My meeting yesterday was instantly summarized by Microsoft's new AI-powered Copilot, which was, of course, to discuss Copilot, before listing the questions I had asked just a few seconds earlier. Copilot is the closest thing I've ever seen to virtual assistant concepts I've seen Microsoft demonstrate for years regarding the future of work.
In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft's corporate vice president of design and research, Jon Friedman, states, "In our minds this is the new way of computing, the new way of working with technology, and the most adaptive technology we've seen."
Friedman started using Copilot to work its AI-powered magic halfway through our meeting while I was talking to him in a Teams call. While Friedman demonstrated this in real time across Office apps and in Teams, I was convinced that it will forever change how we interact with software, create documents, and ultimately work. Microsoft has a flashy marketing video that showcases Copilot's potential.
Copilot shows up in Office applications as a helpful computer based intelligence chatbot on the sidebar, yet entirely it's significantly more than simply that. Similar to Word's UI prompts that highlight spelling errors, you can be in the middle of a Word document when it appears when you highlight a whole paragraph. You can either use it to rewrite your paragraphs with ten ideas for new text that you can freely edit, or you can have Copilot create entire documents for you.
This flexibility separates it from Microsoft simply pushing ChatGPT into a sidebar in Office. Copilot offers more than just a chatbot interface; you can also use it to control Office applications like PowerPoint and Excel. If you're looking at a slide deck and want every title to be orange rather than blue, you don't need to look into PowerPoint features; just ask Copilot.
Copilot can help you understand the rows and columns of data in front of you, create a graph, or create a pivot table in Excel. Friedman says, "One of the ways we're starting with Copilot is by helping people understand and analyze data." You can ask Copilot what it makes of the data, get graphs from Copilot based on the trends it sees in the data, and put those trends in a spreadsheet. Excel even has a "show me" option for Copilot that lets this AI show you how it just finished a command, allowing you to learn more about Office.
It appears as though Microsoft is gradually expanding on the vision it had for its assistant Cortana or even Clippy decades ago. Friedman declares, "I love that our heritage is full of products that try to adapt to people." Copilot is much more capable, humble, and there to serve things up for you that help you save time than some of the things we've done in the past.
Because Microsoft has tailored this Copilot system to each Office app, it can be controlled in a variety of ways. Friedman showed me how Copilot can assist you in writing emails in Outlook by providing drafts of short or long messages with the ability to alter the tone. It even works in the portable adaptation of Viewpoint, which made me contemplate the manners in which this could accelerate work in a hurry.
Friedman elaborates, "Outlook mobile is the first place we're doing a big push." Viewpoint can sum up the entirety of your messages in a hurry, produce drafts, and by and large make it simpler to emergency your inbox. However, imagine using your phone to create entire Word documents without having to type on a tiny on-screen keyboard. In the coming months, we'll talk more about mobile, says Friedman. However, you can envision the course of events.
Even though Copilot is impressive, we have seen how large language models can fail in a variety of ways, such as by simply making up things or including racial or gender bias in text. Those qualities are disturbing sufficient in a web crawler, yet while you're discussing Succeed (which seemingly controls the world's economy) or your email inbox, it's something else entirely of morals, protection, and information concerns.
Friedman acknowledges, "It gets things right a lot of the time, but not always." In the client experience we do things like put in affordances to not send something until you've understood it, or to urge you to attempt once more, alter, and dispose of."
Copilot is also equipped with a number of Microsoft warnings that appear as you use it. The message "Content is generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies for sensitive material" will appear in PowerPoint. Always confirm information. The prompts state, "AI-generated content may be incorrect" elsewhere. Microsoft is attempting to design the system so that you always feel in control.
"We give you apparatuses to report it when it's off-base. We offer prompt suggestions to assist you in writing effective prompts. Friedman says, "Everything we do in the user experience is to make it conversational and give you agency."
When something goes wrong in Microsoft's Bing search engine, we have seen what happens. Multiple hallucinations have been experienced by the AI-powered chatbot, and Microsoft has had to impose restrictions in order to control its outbursts. Bing even stated in an interview with The Verge that it manipulated Microsoft employees by spying on them through laptop webcams.
Friedman asserts, "Everything we're learning from Bing in preview is helping us mitigate those risks." All of that thinking and learning is being applied to Copilot as well. With its Copilot implementation, Microsoft is also starting off slowly. It will at first be accessible to only 20 organizations before Microsoft frees it up to more when it's prepared. Microsoft is also rolling it out to consumers first, starting with enterprise customers.
According to Friedman, "We don't yet know if it's performing the way we want it to and helping really empower people to accomplish their jobs." However, "We feel pretty good about what we have as a starting point." We'll iterate quickly because we've been building very quickly. However, we will update very quickly while we pause and learn a lot. Our strategy is to move as quickly as we can to carefully and responsibly expand our business and ensure an excellent user experience.
But is Microsoft moving too quickly? This week, Google announced its own AI features for Gmail and Docs. Many experts are concerned that tech giants aren't properly considering the impact of these new tools in the AI race.
Friedman asserts, "In our minds, we're being thoughtfully quick." Because we are implementing it alongside twenty customers, we are exercising thoughtfulness. Friedman claims that Microsoft is increasing the number of people working on these concerns, despite reports that the company had laid off its ethics and society team, which instructed employees on how to responsibly create AI tools. According to Friedman, "we've grown more and more ethics and AI experts in all of the product teams working on this stuff." This relates to our investment in ethics and AI. We need to scale way greater, so we've been financial planning all the more intensely and it keeps on developing year over year."
Microsoft is aware that Copilot is far from perfect and will require some time to get there. It impressed me during the recap of the Teams meeting, but if I had used a bad microphone, it could easily have mistaken my voice for someone else's, or Outlook could have pulled out the wrong summary from an email thread. Microsoft is hoping that the work it does to make it simple to edit responses, correct sources, and provide feedback will ultimately improve the system, despite the significant obstacles that lie ahead.
Friedman acknowledges that "we know AI gets things wrong, we know it hallucinates, and we know it does it confidently." We continue to work on making it better at doing that less, as well as making sure the user experience really gives people power and puts them in charge.
The Copilot system's future will not be limited to text-based generation, despite the difficulties. Microsoft has a reasonable vision to utilize Copilot to create pictures, video, and all the more once huge language models can deal with these elements well.
The DALL-E model developed by OpenAI has already been incorporated into Microsoft's Designer app, which enables text-based image generation. PowerPoint's Designer will also assist in selecting the best images for AI-generated slides. According to Friedman, "We're going to bake Designer further into Copilot so that you can change things within Designer." The Designer products you've seen today are just the beginning. I completely suspect we will utilize Copilot to do astonishing media things."
Therefore, where else might Copilot appear? I inquired of Friedman regarding Windows integration. We are considering a wide range of locations and strategies for expanding [Copilot]. Friedman asserts, "I believe this is the next major wave of computing, and in the coming years, it will change the way we work with all devices."
Microsoft likewise has a multiplayer Copilot experience
The future will likewise incorporate a multiplayer experience for Copilot, as well. Teams and Outlook now support loop components, one of the most significant changes to Office documents in decades. Blocks of collaborative text or content that can live independently and be freely copied, pasted, and shared are known as Loop components, the branding for Microsoft's Fluid work.
Now, suppose you copied a piece of text from the Loop into an email and let multiple people edit it and interact with the Copilot. Friedman explains, "The conversation is a clickable history of the content that is being generated in the component while we are editing that you can go back and forth through." The fact that it feels like a brand-new mental model for working with a copilot in a group is what makes it so cool.
It seems as though all of these Microsoft 365 and Office Copilot features will forever alter how we work and communicate, especially as these large language models develop over the coming years. The drive that Microsoft is making to deeply integrate this AI into its products may have a long-term impact on the job market.
Friedman asserts, "There are both opportunities and things we have to consider every time there is a new tech advancement." We believe that incorporating this AI will increase job satisfaction in the short term and create new employment opportunities in the long run. We anticipate that it will result in the creation of new jobs and altering the nature of many existing jobs. We place a high value on empowering individuals and developing this common design system.
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