Apple introduces Apple Pay Later, Microsoft unveils AI-powered cybersecurity platform

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley joins the Live show to discuss Security CoPilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered cybersecurity assistant, and Apple's buy now, pay later service Apple Pay Later, which will allow U.S. Apple Pay users to split purchases into four payments with zero interest and no fees.

Video transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Out this morning Microsoft is announcing a new AI cybersecurity platform. Joining me with the latest is our very own Dan Howley. Hey, Dan.

- That's right, Rachelle. Microsoft today announced their Security Copilot platform. This is something that they're using ChatGPT technology, specifically OpenAI's GPT-4 to basically power an AI security bot.

Now what this means is companies that use cybersecurity protocols, which should really be every company, they'll be able to use this as, kind of, almost extension of cybersecurity personnel. So they'll get a prompt box similar to what you would get if you use Bing right now or OpenAI's ChatGPT. Type in what you want about a incident that may have occurred, a hack, and you'll get a return from that prompt giving you information on a hack or intrusion.

So one example they say is that an employee at a company, their device was compromised by a hacker. And so you type in information about that into this prompt box and it runs you through the entire process of the hack, basically reverse engineering it. Now for the average consumer, this means absolutely nothing. But for companies, and more importantly Microsoft, it means easier access to more cybersecurity capabilities. For actual cybersecurity professionals, it should improve time for detecting incidents and remediating them.

And so this is just, kind of, another example of Microsoft moving the OpenAI partnership that they have into more and more products. They already have Copilot for Microsoft 365. That's their productivity suite. And then obviously, I had mentioned Bing, as well as their new Edge browser with Bing built in. So they're really are going whole hog into OpenAI and ChatGPT, as well as the whole generative AI landscape.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And Dan, staying in tech, Apple today introduced Apple Pay Later in the US allowing users to split purchases across four payments that we already see existing. Interesting move here for Apple.

DAN HOWLEY: That's right. As you said, four payments, they're spread across six different weeks. One example is a $125 or so payment that's split across three $31.27, three-week period. They show you a breakdown of it in a receipt. It'll be available.

Similar to Apple Pay, this is going through Mastercard. So anyone that accepts Apple Pay should also be able to accept this. And it just shows Apple is diving further into the financing space. They already have their Apple Card.

They offer financing through that with Goldman Sachs and so you can expect them to push further into this as they try to make their services segment more robust. The conversation always been about how they want services to be an important part of the company. It already is their second largest earner outside of the iPhone. They want to try to push that even further, so they're not as reliant on the iPhone for that revenue.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: All right, appreciate that update. Dan Howley there joining us this morning.