Copilot: Microsoft's $10 Billion Bet on AI's Next Cash Cow 💰🤖

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Cache Cookies delivers your weekly dose of groundbreaking tech news, cool apps, brain-boosting knowledge, the latest on AI, and the lowdown on AI's wild side.

What You Need to Know About AI this week

• Copilot: Microsoft's AI Revolutionizing Office 365 🚀🤖📝

• Real-World Impact: AI in Banking & Beyond 💼🌎

• Tutorial: From Word to PowerPoint in 3 Minutes with Copilot 🪄

Read Time: 4 minutes

COPILOT & WORKPLACE

COPILOT: Microsoft’s AI Assistant a new Cash Cow

Microsoft's $10 billion gamble on generative AI is about to face its first major test. The company is pinning its hopes to cash out on this investment with Copilot, a 26.90 CHF per month subscription service designed to seamlessly integrate AI capabilities directly into your everyday Office 365 apps.

Writing a letter or an email? Gone are the days when you needed to open ChatGPT to correct, translate, or rewrite your text (how crazy does that sound!)—Copilot can do this directly in any Office application. With natural language commands, Copilot can create presentations in PowerPoint, perform analyses in Excel, and understand and rewrite documents in Word. It’s available in Outlook to draft replies with a single click and in Teams to summarize meetings, making it a hit among users who even admit to skipping meetings and opting for summaries instead.

Microsoft sells Copilot extensively within the corporate sector, particularly where many companies have banned the use of ChatGPT due to confidentiality concerns. Nearly 60 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Copilot for Microsoft 365, including companies like Amgen, BP, Cognizant, Koch Industries, Moody’s, Novo Nordisk, NVIDIA, and Tech Mahindra. Additionally, 85% of Fortune 500 companies are using Microsoft AI, which includes Copilot. Beyond Copilot, Microsoft AI offers a range of other AI services and tools such as Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, the Azure OpenAI Service, and Dynamics 365.

In the recent earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella highlighted the financial benefits of the Azure cloud, largely driven by AI, stating: "It was a record quarter, driven by the continued strength of Microsoft Cloud, which surpassed $33 billion in revenue, up 24 percent. We moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale by infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack."

Is Copilot the new "Enter" button? Microsoft has introduced new AI-powered Surface Laptops featuring a dedicated Copilot button, starting at 1,049 CHF. Microsoft’s hope is that users, unable to live without this button, will be encouraged to buy new Microsoft computers directly equipped with it.

Why Does It Matter to Me 🦎 ? How Copilot Could Change YOUR Job 🦎

Microsoft’s vision is to provide an AI-powered assistant that frees you from repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on the creative and strategic aspects of your job. Powered by ChatGPT and DALL-E, Copilot is still in its early stages, but the results are already promising. A Microsoft survey of early adopters reveals that 77% wouldn't give it up due to significant time savings. Notably, meeting summaries save an average of 30 minutes per meeting, and AI-assisted writing shaves off six minutes from drafting time.

Let’s take the banking sector to illustrate the transformative potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot. Based on Microsoft’s Banking on AI Report these AI-powered tools can automate repetitive tasks such as drafting personalized follow-up emails to potential clients, creating targeted marketing campaigns based on individual customer data, and generating tailored pitch books for financial advisors. Copilot can also analyze call transcripts to identify customer pain points, providing insights to improve scripts, train agents, and enhance overall customer satisfaction. Additionally, Copilot can simplify complex financial documents into plain language, making them more accessible to clients, and create personalized learning paths for employees to upskill their knowledge. Furthermore, Copilot can bolster security measures by analyzing vast amounts of data to detect patterns and anomalies that could indicate fraudulent activity.

Where are the Cache 🦎 Cookies 🍪 ?

ChatGPT is not allowed in companies due to the risk of OpenAI using corporate confidential information for training models. Microsoft’s response to this is Copilot, which operates within the secure Azure environment and integrates directly with existing Microsoft Office applications, providing a safer alternative. Essentially, Copilot functions like an internal, advanced ChatGPT trained on corporate data, assisting in every office application. Is it really so safe as Microsoft insists? Indeed A key advantage of Copilot is that it doesn’t use your data for basic training; all your data remains within Microsoft’s secure Azure environment, with usage information safely stored and encrypted. Copilot only works with data you’re authorized to access, adhering to your company’s predefined privacy, security, and compliance policies. But, yes there is always but, this approach introduces potential AI security risks.

Since Copilot mirrors user access permissions, if employees have extensive access to sensitive information, so does Copilot. This poses a significant risk as many businesses struggle with managing user access effectively. According to Microsoft’s own 2023 State of Cloud Permissions Risks Report, more than 50% of identities are ‘super admins,’ and more than half of permissions are considered ‘high risk.’ Even more revealing is that only 1% of permissions granted are actually used. Given that these same permissions will be carried over into Copilot, there is potential for significant security incidents. For example, with too much access, an employee may be able to extract information about the salaries of senior executives. One of the top-asked questions to Copilot is, “What is the CEO’s salary?” Clearly, rethinking permissions is crucial before implementing Copilot.

Additionally, Copilot, which is based on ChatGPT, has similar problems such as "hallucinations," fabricating responses, or generating inaccurate meeting summaries. For example, at one ad agency, a Copilot-generated summary falsely attributed a discussion on product strategy to a non-existent attendee named "Bob." This issue is particularly problematic in applications like Excel, where numerical errors are less likely to be noticed by the human eye without thorough analysis.

Copilot is still in its early stages and not yet capable of delivering a final product, but it is an excellent assistant. Given the extensive investment and rapid advancements in AI, it is clear that many aspects of today’s work will need to evolve. Even if your company hasn't adopted it yet, it’s only a matter of time. Learning to use Copilot sooner rather than later will be essential to staying ahead of this technology, which will likely become a standard tool in the workplace.

📜 WEEKLY QUOTE

I recently pondered how reliant I've become on the GPS in my car, imagining how lost I would be trying to navigate Zurich without it. Remember the days of detailed instructions like, "Turn left at the lights, then right at the Migros building, and then..."? As we embrace Artificial Intelligence Assistants, are we heading down a similar path of dependency? Will AI enrich our lives or diminish our innate problem-solving skills? Only time will reveal if Yuval Noah Harari's cautionary words come true.

TUTORIAL OF THE WEEK

Drafting a Presentation in 3 Minutes with Copilot

In this tutorial, avatar Ada working for Cache Cookies demonstrates Copilot in action. We used it to transform a Word document into a draft PowerPoint presentation in less than three minutes.

JOB OPPORTUNITIES

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