They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot.<p>I have been using Copilot for over half a year or something, and I haven't found it to be useful in Word, and it is rarely useful in Outlook. I don't use Excel a lot, so I get a lot of value out of the formulae generation stuff when I have to use Excel.<p>There are several meetings that I need information from, but don't need to attend. Culture has been to take the summary from a meeting and dump it into the chat after, and if it misses anything add it below it. Really nice for action items and things like that.
I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck."<p>Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on?<p>But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's pretty damning it's so bad 2 years later.
Whattttttt? Impossible. Surely the AI must have been adding value. A big company wouldn't just look to shove AI into something because it's trendy and fool themselves into thinking that customers would pay them for it, would they?<p>Also, why are we linking to some forum and not the articles?
They gave my brother in law’s company a <i>discount</i> on the yearly renewal if they enabled GitHub copilot for all 5000 devs or so in the organization. Our theory was they thought all the devs would become addicted to copilot then demand the company pays for it the following renewal.<p>Paying for copilot did not happen.
First the inital, irrational exuberance. Along with out of control spending on anything AI.<p>Then the lack of financial return on investment from the initial exploratory (try everything) stages. Leading to a sizable pullback in spending across the entire ecosystem.<p>Then the doom & gloom (talking heads on TV; smarter-than-thou industry pundits); death of garbage start-ups (the great thinning); painful layoffs; stocks decline.<p>And last, given some time - very substantial, tangible value (productivity gains, new products) is realized across decades. Rinse & repeat.
This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI. Their bing chat is a bloated mess and while I haven't personally tried AI Office 365, I suspect it follows the same theme.<p>Anecdotally, I've heard demand for OpenAI's enterprise tier is ridiculous from someone working within their GMT function. I guess you can say Microsoft did a great job of hedging their bets.
Why is this post off the front-page after < 1 hour? or even the second page, or third page? In 1 hour, it garnered ~60pts, and it's a very interesting topic.<p>I seriously think Big AI (Microsoft, Open AI and other players) somehow influenced this burying.<p>It's super-damaging to Microsoft, who have tooted O365 "AI" like crazy. Not to mention their investment in OpenAI. Continued criticism like this about their clumsy "AI" is probably going to cost them a few billion.
> After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade<p>This, combined with the otherwise non-specificity of the article gives me pause.<p>Is AI bunk? Sure! Even the latest-and-greatest models can't explain how to programmatically create a DNS record in Azure using the latest C# SDK, how to create a searchable/sortable React data-table with a remote data source, or how to achieve world peace (just to cite 2/3 topics <i>everyone</i> utterly failed at the last month when I tried).<p>Is this article bunk? Yeah, most likely -- no exec in any pharma company in their right mind would admit failure after only <i>six mere</i> months, and without any lawsuits...