Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink
theregister.com
theregister.com
It was a mind-numbingly boring seminar though, so perhaps it's these boring business functions that where the most benefit is seen, and they are so boring that journalists ignore the stories.
It seems to be a number that the masses are willing to just accept without any reasoning.
If they said 30% people might start to ask how, if they said 5% people might just shrug and think it's not significant.
A lot of people are probably just repeating a number that is big enough to impress management but not so big it sounds far fetched. Otherwise evaluating Copilot should be no different from evaluating any other tool claiming to improve productivity. How would you evaluate Excel vs. pen and paper? Self reporting, estimating time saved per action or common scenario, counting how many actions are taken per day, etc.
I don't see 20% in any of MS' marketing material. The claim 6 hours saved weekly for a team of 5, so 2.5%. They claim 29% quicker on "completing everyday tasks", but specifics range from 74% faster (summarizing a meeting) down.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/meet-copil...
digging through emails ?
Some of us have work to do. /s
If you want to convince someone of something, you can’t go wrong with 20%.
maybe laying off 20% of the teams/ICs?
We have seen them happening while the profits are growing.
Yes, but you have to move the printing head yourself. /s
In the case of Dynamics, and indeed of other CRMs (which already have a long history of ML/AI tooling, like Clari, Gong, etc) no amount of AI can solve the fundamental problem that if humans dont keep their records in the CRM clean and accurate, (which, by the way, they hate doing and absolutely suck at) then the AI is presenting insights based on garbage.
Since it was literally email threads he was working from the "junk data" thing wasn't a huge problem.
the average was 80 times in 30 mins.
utterly ridiculous. Like being in that film "being John Malkovich".
I no longer want to attend any MS "catch up" meetings... its all they want to talk about.
It's integrated incredibly well into the rest of the 365 suite and Microsoft provide really good onboarding and training resources. It Just Works, even for non-technical users who don't have the first idea about LLMs.
Zvi Mowshowitz spends a lot of time talking about the mundane utility of AI and I think Copilot is currently the best example. It isn't something that promises to change the world, it's something that makes life marginally easier for a big cohort of people. Saving the average office worker an hour or so a week isn't revolutionary, but it delivers a very respectable ROI.
....and life miserable for a far larger cohort.
The number of jobs replaced, the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away, and the number of people subject to ever-finer micromanagement as streams of more and more data are fed into authoritarian matrix multipliers will skyrocket.
The amount of human interaction, personal connections, and actors capable of sympathizing and working within the intent of the rules rather than the letter will plummet.
The ability to trust anything, to enjoy most things, and to believe that something is a real thing someone created to bring joy instead of a hypertargeted psychological adworm will disappear entirely.
A few people will get stunningly rich; a small cohort will make things easier. Many, MANY will be far worse off.
I've seen this claimed several times, but it goes against my personal experience using it in business and software development where AI tools remove a lot of boring rote work.
Can you give some examples of the parts of these or other jobs that bring joy which AI will replace?
Even programming - oh, good, LLMs are approximately as good at a fresh college graduate as spewing out a bunch of code that isn't quite right and I have to go debug and review. Except at least I can get joy teaching the new grad and seeing them grow.
Writers can be replaced too. The job is paying abysmally (from a hearsay) for almost all writers except for top tier ones. By automating writing and flooding all markets and niches with generated drivel this profit will be eliminated, then medium tier (for a lack of a better term) writers will be broke and switch careers, then the whole selection process which produces top tier writers will collapse since there are not enough people doing this in total, and then generated drivel will replace whatever writing jobs will remain. A few select authors will survive on Patreon style payments, but donations even today are famously concentrated to the very small number of top performers.
I've seen this for "journalism" when the AI is inventing credible propaganda pieces.
In real engineering work you cannot go with thumb feelings (except FAANG, but that is another story). AI has no bloody idea how to qualify a test result.
This assumes that people are employed only because of their productivity, and that productivity can be replaced with AI.
You can't AI-away bureaucracy, because a bureaucracy's incentives are not efficiency or productivity, but the perpetuation of bureaucracy. Sure, in the future a lot of the "actual" work might be done by AI - but right now a lot of that "actual" work is done by a relatively small number of employees.
Jobsite table saws are a thing as are portable belt sanders, but those aren't the most common carpentry tools.
Or is that what you meant?
Tell that to Windows Update team. /s
Who doesn't want a Photon Torpedo of Productivity?
I don't think that's the case here, or if it was, it's good enough not to matter in terms of readability.
The literal last place I can see publishing AI generated slop is el reg.
Author could do with some grass touching. Yes there are real privacy concerns but it’s not the end of the world