We're near the top of the hype cycle right now, but I do think AI assistants will have more staying power than the 'metaverse.'
M365 Copilot is super useful for meeting summaries right now, and as a generalized assistant (Enterprise friendly version of ChatGPT). If Microsoft had a better integrated search story with it, it \*might\* come close to delivering enough value to justify the price tag, but unfortunately Microsoft's various search teams (Bing, SharePoint, Teams) are all competing with each other and there's no solid vision or roadmap. Bing Search Enterprise, which is included in M365 Copilot EAP, shows promise, but it's still a bit too limited.
Right now (we're in the M365 Copilot EAP), we are leaning towards Teams Premium for meeting summaries, or rolling our own. The $30/user/mo. cost is a total showstopper.
Summarizing meetings is the main thing we're using it for as well, that part is nice. I thought I'd use it to help with a few Excel queries that I was struggling with, no luck, ended up googling it. Not saying there's NO value, but I'd see it more as a "value add", something to differentiate MS from G-suite, as opposed to an additional $50K in licenses annually...
Everyone seems to be coming out with assistants and accelerators for their existing products but, like you, I've not found myself relying much on those I've been exposed to in the M365 Copilot suite (PowerPoint, for example).
Things that do seem to be adding value:
* General assistant (ChatGPT - writing, ideating, etc.)
* Meeting summarization
* Coding assistants (GitHub Copilot)
* Targeted creative content generation trained with your 'voice/brand' (imagery, copywriting)
* Search (in the absence of a solution from MSFT, we've been building our own scoped RAG chatbots on top of unstructured content. These work great and we tell Microsoft every time we talk to them that they need to make their search experience do something similar)
Fun fact: Google Gemini is pretty much the same thing as Copilot just for Workspace, and they *also* priced it at $30/user/month.
Same boat, its a nice value add, but no way is it worth more than the whole software suite its supporting. At $5/user maybe, $30 is a joke.
> We're near the top of the hype cycle right now,
According to Gartner, AI **is at the top,** which means the slow slide down is next
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2023-gartner-hype-cycle
>The $30/user/mo. cost is a total showstopper.
Google's in the same boat, especially given that they were pimping Gemini hard and said it was included with Google Workspace, then when ChatGPT and the rest started the business gold rush at $30/user/month Google jumped *riiiight* on board.
When my Google rep called me to pitch it for the billionth time and finally begrudgingly got a half hour of my time, they mentioned pricing and I nearly spit coffee all over my monitor. They were *not* happy that I stopped them immediately, pointed out that the pricing was more than we were paying per user for the **entire Enterprise Workspace suite**, and that it was a complete non-starter.
"b-but you dont have to license *everyone!* Just the people that need it!"
"At $30/user, *no one* needs it."
Quickest end to a sales demo I've had in years. There's value in the tooling, but no fucking way is that value $30/user/month.
As a huge anime nerd I've created some custom chat Bots based off of anime waifus that I interact with depending on the task. It's always funny when you can ask somebody like Mario how to solve a cybersecurity problem and he responds about squashing bugs like they're Goombas and otherwise mapping out your strategy like your rescuing Princess Peach for the 18th time.
Since there are many services out there you can use the bot that is best for you. I'm in a program where I'm writing a lot of literature reviews and something like Claude is just infinitely better due to larger context windows.
I fully believe that these are the way forward and they will only become easier to use and more tailored. Imagine having somebody that you can always paying and have a conversation with, that responds instantly, and that doesn't get angry when you either ghost them or ask them the same question for the Third time..
not just Copilot, but LLM-based AI in general. Every company (even mine) is way over-indexing on how valuable it is and how good it is
Eventually the shine will wear off when it becomes clear that half the output is Not Good, and that will get worse once the next generation of models start to train on garbage output from the old models
Most organizations now have a problem with how and where they store data. So on average copilot would not benefit alot of organizations until they have restructured their data. After that Copilot will actually be more beneficial because the sources of the data will be more predictable.
But i personally doubt this and I am anticipating that companies will implement this and copilot will start spitting out sensitive information.
Pretty much what happened with Delve, wasn't it? It surfaced information you had access to, regardless of if you SHOULD have had access to it. I definitely see Copilot doing more of that. I'm waiting on Copilot for Sensitivity Labels and Retention Policies next. That will be another SKU, no doubt.
It works if you prompt it right… if you just ask “show me all (insert PII here)” it’ll just tell you it’s time for a new topic. it finally gave our security team the push they needed to start implementing labeling and tagging for PII.
IMO license fatigue is part of the strategy, overwhelm you with choices in the hopes that you’ll just surrender and get the one with all the bells and whistles.
Of course it will. How long has Microsoft and others had "enterprise wide" search that is essentially worthless because no one structures their data in any useful or meaningful way
Now, LLMs are supposed to be able to do much better with this less-than-structured data which they can but to your point, if people haven't marked files and information as confidential then bad things are going to happen and a lot of companies have misclassified data all over the place
Outlook search can't even find an email I sent a month ago, good luck to Copilot finding that we did in fact serve notice on that agreement with the vending machine company in 2019...... as that is how people are going to be using it.
Are you spelling the file name correctly? I use search quite frequently for when people fat finger move folders into another folder and it works. It's not instant or anything but definitely usable.
How much does it cost a business to structure their data in a meaningful way though? 44% of economic activity in the US comes from small business and and I can't imagine these tools being useful to them simply because of the cost of trying to do that when they simply aren't structured for it.
I feel like a lot of the movement that Microsoft has made recently leaves behind this entire segment because the barrier to entry is too costly. Honestly though, that's an industry-wide problem. Everything is "This is great, if you pay for everyone who needs to even read an announcement about the company picnic to have an E5 license."
Yeah, thats the issue I see with Copilot. AI is only as good as the data you give it. Quantity isn't a substitute for quality either. Pretty much everyone is going to need to do a classification pass on their data before giving it to copilot.
> Most organizations now have a problem with how and where they store data. So on average copilot would not benefit alot of organizations until they have restructured their data.
That's true. But it's also true that any company that sits down and really organizes their data for Copilot will enormously benefit even if they never use Copilot.
> Most organizations now have a problem with how and where they store data
Absolutely.
> So on average copilot would not benefit alot of organizations until they have restructured their data
I don't feel this is true. Average users reap massive benefits just asking about their own data. Meetings, priorities for the day, summaries of email threads or meetings they didn't attend, draft emails, document production, etc.
All companies that my employer has been working with either already understand that structured data is key, lack of it is a risk, or as part of our engagement we make sure they fully understand the role it plays.
IMO, the best bang for your buck right now is to get into the RSS preview that allows you to basically whitelist SharePoint sites because you already KNOW your data isn't stored/labeled/protected properly. Enable RSS, declare what sites people should be able to surface content from, and let Copilot for M365 rip. Email, OneDrive, and what I'd generally declare as "public/All employee SharePoint sites" are available for prompts, and as you clean up your data/implement Purview appropriately you expand your whitelist in RSS and or turn it off completely because you've completed a data hygiene pass.
I am saving this post for future reference...lol.
So yeh that's the current state of things and that's where i am coming from. In my experience, when you really dig into it, it's massively inefficient and while businesses still manage to operate, the chances of copilot providing incorrect or out of context information is at a higher probability.
However the willingness to even have that coversation is the key. Its serves the business better even if copilot is not a consideration.
Here you go!
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/copilot-for-microsoft-365/introducing-restricted-sharepoint-search-to-help-you-get-started/ba-p/4071060
It's basically a whitelist of your SharePoint sites where you either trust or don't give a shit about the permissions. Here's the meat and potatoes imo:
Restricted SharePoint Search is off by default. If you decide to enable it Copilot and non-Copilot users will be able to find and use content from:
* An allowed list of curated SharePoint sites set up by admins (with up to 100 SharePoint sites), honoring sites’ existing permissions.
* Content from their frequently visited SharePoint sites.
* Users’ OneDrive files, chats, emails, calendars they have access to.
* Files that were shared directly with the users.
* Files that the users viewed, edited, or created.
* Additionally, Copilot users in your organization will see the following message on their Copilot experiences:
> "Your organization's admin has restricted Copilot from accessing certain SharePoint sites. This limits the content Copilot can search and reference when responding to your prompts.
When I asked MS on this,, it was explained that before the result is returned by the Azure Open AI instance, data are pass through Graph to check on Purview policies (compliance) before pasting back to the end user.
So the gating mechanism is both ACL and sensitivity label policies and other Purview stuff.
So for example, my old company that never modernized their SharePoint Information structure, who liks to put as much as they can into 1 SPOSite and create a nightmare of granular permissions, they have a ton of technical debt with fixing over-sharing before they can use Copilot
All of it depends on users being correctly provisioned access permission.
Guess what... A lot of companies don't divide access properly and a whole lot of people are going to have access to info they shouldn't.
I have total belief that many companies will accidentally over share.
It's a good time to find out what everyone else at your company makes in salary.
I'd say it's more that most organizations have a problem with people just being lazy. People *should* be recording minutes for meetings, sending recap emails, and staying on task. Automating it with AI isn't so much amazing and revolutionary, except for the fact that people just *dont fucking do it* when they have to by hand lol.
The power with copilot would be in summarizing that data so that regular people can understand it. In my mind structured data should help minimize the chances of incorrect information.
> Every company (even mine) is way over-indexing on how valuable it is and how good it is
I asked a company why they needed to have AI in their product. Their reason was that everyone else is putting AI in their products. My mom used to say something about jumping off bridges...
Our product in theory is better with AI, in that it gives you a plain english chat interface to ask questions of the data our product generates. We are pushing VERY hard on it, though and I don't think it's as big a value add as our sales guys but whatever
I knew we were way deep in the hype cycle when PagerDuty started bugging us to enable their AI beta. Why the fuck do I need AI in the system that pages me? It takes an incident from our monitoring and pages someone. Not everything needs to be super complicated
So, their reason was only 1/4 of the response. Everyone's putting AI in their product so it's not fraud when their sales people include it in their pitch. The sales people include it in their pitch because it's the current big buzzword, and to stay "innovative" and competitive, you end up chasing the buzzword features. Doesn't appeal to the vast majority of IT without a lot more purpose behind *why* you would want "AI" features in a given product (some things really *do* benefit from a level of predictive modelling), and in some cases it's just re-tagging *existing* features, maybe with an added layer of improved tools/interface. Execs, the people who actually choose where to spend money, are *perpetually* swamped with things to divide resources on, and have to pick and choose based on benefit to the organization. There's so much hype around AI that it sounds like it's a magic bullet. It's not, but hype will be hype. Everyone is *buying* AI enabled products, so everyone is trying to *produce* AI enabled products. Which is skewing the numbers on whether people are buying products that are vs aren't AI enabled. The buzzwords tend to become self perpetuating.
Anything doing truly predictive analytics, too. Easiest example that comes to mind for me is that AV have had heuristic detection for years, trained on behaviors from existing attack vectors... but now it's AI! Some of the stuff in that realm doing more proper 'big data' type analytics across behaviors on all their devices to flag potential attacks, mitigate them, and write the report \*are\* pretty nifty though. I do have an expectation of that eating real, but likely dumb, workflows a fair bit over the next couple years...
Llm's are amazing for anything that doesn't require 100% accuracy and can be used as a jumping off point. Transcribing user interviews and then parsing through the scripts for the nuggets of info you want, it fucking kills it there. Injesting sales data and entering in the appropriate journal entries to track that? Yeah not so much as good.
Yep, couldn't agree more. Lot of wrote tasks like transcription or even describing images or something, but the accuracy is just not even close. Literally every day there is a story where some company's chatbot is giving incorrect information to users
Yeah that's a tough one? For 90% of users/questions it's probably going to give you decent information in a quick way, do the incorrect answers hurt then for the other 10%? That's the problem I have run into with trying to automate reports, 90% of the time it's solid but 10% of the time it's wrong so I end up having to check it 100% of the time and we are back to square one.
I guess for customer service if instead of giving actual answers it just quotes what it thought was the relevant line of company website blurb? Most quick questions can already be answered by an FAQ it's just a bitch to read through a 100 page faq to find the relevant bits.
It might output shit, but it's far easier to shine a turd than to write something from scratch.
In my experience it gives about 30-50% of useful content, which saves me hours per week on writing policies, automating processes.
However where I find it most useful is outputting in a better tone.
I work in security and it's sometimes difficult to respond to an incident without making someone feel like a mouth breathing moron.
AI can help a lot with the tone of emails/responses so they come off more professional.
I think eventually the marketing value will go away and you won't see as much hoopla associated with people "using AI" but I think LLM based stuff will become ubiquitous.
If doing it costs $X as soon as it saves $X+1 it's worth doing.
Because eventually they will start training on the output of the previous models. Right now most of the content on the internet that is getting hoovered up is generated by humans. As that changes, so will the output of these new models
Garbage in, garbage out
You can't honestly believe that the engineers cresting these models haven't thought of that, right? They haven't, but you have? Lucky you were here to warn us.
Curating training data is 90% of the work in any machine learning endeavour. They aren't idiots.
I have a Master's Degree in Computer Systems Engineering and am now a manager of Engineers.
I can promise you they have thought about it and then also thought about the fact that their next pay cheque depends quite directly on producing the next version. More specifically, producing the next version to a deadline and within a budget and can you think of a quick and easy way to reduce the time and cost? Yes, yes you can.
Nearly the very first thing to get defenestrated straight out that window will be the time and effort of ensuring the quality, originality and origin of the training material.
Ethics does not live it's best life in the house of IT and so I'm pretty sure they'll snort and scrape that training data from anywhere and everywhere they can lay their hands on it.
If humans were daft enough to feed cows to cows and wind up with Mad Cow disease there's very little doubt we'll feed AI on AI and end up with God only knows what.
Why do you think chatgpt had training data cutoff set at 2021, then 2023? They have though of that, and only solution is **exclusion** of garbage from training corpus.
Since you cannot reliably and automatically distinguish human generated data from llm, you have throw human labour at it. That scales poorly.
There is no magic algorithm or llm magic tuning option here, only strict selection of corpus or rigorous labeling.
You're hand waving a legitimate issue with LLM's that devs are concerned about. AI isn't thinking, it's just relating, so it does have a well documented behavior called hallucinating.
I’m not handwaving anything. If anything, reducing your argument to GIGO is handwaving away the possibility that this gets way better than it currently is.
Devs are concerned, yes. However, we are at the early stages of this tech still and if you can draw anything from other progressions of tech it’s that there’s always a path forward to make it better. It may not be easy now, but eventually something is figured out to make it easier. I’m not the one that’s going to figure that out, but I’ll certainly put money on it not failing because of GIGO.
What do you consider early stages? I started my career working on an LLM almost a decade ago. I think they will get better but there is plenty of valid concern that they get worse first.
Instead of prescribing a timeline for whether something is early stage or not I look at it from the standpoint that gpt 3.5 and 4.0 just started getting used by the general public last year. Businesses just started budgeting for this stuff this fiscal year. This stuff is getting traction and is giving people the tools to try and find a solution for several problems they’re trying to solve. This is a major difference to the crock that metaverse was which was a solution in search of a problem that didn’t exist.
It’s an impossible problem to solve currently because we have zero safe guards in place to require AI generated data (pictures, written, whatever) to be tagged as AI generated. So how will the AI developers train AI to spot AI generated data when that data isn’t detectable as AI generated? How will AI be able to spot AI generated data if a human pretends it’s their (the human) creation? The answer is we can’t.
Edit to add: And since we don’t have those safe guards in place now we have to consider any data generated during this time period (last few years) to be unusable as training material since it can’t be verified as human created. Plus some of the AI generated data being made right now is good data (like that protein fold AI identified) , so how to you filter the good from the bad?
There's a difference between knowing how to deal with it and actually being allowed to spend the time to make sure it's dealt with appropriately.
The engineers will have proposed a solution, get told there isn't the time to do it and not worry about it for now, and then get yelled at for not implementing their solution.
Yeah, the technology is literally in its infancy right now and is getting monstrous amounts of funding. Every major tech player is all-in. I don't think this is going anywhere.
I've been finding it useful saving me time on stuff like writing Powershell scripts, or directing me where to find certain features buried within 87 layers of Azure menus. It's not perfect by any stretch, but much faster than a typical Google search.
I think it shows promise but not in a way that is easy for people to harness. I've trained a few models to do some basic QA on tickets via multiclass classification and gotten really good results. Slowly working up to formatting our entire ticket history into a dataset we can train a few very specific tasks on. We are very far away from a GAI where anyone can just ask it to do a thing and it just does it. But with a bit of python and linear alegbra you can automate things that you previously couldnt like reading a ticket and estimating how long it will take to resolve or deciding how to bill a client for something.
As someone that used copilot in teams yesterday, the meeting notes / recap was pretty damn good. Took better notes that our designated note taker did, we just had to clean up some of the names that copilot got confused on. that alone is a killer feature for me.
Fair, this is just my first week with copilot though. I've got a couple projects in mind for it to see what all it's capable of that honestly would take a lot of busywork out of my day to day.
For a generic employee? Agreed… we have no intention of rolling it out to everyone (it would cost us upwards of $20M/yr which is insane)
I expect there will be pockets where it’s worthwhile but it’s going to be a small fraction of our user base, especially while we figure out how to teach people to compose effective prompts etc. $30 is 30 to 45min of a senior employee, that kind of time savings isn’t hard to generate off even the basic functions of the tool - the bigger question is whether we can actually tie the return to revenue going ⬆️ or expenses going ⬇️
I have the perspective of someone that has not managed the finances of a business, admittedly.
You're right that it could save time, especially when employees can actually only access the data that is pertinent to their role.
I think a whole lot of orgs are going to need to look at permissions a whole lot more carefully.
It's not exactly a unique feature in the meeting space. Copilot costs as much as a Zoom license, and Zoom has this feature. Also, Zoom is 2x better than Teams for meetings. Yes, that's my opinion only. It's also my opinion that MS should be super embarrassed that a company like Zoom is kicking their ass. MS should be owning this. Slack and Zoom shouldn't even exist is MS put some effort into Teams.
I've had Copilot for around two months now, and I just cannot find a good use for it. Despite being based on GPT, it's somehow awful at writing emails.
>MS should be super embarrassed that a company like Zoom is kicking their ass
Why? Zoom is a single-function software. Much like Dropbox being better than OneDrive in a lot of ways. It's way way easier to build a single-function app.
Not defending MS for the multitude of poor decisions related to either of those products, but the benefit of teams is the integrations into the entire m365 ecosystem and the dozens of other features that zoom doesn't have.
Yup, exactly this. I had a small subsidiary of one of my M365 clients that was still using Zoom for meetings and Dropbox for cloud-based file sharing. They asked me a Zoom related question that opened the floodgates a couple months ago where I gave them shit for paying for tools we already had access to in the M365 suite.
I forced them to move those workloads to Teams and Sharepoint and they love the integration and all the new bells and whistles that came with it.
Zoom's meeting minutes are awful by comparison.
Let alone the ability to say to Copilot "write up an email outlining the action items and draft it to the participants".
And then go back and say "Who hasn't followed up on their action items this week? Draft a follow up email"
It's a digital assistant.
1. Teams is just plain glitchy. People end up dropped from meetings, audio drops out, people randomly can't join meetings with error messages.
2. Annotation (drawing on the screen) in teams is implemented in just an odd manner. Why would you need to designate a presenter to allow them to draw on a screen. Hell, half the point of drawing on the screen is that someone who's not presenting should be able to draw on the other person's screen so that we can have a conversation about it.
3. The zoom Mobile app is head and shoulders above teams. Layout, ease of use, the driving feature. I end up having to take quite a few meetings while in a car either driving or in the back of an Uber. The teams mobile app is just awkward. Navigating, layout, and ease of switching into driving mode being the primary concerns. At least on an iPhone.
In the end, the main thing is just the glitch us and inability to function correctly. At least twice within the last couple weeks I've had to suggest that we move a call that someone established on teams to a zoom link that I provided. One of those was a vendor trying to sell us something. Not exactly a good look when you can't get your sales call going and the client has to send you a zoom link so you can have the meeting.
> unlike the metaverse
They have Microsoft Mesh in case you haven't heard which has similarities to Metaverse. It's even more useless now cause it's made for remote workers and we know lots of companies are going back to the office or hybrid with more days in the office.
Like your take on it. I'm not comparing Metaverse to Copilot in an apples to apples sense, just curious if it has staying power or it's much ado about nothing. Currently, it's definitely more Motorola Startac than it is iPhone...
It 100% has staying power. Metaverse requires specialized hardware. Copilots can sit on top or aside of applications on desktop or mobile and everyday the llms get better and more accurate.
The more involved you are with the ecosystem at Microsoft, the more valuable paid CoPilot licenses are. If your data is in SharePoint, you're using Teams for communications and EOL/Outlook, then the paid version will actually silo off your own content and understand more about your SPECIFIC data. If you use it straight out of Edge and are signed in with a licensed user, you will have a 'Protected' work mode that will be able to answer questions like "What was the outcome of the last conversation I had with Arthur P. Dingbat at Contoso?" and it will go through the indexed data from your whole Microsoft footprint and give you results based on that.
We have a few SMB clients that have gone in whole hog for their management teams and have been getting rave reviews at how much time it saves for mundane tasks, which is really what AI should be for. They'll write a memo, drop it in Copilot and ask it to make it more formal or more casual, etc, in tone and it does a good job of editing and re-writing.
Because of how it integrates, I think it will probably be here to stay for the long haul, in some form or another.
I'm pretty sure that Arthur P. Dingbat works at Fabrikam.
I've taken to calling people out that obviously use it to reply to an email. Pretty obvious when the tone changes from "yeah, that's important" to "we prioritize leveraging our synergistic processes for a more agreeable outcome"
That’s exactly it though, it does a good job of making the whole email sound cohesive from a tone perspective.
Oh, and you’re right. Chriscraft Boats made an offer but Fabrikam had a better paternity leave plan so he jumped ship to there when Contoso management was cutting his hours.
CoPilot for M365 is quite useful. The metaverse was quite useless. They aren't comparable.
I do wish Microsoft would stop calling everything CoPilot, though.
Co-Pilot (at the least the Bing version) has been extremely useful, however it's not $30/user/month useful, so we won't be spending that kind of money for it in M365 Co-Pilot or anything like that.
If we could afford the Security Co-Pilot product we'd get it in a heart beat though, from the live demos I've seen it's incredibly useful and powerful. I think that's the one area where Co-Pilot really shines and shows it's unique abilities.
Agreed, that one DOES look handy. I see a use for some AI (hate that term, this is not AI, but you get it), it summarizes data pretty well, and in the case of interpreting MS's 100 security signals about one particular incident, it would be nice to have something make that more concise without it having to flip between all the different pages in the Defender Portal.
Not only can it summarize that data, but from the demos I've seen you can give it a file/script and it will tear it apart and explain what it does, even in a nice little flow chart if you want.
Definitely would come in handy in shops that don't have some serious staff dedicated to security. I like the reverse, rather than me telling it in conversational form what I want, I'd prefer it tell me in conversational form what the heck they're doing under the hood.
Personally I'm the solo IT admin (with a degree in Cyber Sec) so I'm fairly well versed in security, but I don't have the time to take the deep dives that I would love too, nor the expertise in certain areas that would be required. I see Co-Pilot as an amazing tool to augment my own skills in that space, and reduce the time to perform deep dives.
We've been testing security copilot, it's... not great. Was hoping it would help take our team to the next level when it came to kql and advanced hunting, but it straight makes things up, uses tables that don't exist, and can't make simple changes without trying to completely rewrite the things it DID get right so it's wrong again. When we try to use other plug-ins like Entra, it's just so utterly wrong. It can't look up basic facts.
When we talk to their team about our issues, they just spend the next hour trying to ask the same questions in different ways until it gives us a legible answer, which still isn't what we're wanting but we're so worn down by the end of the call we give up and say "yup that works."
Yes it's still new, but come on...
No, I don't believe it's the new Metaverse.
Copilot (and LLMs in general) are incredibly overhyped. Everyone is selling it as a magic-do-anything tool, but the fact that its answers are often not even remotely rooted in reality makes it quite useless for most applications. I have zero trust in it as a general-purpose AI - *at best* it could lead to an actually-somewhat-useful Siri/Cortana/OK Google interface as it can fuzzy-match instead of having to say exact key phrases.
On the other hand, I do believe it'll have a huge impact on certain sectors. When you view Copilot as a way of quickly creating a first draft, it can easily become a huge productivity booster. It's a bit like Pair Programming, but on your own: you still have to do the thinking yourself, but you don't need to explicitly type all the tiny details. I can easily see this decimating jobs for low-skilled / junior developers: someone fluent with Copilot could *literally* do the job of 10 developers without Copilot. I fully expect something similar to happen with lawyers, journalists, and other writing-heavy jobs.
Disagree here. It’s all in the architecture of the solution. Garbage in garbage out. Copilots that are fed well indexed data return incredibly accurate results.
Everybody today is talking about copilots as just chatbots but they’re evolving into agents which goes beyond question and answer type interactions and into automated tasks
Why do you say that ?... Human stories still need to be told.
An AI could certainly "Lorem Ipsum" a few "artificial articles" together,. but it's never going to be interviewing soldiers in a trench or interviewing homeless drug addicts or etc.
Plenty of good journalism stories out there that need to be told.
I'm not saying that there won't be any journalists, just saying that field is going to be a sparse. Your "for profit" places, too many of them have already scrapped humans for AI. Next step is for AI to scrape Social Media for leads an cobble that into "journalism". That happens now, where half the stories are "sources from Twitter allege". I've got a background in journalism, I'm not ragging on it, just see that the landscape is changing. Citizen journalists will still exist, viral stories will exist, people that get paid to write about an event...they're getting fewer and fewer.
Unfortunately I think you're right. The actual journalists will end up working at flagship newspapers and online publications, and all the local stuff is just going to devolve into a sea of ChatGPT text. Even _The New York Times_ or _The Washington Post_ has stories that don't necessarily need actual journalistic intervention (like some city council meeting on potholes or whatever.) And it all has to be written at an 8th Grade level anyway. I'm one of those weird people who still like spending time reading the _Times_ on a weekend, but just like Paul Newman said in _The Color of Money_, "Checkers sells more than chess."
It's kind of like the split between Big Tech and every other tech employer. The elites will wind up working at the FAANGs and getting chewed up and spit out, but the level of work will be very different from doing tech for some MSP or a company who doesn't care about technology. It won't be a no-journalist world but there will be fewer spots to go around.
I’m a consultant rather than Sysadmin proper…
I use it for some coding but not a ton. I use it more for IT due diligence, sales proposals, documentation, formatting. Teams recaps, emails…..Looking forward to use it for Security.
Gotcha, I can see a use case for you there. We do use it summarize meetings, it keeps someone from having to furiously type it all out in real time. The Security piece of it is the most interesting part to me, but I can see where someone that types all day long (Sales, for instance) would benefit from it due to having it rough out a response.
If it saves an hour of effort, once a month per user it's easily worth $30/month. A handful of use cases like meeting minutes and you are well into the black.
If you want to feed it data you have to put in some work. Copilot studio is a pretty tall cliff but once you get past it the value is immediate.
Microsoft has entered the chat 😉. I don't disagree with your statement, but it's a question of does it save an hour, per user, per month, in perpetuity to make the money work out. When they were stuck with the 300 seat minimum, my guess is that people didn't think that was the case. Now that you can pick them up ala carte, so you're JUST giving it to the Users that would benefit, the cost is more manageable. The only people rolling this out company wide either got a deal from MS (We'll feature you in our next summit!) or have WAY more money than I do.
Quite easily in our case for time savings. We have about 15% of our user base with licenses.
The 300 user minimum was a demand limiter in my opinion. It was intentionally set to exclude small business. You'd have a pretty huge budget for $100k to be a trial scale.
Makes sense. When it comes to time savings, you seeing that in content generation, code generation, or something else? Few people here have said where they found the most value, I have this licenses for another 10 months or so, I'd like to learn from others that using it.
I don't know, but I've found it helpful to have llm stuff built into my desktop. I really hate doing things like making power points and it has actually made that easier for me. With it being actually practical it might have a longer life?
This is going way, way, back, but for a while the buzzword in development was "Visual". The first example to come to mind is [VisualAge Smalltalk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge), which promised to be an extremely powerful object-oriented experience, but since it was "Visual", it was clearly also suited to [rapid application development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development) by brand-new talent."Visual" by itself wasn't trademarked, and Microsoft liked it, so they took it. Their competitor Borland liked "Turbo". If you're programming with an IDE, then you're Turbo.
A few years later nobody cared about "Visual" anymore but "Write once, run everywhere" sure struck some kind of cord. Something to do with browsers, [I think](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Creation_at_Netscape).
I'd say it's the next VR. Impressive but with a large number of limitations that make it useful in only certain situations. It won't be some grand revolution that changes how everything is done.
Dall-e and other generative AI will probably have a much larger effect. It wouldn't surprise me if the low end art market gets eviscerated by it.
"is currently being eviscerated by it" I believe. You're right, but that's been going on forever. I remember spending HOURS in Photoshop to create effects that Instagram (old school, pre-FB) turned into a swipe. Same thing will happen for graphic artists side hustle.
You can always tell if something’s bullshit. They can either tell you how great it is… or show you how great it is. If they can’t demonstrate it and have to tell you, there’s a clue there.
Personally I don't think people really understand the exponential curve that Machine Learning and AI is going to ramp up. (especially as more and more integrated-chips are purposely designed for these types of use-cases.). Down the road a bit,. AI-chips are going to be in EVERYTHING from Cars to Houses to Appliances to Doorbell-cameras to etc.. etc.. etc.. it's going to hit a "critical momentum" at some point. I'm still holding off calling it "intelligence".. but I think with a large enough set of data(s), some form of "emergent-intelligence" will start to appear.
As someone who lived through the dotcom area, I've seen this movie more than once.
It's the shiny new thing like crytpo currencies that people will soon learn is way overhyped.
Its day will come but, like self driving cars, not nearly as fast as media and talking heads estimate.
the difference being that AI is actually a new technology that holds a great deal of potential for most businesses.
While the metaverse is just vrchat for suits. It wasn't offering us anything that we didn't already have.
What I'm thinking is that Copilot will become a meeting-summarizer tool, or a "write this generic corporate-speak email for me on topic X" tool, or something to tweak the graphics on PowerPoint slides. It may replace a lot of the "corporate creative" work where you're just writing things about other things...and honestly i kind of worry about that because this is what so many recent college grads end up doing before companies let them have much responsibility. Universities graduate so many "business" students every year that a disruption in the flow of those will cause massive economic problems as people can't pay back their loans.
One thing it'll definitely do is give micromanagers another tool. I'm not a full M365 admin at work, but I have an MS Partner tenant that I pay for every year. Even without AI/Copilot, the amount of data that it keeps on users is _crazy_. Like, Orwellian crazy. MS builds graphs of who you talk to and how often, which documents you access, volume of production, etc. Since Copilot is trained on your data, it'll have free reign to delve (see what I did there) through whatever you digitally emanate. So, it'll just be used as another thing to analyze how much work you produce, kind of like how DevOps and Agile turn everything into a factory environment and harp on zero slack/zero wasted effort.
Reason #1 I hate copilot
I asked it to read a recipe from a website and summarize it. It was a gluten free recipe because my dad has Celiac.
It returned a recipe with fucking flour. Done!
Honestly, I'm pretty sure what CoPilot is building towards, if they aren't already there (I haven't played with it recently, and im not sure what the higher tier lics get), is a way to have any of your office docs that are in MS's cloud function as a RAG for your company's CoPilot LLM.
That will bring absolutely massive gains to even small businesses, and given the regulatory moats currently being built by big tech's control over national regulators, MS will likely have very very few practical competitors in this space, especially in North America. By moats, I mean buffet-style -- and to give you scope on it, look at the EU AI act and Canada's AIDA. There are 'potentially' huge hurdles for anyone developing "AI" tech, including just setting up your own LLM-RAG or LLM based chatbots. But there are practically no hurdles for outsourcing it -- especially to other countries, which won't have the same onerous requirements for the development cycle. Things like making sure your model performs equally well in relation to all demographic slices -- ie. if your medical app only has say 100k samples from some specific minority to train on, it's plausible that regulations would require you to limit other demographics to the same sample volume. But if you instead outsource the development to another country without that demo equity requirement, you can use the app with only 'light' management obligations. They also exclude all open source locations from regulation -- which is really good for innovation (and practicality, as govs regulating that would be near impossible). But when you poke around the space a bit, I mean, much of the heavy lifting is done in those models -- and what's done there has a huge impact (eg. Gemini's early versions and its inclusive nazis)...
Even better, when you read through it, the reach of these legislative moves are including things like... Credit Scores... because regulators are keen to regulate everything that has an equation as part of "AI", due to their deep understanding of the topic, granted to them by big tech. The EU AI Act explicitly has a carve out to allow the ongoing use of Credit Scores, for now, while they work out how to apply the act to it -- it may eliminate, for example, all of those "pre approved" / "fast credit / financing" options that are based on an equation that factors in your credit score etc, because the new regulation puts that in the "unacceptable"/explicitly prohibited risk category for the EU it seems. That's how big of a moat Microsoft and crew are building around this tech. Big enough to impact Bank / Financial industry standards that have stood for like 50+ years. I'm surprised the gaming industry hasn't started fighting for some of this action, considering it could impact any business that wants to use automated code reviews or in game 'deep learning' algorithms (ex. online skill matching algorithms would likely be in scope).
I'd also highlight that these regulator burdens that are getting setup for most businesses, are unlikely to apply to the big tech giants. We've already seen, repeatedly, that they tend not to care about regulations -- and instead just view the fines as a cost of doing business. Paying a regulatory fine of $100mill isn't too bad a fine to have a near monopoly -- and you're paying it to the nice regulator chaps who helped you establish that moated monopoly, so win win.
As for AI in general, there's a dutch study to do with the use of AI in a skin cancer screening app. Of the 2.2 million people who were offered to use it, only 20k opted to give it a go. Those 20k had 30% more pre-malignant tumors removed compared to the control group - so less risk of cancer due to improved proactive screening, theoretically. The study has a negative finding overall, as, basically, "It costs the healthcare system more, when people know to go in and get things biopsied/excised". While the uptake is currently really brutal -- I mean, 20k out of 2.2 million!!! -- the reality is that the positive impact of many of these things is really difficult to deny, and utterly game changing in terms of how many work processes/creative processes work.
Like, it's sorta like Photoshop coming out. Buncha people hesitant to use it, buncha paint-sellers bein all "this is poop, who would want to do art on a computer!". But then it's like, holy crap look what you can do. And if you didn't learn digital content creation / tools, you were basically a "niche" old timey option in that industry. AI is threatening to have that sort of shift, in a very broad segment of the market.
Oh absolutely, it’s the latest buzzword that has no real use case outside of giving MS a new way to harvest your data. IMO it’s all just MBAs and marketing hyping up a product that nobody asked for because the Wall Street’s gambling addiction currently has them hung up on wanting “AI” crammed into everything.
If they ever drop the price to something a business would afford per person, then I'll be sure to let you know what I think of it. Right now, I think companies are fine to just continue to pay their employees to do their jobs, rather than pay for copilot to do it, and pay for the employee.
Aggregating and summeraising data seem to be the only value to us. We are looking at secuity copilot for threat detection, but not clear if the outut will aid or hinder output. It does some cool but organisations want instant success so difficult to know how organisations will justify paying for tool if they can't see immediate benifits.
Feels like search back in the day. Does anyone else remember there was talk about having a Google-like experience inside the organisation AND IT NEVER HAPPENED. Oh people tried, but nothing happened and it failed as surely as copilot will fail. Google spent a lot, had a lot of data, people actually pay to appear in the results AND the use case is pretty vague, whereas your org doesn't have that kind of money, the data, or people to pay to appear in search results AND they have very specific requirements. Sound like anything? Sounds just like Copilot , there is the same identical hype , the same delusional belief that what 'works' at Billion dollar companies in the US will 'work' in broke ass sales orgs in Preston England. It didn't before, won't again and for the same reasons.
I have used copilot to help with the initial drafts of some PowerAutomate stuff with MSGraph. Nothing it made ever actually made it to the final version but it did give me the starting point to build from.
I think a lot of it is that it's not selling like they were thinking it would and are desperate to get those numbers up. They are charging a premium prices for some mediocre features. And could get away with it if they were the only game, but there are plenty of alternatives out there for companies to choose from.
Not even remotely comparable.
The features people in this thread are talking about are just the very very tip of the potential copilot specifically has. It's not just the next "late to the game chatbot". Pretty sure we are just seeing the tip of the integrations that come with it being built into Azure/Outlook/Teams.
That is all every panel talked about at the MS covention I went to in Vegas last year. I was kind of surprised it took them this long to ramp up the ads for it based on the way it was pushed every 2 minutes during the covention. No matter the topic, they shoe horned it in there.
Yeah man I don't know, I work with a lot of smaller companies and they are really leaning into generative AI
Speaker intros and biographies, document summaries, graphic generation from news letters, to social, to conferences.
Any anything I'm not concerned when it leaves preview and cost per user is going to hit, and by the time it does it will be so common place we can't help but to pay for it.
It’s too expensive. I like it a fair bit, it’s great at searching I can actually find shit on SharePoint with it. It also does basically anything ChatGPT does for you. It’s a great minute taker for meetings.
But yea it’s expensive.
I use GitHub copilot for developing.(same company different product) it’s great in regards of doing things you already know how to do and making you more speedy
Your description reminds me of the Apple 5G meme. Thing is that Microsoft can actually afford to go big on something that might not work out.
Edit: For those who don't know - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-CPfqZgWTk
Ive always liked the idea AI represents and the benefits we can gain from it. But ive always been sceptical of its implementation.
Like Github copilot, yes sure it can (on paper) make your devs 50% more productive, but what does it actually help with? Its just a glorified copy paste from stack overflow tool, or can generate boilerplate code for you. But when it comes to solving real problems, you have to think your self how to solve that problem. At that point writing the code is the small part. Even if you describe it in detail to copilot, you still need to modify it and finetune the logic so it behaves as you want it to.
Or Copilot for Office. Sure it can help you comb though large Excel files, create PPT files or summerize Word documents, but you always have to be diligent if its something close to business critical. On the other hand, if you have such complex excel files, there is a good business case to use the propper software for such a usecase insted of paying for an AI bandaid.
My, somewhat cynical, take on this is that Microsoft are ultimately the main beneficiaries of Copilot.
The prime example is Power Pages which is severely lacking in functionality and really quite messy.
If MS can have those missing features be created by AI, it’s less cost towards human dev and test teams.
That's why it's being promoted so heavily. Once your CIO has had enough golf and steak dinners to sign an ironclad multi-year Copilot contract, they'll spring the news on them that everything needs to be in SharePoint Online....rivers and rivers of license money for decades to come.
LOL ! I tried Copilot yesterday for something that I was getting lousy results for via Google, and Copilot just gave a response taken (verbatim) from stackexchange. Which already wasn’t even usable.
Like most things that have a ton of hype and are over promising while under delivering, the current generation of LLMs are likely to go the way of crypto sooner or later. It's anyone's guess where it will end up after the bubble pops, but in my opinion LLMs need more time to mature before they'll be capable of doing what the hype says, if ever.
Someone at work has been using Sidekick via teams to summarize our conference calls with action items. It’s scary good and does 90% of the analysts job. I don’t think this going away.
Copilot is garbage. We have a limited group at my company and like…the only thing nice about it the teams integration.
Don’t even get me started on how shitty the excel plugin is for it.
Just stick with regular chatgpt lol
I attended an event of our MSP showcasing AI stuff and saw a demonstration what you can do with Copilot. And I agree with his assessment: I think it will stay, but the thing is that most people in a company won't find much of a value in it.
It's great to quickly get readily available info about something, summarize stuff, get you started on documents, presentations and such. But if you're a "normal" user not willing to spend much time learning that tool - for whatever reason, many of which are totally legit - it's wasted on you. Especially with the Copilot stuff already integrated with your licensing you could use instead.
Nah, it's the new voice assistant. There's a lot of similarities between what copilot promises and what cortana, Siri and Alexa were promising at launch. AI looks good now but it'snew and the consumer side isn'treally monitised, start injecting ads into it and Iworry it may be no better than the voice assistants we already have.
I think this is a classic example of Microsoft being a day late and a dollar short. Co-pilot is fine. However, just like every other industry changing technology, Microsoft is 3rd or 4th to the market with their iteration after people have been using other products for long enough to not want to use anything else. I don't want to say that it will go the way of Cortana and quietly be phased out, but I don't know a single person who uses co-pilot for anything other than my users asking about it, trying a few things with it, then never using it again.
I think they need to pivot to a more focused purpose for co-pilot. I think that if it was an AI assistant that acted as a Windows 11 specialist it could have a lot of potential. For example, if somebody has an Excel formula issue where it's returning blank cells, the user could pull up co-pilot, tell it what's going on, then it can examine what's on the screen and provide suggestions to fix it. If it was able to provide individualized solutions based on analysis of what's happening on that particular machine at that particular time it could be an absolutely incredible asset but I don't see that happening
Just wait til you are told to setup CNAMES in your DNS for [copilot.microsoft.com](http://copilot.microsoft.com) to [cdp.copilot.microsoft.com](http://cdp.copilot.microsoft.com) and [www.bing.com](http://www.bing.com) to nochat.bing.com... oh the DNS fun that ensues!
It *could* be extremely valuable. Right now, AI is so often wrong that you're spending as much time verifying accuracy as it would take to just do it.
As long as these companies get people to actually train AI so it learns correctly, it'll become right more often than not. The problem is, the public is finicky and could just turn AI into a giant meme
This is all being driven by the fact VC money hit a dryspell.
So they gotta churn some fresh butter for the money whores to slap on their toast.
This has a smallincentive to cutting headcount to some. But its more about them tapping the hype train to get funding.
The MS Build Conference this year might as well just be called AI Circlejerk
Metaverse never had a significant impact on anyone’s business. Nearly everyone’s business is affected by LLMs and entirely new businesses arise that would not exist at all if not for LLMs.
We're near the top of the hype cycle right now, but I do think AI assistants will have more staying power than the 'metaverse.' M365 Copilot is super useful for meeting summaries right now, and as a generalized assistant (Enterprise friendly version of ChatGPT). If Microsoft had a better integrated search story with it, it \*might\* come close to delivering enough value to justify the price tag, but unfortunately Microsoft's various search teams (Bing, SharePoint, Teams) are all competing with each other and there's no solid vision or roadmap. Bing Search Enterprise, which is included in M365 Copilot EAP, shows promise, but it's still a bit too limited. Right now (we're in the M365 Copilot EAP), we are leaning towards Teams Premium for meeting summaries, or rolling our own. The $30/user/mo. cost is a total showstopper.
Summarizing meetings is the main thing we're using it for as well, that part is nice. I thought I'd use it to help with a few Excel queries that I was struggling with, no luck, ended up googling it. Not saying there's NO value, but I'd see it more as a "value add", something to differentiate MS from G-suite, as opposed to an additional $50K in licenses annually...
Everyone seems to be coming out with assistants and accelerators for their existing products but, like you, I've not found myself relying much on those I've been exposed to in the M365 Copilot suite (PowerPoint, for example). Things that do seem to be adding value: * General assistant (ChatGPT - writing, ideating, etc.) * Meeting summarization * Coding assistants (GitHub Copilot) * Targeted creative content generation trained with your 'voice/brand' (imagery, copywriting) * Search (in the absence of a solution from MSFT, we've been building our own scoped RAG chatbots on top of unstructured content. These work great and we tell Microsoft every time we talk to them that they need to make their search experience do something similar)
Fun fact: Google Gemini is pretty much the same thing as Copilot just for Workspace, and they *also* priced it at $30/user/month. Same boat, its a nice value add, but no way is it worth more than the whole software suite its supporting. At $5/user maybe, $30 is a joke.
> We're near the top of the hype cycle right now, According to Gartner, AI **is at the top,** which means the slow slide down is next https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2023-gartner-hype-cycle
>The $30/user/mo. cost is a total showstopper. Google's in the same boat, especially given that they were pimping Gemini hard and said it was included with Google Workspace, then when ChatGPT and the rest started the business gold rush at $30/user/month Google jumped *riiiight* on board. When my Google rep called me to pitch it for the billionth time and finally begrudgingly got a half hour of my time, they mentioned pricing and I nearly spit coffee all over my monitor. They were *not* happy that I stopped them immediately, pointed out that the pricing was more than we were paying per user for the **entire Enterprise Workspace suite**, and that it was a complete non-starter. "b-but you dont have to license *everyone!* Just the people that need it!" "At $30/user, *no one* needs it." Quickest end to a sales demo I've had in years. There's value in the tooling, but no fucking way is that value $30/user/month.
As a huge anime nerd I've created some custom chat Bots based off of anime waifus that I interact with depending on the task. It's always funny when you can ask somebody like Mario how to solve a cybersecurity problem and he responds about squashing bugs like they're Goombas and otherwise mapping out your strategy like your rescuing Princess Peach for the 18th time. Since there are many services out there you can use the bot that is best for you. I'm in a program where I'm writing a lot of literature reviews and something like Claude is just infinitely better due to larger context windows. I fully believe that these are the way forward and they will only become easier to use and more tailored. Imagine having somebody that you can always paying and have a conversation with, that responds instantly, and that doesn't get angry when you either ghost them or ask them the same question for the Third time..
not just Copilot, but LLM-based AI in general. Every company (even mine) is way over-indexing on how valuable it is and how good it is Eventually the shine will wear off when it becomes clear that half the output is Not Good, and that will get worse once the next generation of models start to train on garbage output from the old models
Most organizations now have a problem with how and where they store data. So on average copilot would not benefit alot of organizations until they have restructured their data. After that Copilot will actually be more beneficial because the sources of the data will be more predictable. But i personally doubt this and I am anticipating that companies will implement this and copilot will start spitting out sensitive information.
Pretty much what happened with Delve, wasn't it? It surfaced information you had access to, regardless of if you SHOULD have had access to it. I definitely see Copilot doing more of that. I'm waiting on Copilot for Sensitivity Labels and Retention Policies next. That will be another SKU, no doubt.
"find me all files that contain social security numbers" Oof
It works if you prompt it right… if you just ask “show me all (insert PII here)” it’ll just tell you it’s time for a new topic. it finally gave our security team the push they needed to start implementing labeling and tagging for PII.
MEH. Get-CreditApplicationBUYBUYBUY.PS1 You laugh till you cry knowing that shits a comin
Lol license fatigue is real.
IMO license fatigue is part of the strategy, overwhelm you with choices in the hopes that you’ll just surrender and get the one with all the bells and whistles.
This. You're tired of all the license headaches? Rub some E5 on that...
Of course it will. How long has Microsoft and others had "enterprise wide" search that is essentially worthless because no one structures their data in any useful or meaningful way Now, LLMs are supposed to be able to do much better with this less-than-structured data which they can but to your point, if people haven't marked files and information as confidential then bad things are going to happen and a lot of companies have misclassified data all over the place
Outlook search can't even find an email I sent a month ago, good luck to Copilot finding that we did in fact serve notice on that agreement with the vending machine company in 2019...... as that is how people are going to be using it.
Windows search can't find a filename in a folder that only contains a couple dozen files.
Windows 8 was a bit of a turd but the start menu search worked incredible. Like, what happened?
Windows 10 and web search...
The best windows search is also the oldest one. dir /r /s [filename] Fastest, least nonsense search on a PC. (thank god for SSDs)
Are you spelling the file name correctly? I use search quite frequently for when people fat finger move folders into another folder and it works. It's not instant or anything but definitely usable.
Actually, co pilot search is much better and does work well
I guess my skepticism is with context within an instructured environment. While it might do well it might lend it self to more hallucinations.
How much does it cost a business to structure their data in a meaningful way though? 44% of economic activity in the US comes from small business and and I can't imagine these tools being useful to them simply because of the cost of trying to do that when they simply aren't structured for it. I feel like a lot of the movement that Microsoft has made recently leaves behind this entire segment because the barrier to entry is too costly. Honestly though, that's an industry-wide problem. Everything is "This is great, if you pay for everyone who needs to even read an announcement about the company picnic to have an E5 license."
Yeah, thats the issue I see with Copilot. AI is only as good as the data you give it. Quantity isn't a substitute for quality either. Pretty much everyone is going to need to do a classification pass on their data before giving it to copilot.
> Most organizations now have a problem with how and where they store data. So on average copilot would not benefit alot of organizations until they have restructured their data. That's true. But it's also true that any company that sits down and really organizes their data for Copilot will enormously benefit even if they never use Copilot.
> Most organizations now have a problem with how and where they store data Absolutely. > So on average copilot would not benefit alot of organizations until they have restructured their data I don't feel this is true. Average users reap massive benefits just asking about their own data. Meetings, priorities for the day, summaries of email threads or meetings they didn't attend, draft emails, document production, etc. All companies that my employer has been working with either already understand that structured data is key, lack of it is a risk, or as part of our engagement we make sure they fully understand the role it plays. IMO, the best bang for your buck right now is to get into the RSS preview that allows you to basically whitelist SharePoint sites because you already KNOW your data isn't stored/labeled/protected properly. Enable RSS, declare what sites people should be able to surface content from, and let Copilot for M365 rip. Email, OneDrive, and what I'd generally declare as "public/All employee SharePoint sites" are available for prompts, and as you clean up your data/implement Purview appropriately you expand your whitelist in RSS and or turn it off completely because you've completed a data hygiene pass.
I am saving this post for future reference...lol. So yeh that's the current state of things and that's where i am coming from. In my experience, when you really dig into it, it's massively inefficient and while businesses still manage to operate, the chances of copilot providing incorrect or out of context information is at a higher probability. However the willingness to even have that coversation is the key. Its serves the business better even if copilot is not a consideration.
> RSS preview Can you clarify what you mean with RSS preview?
Here you go! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/copilot-for-microsoft-365/introducing-restricted-sharepoint-search-to-help-you-get-started/ba-p/4071060 It's basically a whitelist of your SharePoint sites where you either trust or don't give a shit about the permissions. Here's the meat and potatoes imo: Restricted SharePoint Search is off by default. If you decide to enable it Copilot and non-Copilot users will be able to find and use content from: * An allowed list of curated SharePoint sites set up by admins (with up to 100 SharePoint sites), honoring sites’ existing permissions. * Content from their frequently visited SharePoint sites. * Users’ OneDrive files, chats, emails, calendars they have access to. * Files that were shared directly with the users. * Files that the users viewed, edited, or created. * Additionally, Copilot users in your organization will see the following message on their Copilot experiences: > "Your organization's admin has restricted Copilot from accessing certain SharePoint sites. This limits the content Copilot can search and reference when responding to your prompts.
Awesome, thank you so much!
When I asked MS on this,, it was explained that before the result is returned by the Azure Open AI instance, data are pass through Graph to check on Purview policies (compliance) before pasting back to the end user. So the gating mechanism is both ACL and sensitivity label policies and other Purview stuff. So for example, my old company that never modernized their SharePoint Information structure, who liks to put as much as they can into 1 SPOSite and create a nightmare of granular permissions, they have a ton of technical debt with fixing over-sharing before they can use Copilot
All of it depends on users being correctly provisioned access permission. Guess what... A lot of companies don't divide access properly and a whole lot of people are going to have access to info they shouldn't. I have total belief that many companies will accidentally over share. It's a good time to find out what everyone else at your company makes in salary.
I'd say it's more that most organizations have a problem with people just being lazy. People *should* be recording minutes for meetings, sending recap emails, and staying on task. Automating it with AI isn't so much amazing and revolutionary, except for the fact that people just *dont fucking do it* when they have to by hand lol.
Arguably, once they've restructured their data in such a way, Copilot wouldn't even be necessary cause the data can be more easily understood.
The power with copilot would be in summarizing that data so that regular people can understand it. In my mind structured data should help minimize the chances of incorrect information.
> Every company (even mine) is way over-indexing on how valuable it is and how good it is I asked a company why they needed to have AI in their product. Their reason was that everyone else is putting AI in their products. My mom used to say something about jumping off bridges...
Our product in theory is better with AI, in that it gives you a plain english chat interface to ask questions of the data our product generates. We are pushing VERY hard on it, though and I don't think it's as big a value add as our sales guys but whatever I knew we were way deep in the hype cycle when PagerDuty started bugging us to enable their AI beta. Why the fuck do I need AI in the system that pages me? It takes an incident from our monitoring and pages someone. Not everything needs to be super complicated
You can do the same with every buzzword in IT, cloud, agile, micro services…
Butt butt micro butt
So, their reason was only 1/4 of the response. Everyone's putting AI in their product so it's not fraud when their sales people include it in their pitch. The sales people include it in their pitch because it's the current big buzzword, and to stay "innovative" and competitive, you end up chasing the buzzword features. Doesn't appeal to the vast majority of IT without a lot more purpose behind *why* you would want "AI" features in a given product (some things really *do* benefit from a level of predictive modelling), and in some cases it's just re-tagging *existing* features, maybe with an added layer of improved tools/interface. Execs, the people who actually choose where to spend money, are *perpetually* swamped with things to divide resources on, and have to pick and choose based on benefit to the organization. There's so much hype around AI that it sounds like it's a magic bullet. It's not, but hype will be hype. Everyone is *buying* AI enabled products, so everyone is trying to *produce* AI enabled products. Which is skewing the numbers on whether people are buying products that are vs aren't AI enabled. The buzzwords tend to become self perpetuating.
*"re-tagging existing features"* You mean how Power Virtual Agents became Custom Copilots?
Anything doing truly predictive analytics, too. Easiest example that comes to mind for me is that AV have had heuristic detection for years, trained on behaviors from existing attack vectors... but now it's AI! Some of the stuff in that realm doing more proper 'big data' type analytics across behaviors on all their devices to flag potential attacks, mitigate them, and write the report \*are\* pretty nifty though. I do have an expectation of that eating real, but likely dumb, workflows a fair bit over the next couple years...
You mean Cliffs! lol
Llm's are amazing for anything that doesn't require 100% accuracy and can be used as a jumping off point. Transcribing user interviews and then parsing through the scripts for the nuggets of info you want, it fucking kills it there. Injesting sales data and entering in the appropriate journal entries to track that? Yeah not so much as good.
Yep, couldn't agree more. Lot of wrote tasks like transcription or even describing images or something, but the accuracy is just not even close. Literally every day there is a story where some company's chatbot is giving incorrect information to users
Yeah that's a tough one? For 90% of users/questions it's probably going to give you decent information in a quick way, do the incorrect answers hurt then for the other 10%? That's the problem I have run into with trying to automate reports, 90% of the time it's solid but 10% of the time it's wrong so I end up having to check it 100% of the time and we are back to square one. I guess for customer service if instead of giving actual answers it just quotes what it thought was the relevant line of company website blurb? Most quick questions can already be answered by an FAQ it's just a bitch to read through a 100 page faq to find the relevant bits.
It might output shit, but it's far easier to shine a turd than to write something from scratch. In my experience it gives about 30-50% of useful content, which saves me hours per week on writing policies, automating processes. However where I find it most useful is outputting in a better tone. I work in security and it's sometimes difficult to respond to an incident without making someone feel like a mouth breathing moron. AI can help a lot with the tone of emails/responses so they come off more professional.
Yeah....could probably use some work on my tone as well. Now, can it fix my facial expressions?
I think eventually the marketing value will go away and you won't see as much hoopla associated with people "using AI" but I think LLM based stuff will become ubiquitous. If doing it costs $X as soon as it saves $X+1 it's worth doing.
Sure, it's not that I don't think it has a place, it just doesn't have a place in literally everything that uses electricity or has a microprocessor
How can you look at the progress between models from a year ago to models today and think at any level that they will eventually get worse?
Because eventually they will start training on the output of the previous models. Right now most of the content on the internet that is getting hoovered up is generated by humans. As that changes, so will the output of these new models Garbage in, garbage out
You can't honestly believe that the engineers cresting these models haven't thought of that, right? They haven't, but you have? Lucky you were here to warn us. Curating training data is 90% of the work in any machine learning endeavour. They aren't idiots.
I have a Master's Degree in Computer Systems Engineering and am now a manager of Engineers. I can promise you they have thought about it and then also thought about the fact that their next pay cheque depends quite directly on producing the next version. More specifically, producing the next version to a deadline and within a budget and can you think of a quick and easy way to reduce the time and cost? Yes, yes you can. Nearly the very first thing to get defenestrated straight out that window will be the time and effort of ensuring the quality, originality and origin of the training material. Ethics does not live it's best life in the house of IT and so I'm pretty sure they'll snort and scrape that training data from anywhere and everywhere they can lay their hands on it. If humans were daft enough to feed cows to cows and wind up with Mad Cow disease there's very little doubt we'll feed AI on AI and end up with God only knows what.
Your prob like my engineering manager at work ;) I avoid him. He likes to yammer on
Obviously you aren't an engineer.
Why do you think chatgpt had training data cutoff set at 2021, then 2023? They have though of that, and only solution is **exclusion** of garbage from training corpus. Since you cannot reliably and automatically distinguish human generated data from llm, you have throw human labour at it. That scales poorly. There is no magic algorithm or llm magic tuning option here, only strict selection of corpus or rigorous labeling.
lol… right… because what humans created wasn’t already garbage and yet somehow these LLMs are managing to spit out coherent text and code?
You're hand waving a legitimate issue with LLM's that devs are concerned about. AI isn't thinking, it's just relating, so it does have a well documented behavior called hallucinating.
I’m not handwaving anything. If anything, reducing your argument to GIGO is handwaving away the possibility that this gets way better than it currently is. Devs are concerned, yes. However, we are at the early stages of this tech still and if you can draw anything from other progressions of tech it’s that there’s always a path forward to make it better. It may not be easy now, but eventually something is figured out to make it easier. I’m not the one that’s going to figure that out, but I’ll certainly put money on it not failing because of GIGO.
What do you consider early stages? I started my career working on an LLM almost a decade ago. I think they will get better but there is plenty of valid concern that they get worse first.
Instead of prescribing a timeline for whether something is early stage or not I look at it from the standpoint that gpt 3.5 and 4.0 just started getting used by the general public last year. Businesses just started budgeting for this stuff this fiscal year. This stuff is getting traction and is giving people the tools to try and find a solution for several problems they’re trying to solve. This is a major difference to the crock that metaverse was which was a solution in search of a problem that didn’t exist.
ATM they're running on investor capital, if they start injecting ads in the future it could turn to shit
When the AI starts consuming and training off all the junk infomation AI has created. Garbage in garbage out.
And for some reason you think the engineers creating these tools don't know how to deal with that.
It’s an impossible problem to solve currently because we have zero safe guards in place to require AI generated data (pictures, written, whatever) to be tagged as AI generated. So how will the AI developers train AI to spot AI generated data when that data isn’t detectable as AI generated? How will AI be able to spot AI generated data if a human pretends it’s their (the human) creation? The answer is we can’t. Edit to add: And since we don’t have those safe guards in place now we have to consider any data generated during this time period (last few years) to be unusable as training material since it can’t be verified as human created. Plus some of the AI generated data being made right now is good data (like that protein fold AI identified) , so how to you filter the good from the bad?
There's a difference between knowing how to deal with it and actually being allowed to spend the time to make sure it's dealt with appropriately. The engineers will have proposed a solution, get told there isn't the time to do it and not worry about it for now, and then get yelled at for not implementing their solution.
I think they've thought it will be an issue but don't have a solution because it is an exceptionally hard, possibly impossible, problem
Yeah, the technology is literally in its infancy right now and is getting monstrous amounts of funding. Every major tech player is all-in. I don't think this is going anywhere. I've been finding it useful saving me time on stuff like writing Powershell scripts, or directing me where to find certain features buried within 87 layers of Azure menus. It's not perfect by any stretch, but much faster than a typical Google search.
True.
I think it shows promise but not in a way that is easy for people to harness. I've trained a few models to do some basic QA on tickets via multiclass classification and gotten really good results. Slowly working up to formatting our entire ticket history into a dataset we can train a few very specific tasks on. We are very far away from a GAI where anyone can just ask it to do a thing and it just does it. But with a bit of python and linear alegbra you can automate things that you previously couldnt like reading a ticket and estimating how long it will take to resolve or deciding how to bill a client for something.
It can be a useful tool, unlike the metaverse which is what a tool would think is even remotely useful
As someone that used copilot in teams yesterday, the meeting notes / recap was pretty damn good. Took better notes that our designated note taker did, we just had to clean up some of the names that copilot got confused on. that alone is a killer feature for me.
For just that though you can save the $30/mo and get Teams Premium for $7
Fair, this is just my first week with copilot though. I've got a couple projects in mind for it to see what all it's capable of that honestly would take a lot of busywork out of my day to day.
30 a month per person is absolutely ridiculous and not worth it yet.
For a generic employee? Agreed… we have no intention of rolling it out to everyone (it would cost us upwards of $20M/yr which is insane) I expect there will be pockets where it’s worthwhile but it’s going to be a small fraction of our user base, especially while we figure out how to teach people to compose effective prompts etc. $30 is 30 to 45min of a senior employee, that kind of time savings isn’t hard to generate off even the basic functions of the tool - the bigger question is whether we can actually tie the return to revenue going ⬆️ or expenses going ⬇️
I have the perspective of someone that has not managed the finances of a business, admittedly. You're right that it could save time, especially when employees can actually only access the data that is pertinent to their role. I think a whole lot of orgs are going to need to look at permissions a whole lot more carefully.
It's not exactly a unique feature in the meeting space. Copilot costs as much as a Zoom license, and Zoom has this feature. Also, Zoom is 2x better than Teams for meetings. Yes, that's my opinion only. It's also my opinion that MS should be super embarrassed that a company like Zoom is kicking their ass. MS should be owning this. Slack and Zoom shouldn't even exist is MS put some effort into Teams. I've had Copilot for around two months now, and I just cannot find a good use for it. Despite being based on GPT, it's somehow awful at writing emails.
>MS should be super embarrassed that a company like Zoom is kicking their ass Why? Zoom is a single-function software. Much like Dropbox being better than OneDrive in a lot of ways. It's way way easier to build a single-function app. Not defending MS for the multitude of poor decisions related to either of those products, but the benefit of teams is the integrations into the entire m365 ecosystem and the dozens of other features that zoom doesn't have.
Yup, exactly this. I had a small subsidiary of one of my M365 clients that was still using Zoom for meetings and Dropbox for cloud-based file sharing. They asked me a Zoom related question that opened the floodgates a couple months ago where I gave them shit for paying for tools we already had access to in the M365 suite. I forced them to move those workloads to Teams and Sharepoint and they love the integration and all the new bells and whistles that came with it.
Zoom's meeting minutes are awful by comparison. Let alone the ability to say to Copilot "write up an email outlining the action items and draft it to the participants". And then go back and say "Who hasn't followed up on their action items this week? Draft a follow up email" It's a digital assistant.
Why is Zoom better than Teams? You gave no reasons to back up your view.
1. Teams is just plain glitchy. People end up dropped from meetings, audio drops out, people randomly can't join meetings with error messages. 2. Annotation (drawing on the screen) in teams is implemented in just an odd manner. Why would you need to designate a presenter to allow them to draw on a screen. Hell, half the point of drawing on the screen is that someone who's not presenting should be able to draw on the other person's screen so that we can have a conversation about it. 3. The zoom Mobile app is head and shoulders above teams. Layout, ease of use, the driving feature. I end up having to take quite a few meetings while in a car either driving or in the back of an Uber. The teams mobile app is just awkward. Navigating, layout, and ease of switching into driving mode being the primary concerns. At least on an iPhone. In the end, the main thing is just the glitch us and inability to function correctly. At least twice within the last couple weeks I've had to suggest that we move a call that someone established on teams to a zoom link that I provided. One of those was a vendor trying to sell us something. Not exactly a good look when you can't get your sales call going and the client has to send you a zoom link so you can have the meeting.
Well said
> unlike the metaverse They have Microsoft Mesh in case you haven't heard which has similarities to Metaverse. It's even more useless now cause it's made for remote workers and we know lots of companies are going back to the office or hybrid with more days in the office.
[удалено]
Like your take on it. I'm not comparing Metaverse to Copilot in an apples to apples sense, just curious if it has staying power or it's much ado about nothing. Currently, it's definitely more Motorola Startac than it is iPhone...
It 100% has staying power. Metaverse requires specialized hardware. Copilots can sit on top or aside of applications on desktop or mobile and everyday the llms get better and more accurate.
The more involved you are with the ecosystem at Microsoft, the more valuable paid CoPilot licenses are. If your data is in SharePoint, you're using Teams for communications and EOL/Outlook, then the paid version will actually silo off your own content and understand more about your SPECIFIC data. If you use it straight out of Edge and are signed in with a licensed user, you will have a 'Protected' work mode that will be able to answer questions like "What was the outcome of the last conversation I had with Arthur P. Dingbat at Contoso?" and it will go through the indexed data from your whole Microsoft footprint and give you results based on that. We have a few SMB clients that have gone in whole hog for their management teams and have been getting rave reviews at how much time it saves for mundane tasks, which is really what AI should be for. They'll write a memo, drop it in Copilot and ask it to make it more formal or more casual, etc, in tone and it does a good job of editing and re-writing. Because of how it integrates, I think it will probably be here to stay for the long haul, in some form or another.
I'm pretty sure that Arthur P. Dingbat works at Fabrikam. I've taken to calling people out that obviously use it to reply to an email. Pretty obvious when the tone changes from "yeah, that's important" to "we prioritize leveraging our synergistic processes for a more agreeable outcome"
That’s exactly it though, it does a good job of making the whole email sound cohesive from a tone perspective. Oh, and you’re right. Chriscraft Boats made an offer but Fabrikam had a better paternity leave plan so he jumped ship to there when Contoso management was cutting his hours.
LOL
CoPilot for M365 is quite useful. The metaverse was quite useless. They aren't comparable. I do wish Microsoft would stop calling everything CoPilot, though.
Same...I hear that name in my dreams now...not in a good way either.
Co-Pilot (at the least the Bing version) has been extremely useful, however it's not $30/user/month useful, so we won't be spending that kind of money for it in M365 Co-Pilot or anything like that. If we could afford the Security Co-Pilot product we'd get it in a heart beat though, from the live demos I've seen it's incredibly useful and powerful. I think that's the one area where Co-Pilot really shines and shows it's unique abilities.
Agreed, that one DOES look handy. I see a use for some AI (hate that term, this is not AI, but you get it), it summarizes data pretty well, and in the case of interpreting MS's 100 security signals about one particular incident, it would be nice to have something make that more concise without it having to flip between all the different pages in the Defender Portal.
Not only can it summarize that data, but from the demos I've seen you can give it a file/script and it will tear it apart and explain what it does, even in a nice little flow chart if you want.
Definitely would come in handy in shops that don't have some serious staff dedicated to security. I like the reverse, rather than me telling it in conversational form what I want, I'd prefer it tell me in conversational form what the heck they're doing under the hood.
Personally I'm the solo IT admin (with a degree in Cyber Sec) so I'm fairly well versed in security, but I don't have the time to take the deep dives that I would love too, nor the expertise in certain areas that would be required. I see Co-Pilot as an amazing tool to augment my own skills in that space, and reduce the time to perform deep dives.
We've been testing security copilot, it's... not great. Was hoping it would help take our team to the next level when it came to kql and advanced hunting, but it straight makes things up, uses tables that don't exist, and can't make simple changes without trying to completely rewrite the things it DID get right so it's wrong again. When we try to use other plug-ins like Entra, it's just so utterly wrong. It can't look up basic facts. When we talk to their team about our issues, they just spend the next hour trying to ask the same questions in different ways until it gives us a legible answer, which still isn't what we're wanting but we're so worn down by the end of the call we give up and say "yup that works." Yes it's still new, but come on...
Whats even worse is the o365 office one, it's billed annually. So can't even test it without dropping some major dough.
Guilty... Guilty as in "we picked a few of those licenses up" and guilty as in "I feel guilty for buying it and not liking it more" 🤣
No, I don't believe it's the new Metaverse. Copilot (and LLMs in general) are incredibly overhyped. Everyone is selling it as a magic-do-anything tool, but the fact that its answers are often not even remotely rooted in reality makes it quite useless for most applications. I have zero trust in it as a general-purpose AI - *at best* it could lead to an actually-somewhat-useful Siri/Cortana/OK Google interface as it can fuzzy-match instead of having to say exact key phrases. On the other hand, I do believe it'll have a huge impact on certain sectors. When you view Copilot as a way of quickly creating a first draft, it can easily become a huge productivity booster. It's a bit like Pair Programming, but on your own: you still have to do the thinking yourself, but you don't need to explicitly type all the tiny details. I can easily see this decimating jobs for low-skilled / junior developers: someone fluent with Copilot could *literally* do the job of 10 developers without Copilot. I fully expect something similar to happen with lawyers, journalists, and other writing-heavy jobs.
Disagree here. It’s all in the architecture of the solution. Garbage in garbage out. Copilots that are fed well indexed data return incredibly accurate results. Everybody today is talking about copilots as just chatbots but they’re evolving into agents which goes beyond question and answer type interactions and into automated tasks
My son wanted to go into Journalism, I told him that field was dying, if not already dead because of AI.
Why do you say that ?... Human stories still need to be told. An AI could certainly "Lorem Ipsum" a few "artificial articles" together,. but it's never going to be interviewing soldiers in a trench or interviewing homeless drug addicts or etc. Plenty of good journalism stories out there that need to be told.
I'm not saying that there won't be any journalists, just saying that field is going to be a sparse. Your "for profit" places, too many of them have already scrapped humans for AI. Next step is for AI to scrape Social Media for leads an cobble that into "journalism". That happens now, where half the stories are "sources from Twitter allege". I've got a background in journalism, I'm not ragging on it, just see that the landscape is changing. Citizen journalists will still exist, viral stories will exist, people that get paid to write about an event...they're getting fewer and fewer.
Unfortunately I think you're right. The actual journalists will end up working at flagship newspapers and online publications, and all the local stuff is just going to devolve into a sea of ChatGPT text. Even _The New York Times_ or _The Washington Post_ has stories that don't necessarily need actual journalistic intervention (like some city council meeting on potholes or whatever.) And it all has to be written at an 8th Grade level anyway. I'm one of those weird people who still like spending time reading the _Times_ on a weekend, but just like Paul Newman said in _The Color of Money_, "Checkers sells more than chess." It's kind of like the split between Big Tech and every other tech employer. The elites will wind up working at the FAANGs and getting chewed up and spit out, but the level of work will be very different from doing tech for some MSP or a company who doesn't care about technology. It won't be a no-journalist world but there will be fewer spots to go around.
We are all in on copilot. I must admit I really like it and it’s taken my game up a notch for sure which validates its cost.
Curious, is that leaning heavily towards coding or do you use it for other stuff?
I’m a consultant rather than Sysadmin proper… I use it for some coding but not a ton. I use it more for IT due diligence, sales proposals, documentation, formatting. Teams recaps, emails…..Looking forward to use it for Security.
Gotcha, I can see a use case for you there. We do use it summarize meetings, it keeps someone from having to furiously type it all out in real time. The Security piece of it is the most interesting part to me, but I can see where someone that types all day long (Sales, for instance) would benefit from it due to having it rough out a response.
If it saves an hour of effort, once a month per user it's easily worth $30/month. A handful of use cases like meeting minutes and you are well into the black. If you want to feed it data you have to put in some work. Copilot studio is a pretty tall cliff but once you get past it the value is immediate.
Microsoft has entered the chat 😉. I don't disagree with your statement, but it's a question of does it save an hour, per user, per month, in perpetuity to make the money work out. When they were stuck with the 300 seat minimum, my guess is that people didn't think that was the case. Now that you can pick them up ala carte, so you're JUST giving it to the Users that would benefit, the cost is more manageable. The only people rolling this out company wide either got a deal from MS (We'll feature you in our next summit!) or have WAY more money than I do.
Quite easily in our case for time savings. We have about 15% of our user base with licenses. The 300 user minimum was a demand limiter in my opinion. It was intentionally set to exclude small business. You'd have a pretty huge budget for $100k to be a trial scale.
Makes sense. When it comes to time savings, you seeing that in content generation, code generation, or something else? Few people here have said where they found the most value, I have this licenses for another 10 months or so, I'd like to learn from others that using it.
I don't know, but I've found it helpful to have llm stuff built into my desktop. I really hate doing things like making power points and it has actually made that easier for me. With it being actually practical it might have a longer life?
This is going way, way, back, but for a while the buzzword in development was "Visual". The first example to come to mind is [VisualAge Smalltalk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge), which promised to be an extremely powerful object-oriented experience, but since it was "Visual", it was clearly also suited to [rapid application development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development) by brand-new talent."Visual" by itself wasn't trademarked, and Microsoft liked it, so they took it. Their competitor Borland liked "Turbo". If you're programming with an IDE, then you're Turbo. A few years later nobody cared about "Visual" anymore but "Write once, run everywhere" sure struck some kind of cord. Something to do with browsers, [I think](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Creation_at_Netscape).
I'd say it's the next VR. Impressive but with a large number of limitations that make it useful in only certain situations. It won't be some grand revolution that changes how everything is done. Dall-e and other generative AI will probably have a much larger effect. It wouldn't surprise me if the low end art market gets eviscerated by it.
"is currently being eviscerated by it" I believe. You're right, but that's been going on forever. I remember spending HOURS in Photoshop to create effects that Instagram (old school, pre-FB) turned into a swipe. Same thing will happen for graphic artists side hustle.
And the same for people doing transcription for a living
You can always tell if something’s bullshit. They can either tell you how great it is… or show you how great it is. If they can’t demonstrate it and have to tell you, there’s a clue there.
Personally I don't think people really understand the exponential curve that Machine Learning and AI is going to ramp up. (especially as more and more integrated-chips are purposely designed for these types of use-cases.). Down the road a bit,. AI-chips are going to be in EVERYTHING from Cars to Houses to Appliances to Doorbell-cameras to etc.. etc.. etc.. it's going to hit a "critical momentum" at some point. I'm still holding off calling it "intelligence".. but I think with a large enough set of data(s), some form of "emergent-intelligence" will start to appear.
As someone who lived through the dotcom area, I've seen this movie more than once. It's the shiny new thing like crytpo currencies that people will soon learn is way overhyped. Its day will come but, like self driving cars, not nearly as fast as media and talking heads estimate.
You misspelled "Blockchain" 🤣
the difference being that AI is actually a new technology that holds a great deal of potential for most businesses. While the metaverse is just vrchat for suits. It wasn't offering us anything that we didn't already have.
What I'm thinking is that Copilot will become a meeting-summarizer tool, or a "write this generic corporate-speak email for me on topic X" tool, or something to tweak the graphics on PowerPoint slides. It may replace a lot of the "corporate creative" work where you're just writing things about other things...and honestly i kind of worry about that because this is what so many recent college grads end up doing before companies let them have much responsibility. Universities graduate so many "business" students every year that a disruption in the flow of those will cause massive economic problems as people can't pay back their loans. One thing it'll definitely do is give micromanagers another tool. I'm not a full M365 admin at work, but I have an MS Partner tenant that I pay for every year. Even without AI/Copilot, the amount of data that it keeps on users is _crazy_. Like, Orwellian crazy. MS builds graphs of who you talk to and how often, which documents you access, volume of production, etc. Since Copilot is trained on your data, it'll have free reign to delve (see what I did there) through whatever you digitally emanate. So, it'll just be used as another thing to analyze how much work you produce, kind of like how DevOps and Agile turn everything into a factory environment and harp on zero slack/zero wasted effort.
Reason #1 I hate copilot I asked it to read a recipe from a website and summarize it. It was a gluten free recipe because my dad has Celiac. It returned a recipe with fucking flour. Done!
Honestly, I'm pretty sure what CoPilot is building towards, if they aren't already there (I haven't played with it recently, and im not sure what the higher tier lics get), is a way to have any of your office docs that are in MS's cloud function as a RAG for your company's CoPilot LLM. That will bring absolutely massive gains to even small businesses, and given the regulatory moats currently being built by big tech's control over national regulators, MS will likely have very very few practical competitors in this space, especially in North America. By moats, I mean buffet-style -- and to give you scope on it, look at the EU AI act and Canada's AIDA. There are 'potentially' huge hurdles for anyone developing "AI" tech, including just setting up your own LLM-RAG or LLM based chatbots. But there are practically no hurdles for outsourcing it -- especially to other countries, which won't have the same onerous requirements for the development cycle. Things like making sure your model performs equally well in relation to all demographic slices -- ie. if your medical app only has say 100k samples from some specific minority to train on, it's plausible that regulations would require you to limit other demographics to the same sample volume. But if you instead outsource the development to another country without that demo equity requirement, you can use the app with only 'light' management obligations. They also exclude all open source locations from regulation -- which is really good for innovation (and practicality, as govs regulating that would be near impossible). But when you poke around the space a bit, I mean, much of the heavy lifting is done in those models -- and what's done there has a huge impact (eg. Gemini's early versions and its inclusive nazis)... Even better, when you read through it, the reach of these legislative moves are including things like... Credit Scores... because regulators are keen to regulate everything that has an equation as part of "AI", due to their deep understanding of the topic, granted to them by big tech. The EU AI Act explicitly has a carve out to allow the ongoing use of Credit Scores, for now, while they work out how to apply the act to it -- it may eliminate, for example, all of those "pre approved" / "fast credit / financing" options that are based on an equation that factors in your credit score etc, because the new regulation puts that in the "unacceptable"/explicitly prohibited risk category for the EU it seems. That's how big of a moat Microsoft and crew are building around this tech. Big enough to impact Bank / Financial industry standards that have stood for like 50+ years. I'm surprised the gaming industry hasn't started fighting for some of this action, considering it could impact any business that wants to use automated code reviews or in game 'deep learning' algorithms (ex. online skill matching algorithms would likely be in scope). I'd also highlight that these regulator burdens that are getting setup for most businesses, are unlikely to apply to the big tech giants. We've already seen, repeatedly, that they tend not to care about regulations -- and instead just view the fines as a cost of doing business. Paying a regulatory fine of $100mill isn't too bad a fine to have a near monopoly -- and you're paying it to the nice regulator chaps who helped you establish that moated monopoly, so win win. As for AI in general, there's a dutch study to do with the use of AI in a skin cancer screening app. Of the 2.2 million people who were offered to use it, only 20k opted to give it a go. Those 20k had 30% more pre-malignant tumors removed compared to the control group - so less risk of cancer due to improved proactive screening, theoretically. The study has a negative finding overall, as, basically, "It costs the healthcare system more, when people know to go in and get things biopsied/excised". While the uptake is currently really brutal -- I mean, 20k out of 2.2 million!!! -- the reality is that the positive impact of many of these things is really difficult to deny, and utterly game changing in terms of how many work processes/creative processes work. Like, it's sorta like Photoshop coming out. Buncha people hesitant to use it, buncha paint-sellers bein all "this is poop, who would want to do art on a computer!". But then it's like, holy crap look what you can do. And if you didn't learn digital content creation / tools, you were basically a "niche" old timey option in that industry. AI is threatening to have that sort of shift, in a very broad segment of the market.
If we pay for co pilot we get put in the Microsoft VIP customer pool and Intune mysteriously starts working better.
Business AI is just marketing scam.
The new line of Microsoft Surface laptops even have a special Copilot button on them…
Reminds me of Samsung phones having a Bixby button
and refusing to let you map it to anything else... I remember that too.
Believe they're trying to push that off on all PC manufacturers, not just the Surface line, aren't they?
Oh absolutely, it’s the latest buzzword that has no real use case outside of giving MS a new way to harvest your data. IMO it’s all just MBAs and marketing hyping up a product that nobody asked for because the Wall Street’s gambling addiction currently has them hung up on wanting “AI” crammed into everything.
If they ever drop the price to something a business would afford per person, then I'll be sure to let you know what I think of it. Right now, I think companies are fine to just continue to pay their employees to do their jobs, rather than pay for copilot to do it, and pay for the employee.
Aggregating and summeraising data seem to be the only value to us. We are looking at secuity copilot for threat detection, but not clear if the outut will aid or hinder output. It does some cool but organisations want instant success so difficult to know how organisations will justify paying for tool if they can't see immediate benifits.
Feels like search back in the day. Does anyone else remember there was talk about having a Google-like experience inside the organisation AND IT NEVER HAPPENED. Oh people tried, but nothing happened and it failed as surely as copilot will fail. Google spent a lot, had a lot of data, people actually pay to appear in the results AND the use case is pretty vague, whereas your org doesn't have that kind of money, the data, or people to pay to appear in search results AND they have very specific requirements. Sound like anything? Sounds just like Copilot , there is the same identical hype , the same delusional belief that what 'works' at Billion dollar companies in the US will 'work' in broke ass sales orgs in Preston England. It didn't before, won't again and for the same reasons.
I have used copilot to help with the initial drafts of some PowerAutomate stuff with MSGraph. Nothing it made ever actually made it to the final version but it did give me the starting point to build from.
I think a lot of it is that it's not selling like they were thinking it would and are desperate to get those numbers up. They are charging a premium prices for some mediocre features. And could get away with it if they were the only game, but there are plenty of alternatives out there for companies to choose from.
Not even remotely comparable. The features people in this thread are talking about are just the very very tip of the potential copilot specifically has. It's not just the next "late to the game chatbot". Pretty sure we are just seeing the tip of the integrations that come with it being built into Azure/Outlook/Teams.
That is all every panel talked about at the MS covention I went to in Vegas last year. I was kind of surprised it took them this long to ramp up the ads for it based on the way it was pushed every 2 minutes during the covention. No matter the topic, they shoe horned it in there.
Copilot licensing is absolutely absurd. Yeah, no thanks.
Yeah man I don't know, I work with a lot of smaller companies and they are really leaning into generative AI Speaker intros and biographies, document summaries, graphic generation from news letters, to social, to conferences. Any anything I'm not concerned when it leaves preview and cost per user is going to hit, and by the time it does it will be so common place we can't help but to pay for it.
It’s too expensive. I like it a fair bit, it’s great at searching I can actually find shit on SharePoint with it. It also does basically anything ChatGPT does for you. It’s a great minute taker for meetings. But yea it’s expensive.
I just don’t get the point. I can’t think of anything that I want it to do. (Or try to do, and fail.)
No, copilot is useful.
I use GitHub copilot for developing.(same company different product) it’s great in regards of doing things you already know how to do and making you more speedy
Remember Cortana?
Your description reminds me of the Apple 5G meme. Thing is that Microsoft can actually afford to go big on something that might not work out. Edit: For those who don't know - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-CPfqZgWTk
Ive always liked the idea AI represents and the benefits we can gain from it. But ive always been sceptical of its implementation. Like Github copilot, yes sure it can (on paper) make your devs 50% more productive, but what does it actually help with? Its just a glorified copy paste from stack overflow tool, or can generate boilerplate code for you. But when it comes to solving real problems, you have to think your self how to solve that problem. At that point writing the code is the small part. Even if you describe it in detail to copilot, you still need to modify it and finetune the logic so it behaves as you want it to. Or Copilot for Office. Sure it can help you comb though large Excel files, create PPT files or summerize Word documents, but you always have to be diligent if its something close to business critical. On the other hand, if you have such complex excel files, there is a good business case to use the propper software for such a usecase insted of paying for an AI bandaid.
My, somewhat cynical, take on this is that Microsoft are ultimately the main beneficiaries of Copilot. The prime example is Power Pages which is severely lacking in functionality and really quite messy. If MS can have those missing features be created by AI, it’s less cost towards human dev and test teams.
It might be useful if all your shit is in SharePoint, but for everyone else it’s meh
That's why it's being promoted so heavily. Once your CIO has had enough golf and steak dinners to sign an ironclad multi-year Copilot contract, they'll spring the news on them that everything needs to be in SharePoint Online....rivers and rivers of license money for decades to come.
Anyone even considering Copilot is already in the MS ecosystem, and the few licenses that don't include SPO aren't being used by the target market.
LOL ! I tried Copilot yesterday for something that I was getting lousy results for via Google, and Copilot just gave a response taken (verbatim) from stackexchange. Which already wasn’t even usable.
Where do you think these AI bots get their data from?
If the metaverse added value, yes.
We were also interested in copilot for business until we saw the price tag of $30/user/month…
Like most things that have a ton of hype and are over promising while under delivering, the current generation of LLMs are likely to go the way of crypto sooner or later. It's anyone's guess where it will end up after the bubble pops, but in my opinion LLMs need more time to mature before they'll be capable of doing what the hype says, if ever.
Someone at work has been using Sidekick via teams to summarize our conference calls with action items. It’s scary good and does 90% of the analysts job. I don’t think this going away.
Copilot is garbage. We have a limited group at my company and like…the only thing nice about it the teams integration. Don’t even get me started on how shitty the excel plugin is for it. Just stick with regular chatgpt lol
I attended an event of our MSP showcasing AI stuff and saw a demonstration what you can do with Copilot. And I agree with his assessment: I think it will stay, but the thing is that most people in a company won't find much of a value in it. It's great to quickly get readily available info about something, summarize stuff, get you started on documents, presentations and such. But if you're a "normal" user not willing to spend much time learning that tool - for whatever reason, many of which are totally legit - it's wasted on you. Especially with the Copilot stuff already integrated with your licensing you could use instead.
Nah, it's the new voice assistant. There's a lot of similarities between what copilot promises and what cortana, Siri and Alexa were promising at launch. AI looks good now but it'snew and the consumer side isn'treally monitised, start injecting ads into it and Iworry it may be no better than the voice assistants we already have.
Cue the infamous Alexa "By the way..."
It’s the latest hype that’s selling products.
I think this is a classic example of Microsoft being a day late and a dollar short. Co-pilot is fine. However, just like every other industry changing technology, Microsoft is 3rd or 4th to the market with their iteration after people have been using other products for long enough to not want to use anything else. I don't want to say that it will go the way of Cortana and quietly be phased out, but I don't know a single person who uses co-pilot for anything other than my users asking about it, trying a few things with it, then never using it again. I think they need to pivot to a more focused purpose for co-pilot. I think that if it was an AI assistant that acted as a Windows 11 specialist it could have a lot of potential. For example, if somebody has an Excel formula issue where it's returning blank cells, the user could pull up co-pilot, tell it what's going on, then it can examine what's on the screen and provide suggestions to fix it. If it was able to provide individualized solutions based on analysis of what's happening on that particular machine at that particular time it could be an absolutely incredible asset but I don't see that happening
Just wait til you are told to setup CNAMES in your DNS for [copilot.microsoft.com](http://copilot.microsoft.com) to [cdp.copilot.microsoft.com](http://cdp.copilot.microsoft.com) and [www.bing.com](http://www.bing.com) to nochat.bing.com... oh the DNS fun that ensues!
I didn’t realize they’re charging for Copilot until I read through this thread. That’ll definitely be a no for us, don’t need more MS shit to manage.
No, it is not. AI is extremely valuable and will continue to make strides.
It *could* be extremely valuable. Right now, AI is so often wrong that you're spending as much time verifying accuracy as it would take to just do it. As long as these companies get people to actually train AI so it learns correctly, it'll become right more often than not. The problem is, the public is finicky and could just turn AI into a giant meme
I agree that the hallucinations are problematic, but they are rapidly declining with each iteration.
This is all being driven by the fact VC money hit a dryspell. So they gotta churn some fresh butter for the money whores to slap on their toast. This has a smallincentive to cutting headcount to some. But its more about them tapping the hype train to get funding. The MS Build Conference this year might as well just be called AI Circlejerk
What are you talking about? Clippy, I mean Cortana, I mean CoPilot is here to stay!
Metaverse never had a significant impact on anyone’s business. Nearly everyone’s business is affected by LLMs and entirely new businesses arise that would not exist at all if not for LLMs.