Employees are eager to use Copilot, Microsoft’s new AI assistant, but is it worth the money?
Microsoft is betting firmly on artificial intelligence by adding Copilot, an assistant, to its Office applications. US companies were able to try Copilot for six months, and there is potential in it. Questions about value for money do linger.
Microsoft wants to make AI a spearhead. CEO Satya Nadella sees Copilot as essential to growing his company. He openly wants to compete with Google and Meta. Only that is not really getting off the ground yet.
Copilot, like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, is an assistant that works with AI. It can summarise e-mails and generate texts. Microsoft hopes to outpace the competition through rapid integration with its Office package. Copilot offers instant help with Word, PowerPoint or Teams.
The chatbot was already added to the Bing search engine, but did not have enough appeal to convince people to abandon Google. Integration with Excel and PowerPoint also leaves something to be desired, it turns out.
But the main point of complaint is the price: Microsoft charges $30 per month per business user, requiring companies to sign up for at least 300 subscriptions. CEOs questioned whether that price was worth testing the software. In response, Microsoft came up with smaller and cheaper test packages.
Is it worth the effort? Yes and no. Certain applications work very well with Copilot, others less so.
So-called hallucinations, where an AI just makes stuff up as it goes along, are still too common. With Excel, this stands out the most, because making mistakes with numbers can have major consequences.
But texts also run into problems. An advertising agency employee asked for a meeting summary, to which Copilot came up with a “Bob” who reported something about product strategy. No Bob worked for the company.
Although meetings do seem to be the area in which Copilot excels. The integration with Teams allows employees to quickly find out what they missed if they were late, or they can choose to skip the meeting and be notified by Copilot about the content.
Art Hu, chief information officer at Lenovo, sees huge benefits: “People can now say, ‘There are already 10 other people on this call. I’ll skip it and catch up tomorrow morning by reading the summary and going to the parts of the meeting I really needed to hear.”
But Lenovo does note that other than transcribing meetings, Copilot’s usage dropped 20% after just one month.
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