Mind blown by Microsoft

On Thursday this week, I attended a webinar on Copilot…a chatbot recently introduced by Microsoft. I hadn’t heard of it before so went in not sure what to expect and came out mind-blown by the pure cleverness of it all but also the sadness that soon humans will be redundant!

A demo showed all the amazing things it can do — summarise your emails when you come back from leave, write meeting notes using recordings — it will even give the sentiment of the meeting at the end. It can analyse your spreadsheets by talking to it humanly, and create tables and graphs. From a Word document, it can produce a beautiful PowerPoint presentation that you need to do very little to amend and so on!!

It was all issued with a word of caution — think of it as a junior member of staff whose work you would need to check but it is quite overwhelming just how many of the day-to-day tasks it can do — recently it has been put on to Outlook to write emails for you!

It does come at a financial cost though — around £30 per user per month which is a high cost for small non-profit organisations which was a lot of the feedback on the session.

It may be something that DCA wants to explore further and look at the possible benefits.

From a personal point of view though and with primary school-age children I can’t help but feel sad at the lack of effort they will need to put into things in the future and how so much will just be done with a click of a button rather than actually understanding what they are doing.

Proceed with caution I think!