Microsoft will cover content displayed in Copilot Daily, a new feature of the Copilot AI-powered cross-platform assistant announced Tuesday along with several other upgrades to Copilot.

Copilot Daily will summarize the weather and current events for users orally. Alexa and Google Assistant have been providing similar daily briefings for years, but Microsoft labels its take as "an antidote to that familiar feeling of information overload.".

Clean, simple and easy to digest, Copilot Daily will only pull from authorized content sources, Microsoft writes in a blog post, adding that options for reminders and customization will arrive over time.

Copilot Daily is only available in the U.S. and U.K. at launch, but Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network, and The Financial Times are signed on. Microsoft won't reveal how much it's paying publishers, nor the other terms of the arrangements, but the company did say it plans to add publishers and expand Copilot Daily to new countries "soon."

The Redmond firm has been paying publishers for content-licensing arrangements for MSN for nearly two decades. Those licensing agreements, however, did not previously extend to the AI offerings of the firm up to this point.

No Copilot Daily publisher partners are reporting back as of publication time on TechCrunch's request for comment.

The partnerships come at a time when some AI vendors, including OpenAI, Perplexity, and even Apple, embrace payment deals partly to ward off claims that their AI tools infringe on copyrighted works. (Microsoft itself is a party to a lawsuit that alleges it used millions of New York Times articles to train chatbots that now compete with the organization.) Many of the deals supply sorely needed data to AI vendors to train their models. The market for training data for AIs could grow close to $30 billion within a decade, one estimate suggests.

Perplexity began paying publishers ad revenue when its AI-powered search engine surfaces their articles in response to a query. In this regard, OpenAI is licensing content from publishers such as Condé Nast, Time, News Corp, Vox Media, and Associated Press.

Others question the structure of these deals, saying they shortchange journalism. Context: OpenAI's lowest-tier checks reportedly run between $1 million and $5 million a year. Others point to their bad execution: as of June, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot was generating links to news partners' stories that didn't work.

But the news sector is desperate for a break.

According to Fast Company, industry may lose as many as 10,000 jobs this year. That is better news than last year, when over 21,400 journalism jobs lost. Still, it's hardly a rosy scenario.

The decline can be attributed to several factors: slow-growing ad budgets and inflation, which is somewhat annually hurting subscriptions. Moreover, the constant search for a profitable business model has not been helped by Big Tech, whose search and feed algorithm changes, combined with AI-generated search overviews, reduced web traffic to news sites.

It has also habituated users to take content for free, according to pundits. It is beside this that almost half of U.S. residents receive their news through social media and captured growing shares of ad dollars once going to publishers. About 60 percent of global ad spend now flows to Big Tech companies, including Google and Meta. One study concludes that broadcasters lose nearly $2 billion in ad revenue each year to Google's and Meta's platforms.