According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user.

"Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively.

Yeah that probably won't have the intended effect...this basically just shows that AI assistants provide no benefit when they're not used and nothing else.

I don't think it's people being resistant to change I think it's people understanding the technology isn't useful. The tagline explains it best.

AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

It's a gimmick, not a fully fleshed out productivity tool, of course no one uses it. That's like complaining that no one uses MS paint for the production of a high quality graphics.

The figures are the averages for the full trial period.

So it’s possible they were making more queries at the start of the trial, but then mostly stopped when if they found using Copilot was more a hindrance than a help.

I have a Copilot license at work. We also have an in house „ChatGPT clone“ - basically a private deployment of that model so that (hopefully) no input data gets used to train the models.

There are some usecases that are neat. E.g. we’re a multilingual team, so having it transcribe, translate (and summarize) a meeting so that it’s easier to finalize and check a protocol. Coming back from a vacation and just ask it summarize everything you missed for a specific area of your work (to get on track before just checking everything chronologically) can be nice, too.

Also we finetuned a model to assist us in writing and explaining code from a domain specific language with many strange quirks that we use for a tool and that has poor support from off the shelf LLMs.

But all of these cases have one thing in common: They do not replace the actual work and are things that will be checked anyways (even the code one, as we know there are still many flaws, but it’s usually great at explaining the code now - not so at writing it). It’s just a convenient method to check your own work - and LLM hallucinations will usually be caught anyway.

If you can be in three meetings at once with AI then every single one of those meetings could have been an email

Or a group chat

There's meetings other people need to have and I just need to know broadly what was said. Transcription and summerizing would be great for that

That is, if I could trust its accuracy. Which I don't.

100%. I'm also trialing Copilot at a medium-sized corpo job and it saves me roughly 12-20 hours of work per week.

I use it often in PowerShell scripting. It occasionally hallucinates and makes up commands, so sometimes it takes a bit of back and forth to get it to do what I want, but it's still a hundred times easier than writing from scratch or tweaking+combining similar scripts I find online.

Probably my favorite part is being able to ask it "Where did I leave off with John on x issue last week?" And it will remind me that I'm supposed to do x and John is supposed to do y. Or even, "I helped a user with this specific issue six months ago. How did I fix it?" and it pulls the exact email and Teams chats outlining what we did, and I can click the link to open those messages and ensure it didn't misinterperate. Way easier than digging by hand.

Finally, I absolutely hate making PowerPoints so I've been having it make all of my rough drafts from transcription notes in meetings. Super nice time saver.

Something I'm concerned about and playing with this week is pronoun usage in transcripts. I'm working with our LGBTQ ERG to ensure that we can make Copilot use preferred pronouns for everyone. If it can't, we'll need to pull back certain features.

It's far from perfect but it genuinely makes my job a lot easier and I'd hate to lose it. I think it will only get better from here.

If you're composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That's an awesome funtion.

Uhm, email templates are far older than LLM.

Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets

That and most governments are wrapped up in Windows, and therefore kinda just captive to the insane pricing. I get everything I need out of LibreOffice, personally.

The sole reason I still pay the Microsoft tax is Excel.
Other office suite components are generally good enough to fill in for their Microsoft counterparts.
But, spreadsheet programs are one area where open source competitors need to get their shit together.

Most of them can do the basics but Excel is still in a class by itself for power users and advanced functionality. That's a real bummer because I would love to stop paying the Microsoft tax.