Microsoft CoPilot: a way to think about it

Microsoft is now embedding some form of AI into all of its products.

Lately, I’ve seen videos describing a new concept – not a product – but a concept of where all of their products have some kind of AI embedded so that they readily “communicate” with each other.

Say you go to a Teams meeting. Supposedly there is a feature that allows you to dictate to the AI chatbot to record the meeting or take notes (probably something really similar to transcription services we see on YouTube). Quite possibly, you don’t even need to be in the meeting; you could just send the AI chatbot to the meeting for you, like a junior assistant.

[Of course, if everybody decides to send an assistant, then there wouldn’t be a real meeting, just a meeting of bots. Meetings could devolve to that.]

Now you have the meeting notes that you can send to everybody. But if everybody has that same AI feature, then you wouldn’t need to send meeting notes. Or maybe you would send the notes to those who could not attend the meeting and did not deploy an AI bot to the meeting.

In a way, a whole world of different ways of attending meetings starts to open up.

Anyway, you now have the meeting notes. Now you can utilize those meeting notes in a Word document or in a PowerPoint presentation. With that PowerPoint presentation, you can call up imagery and words, as well as your meeting notes or Excel file information. Currently, PowerPoint has a kind of AI called Designer that helps you design your PowerPoint.

With the new powerful AI embedded, Designer might become even more powerful and actually help you write up the PowerPoint presentations with words and pictures, including information found in your emails, OneNote, or wherever. It might actually help improve your presentations.

I’m going to embed or direct you to a YouTube video discussing this CoPilot feature, found only in the Office 365 subscription service. The person actually has reviewed the features and presents in some detail about the potential use of this CoPilot

How to think about CoPilot

In this new world, we all will have to figure out how we can provide value. So, what I mean by this is: if presenters or your boss have been turning to you to design PowerPoint presentations because you knew all of the tricks and hacks on using PowerPoint, well, this new AI also knows all of the tricks and maybe even more. So now, they don’t need to turn to you to design the presentation because the AI does a good enough job, and they can do it themselves.

You need to see how you can provide even greater value in using the CoPilot than just using CoPilot alone. You might have to get innovative: maybe innovative creation of words or imagery. I don’t know. That is something we are all going to have to work out.

To me, it is like the early days of the spreadsheets for accountants, in a very rough way. In my first job, I was under the impression that we all got new desktops and all of the spreadsheets that we were creating were new. Just everything was new.

Even the spreadsheet product, which was Lotus, was new. I did not learn spreadsheets in college; it didn’t exist. This was so new that we were learning it as we went along. Most of my peers, if not all, were using spreadsheets as a massive calculator doing addition, addition and multiplication. Me, I used it as a way of figuring out how to do what we called “barrel balancing”, amongst other stuff. This was something we did as a closing activity on the 7th workday. The 7th workday was the day everybody worked until midnight, trying to balance those barrels.

Until I started to use spreadsheets to help balance the barrels. Then I began to finish at 7 pm.

I think this is the same kind of thing we are going to go through with using these AI tools: we have to figure out how to use them to our advantage. But in a way that is better than AI alone.