Microsoft plans to revolutionize work with its AI Copilot

Productivity is about to go through the roof

Allow me to state the obvious: as recent technological advancements go, few innovations have the potential to reshape our work and productivity as profoundly as AI does. We have already witnessed its evolution from buzzword to a fully-productized tool used by 100 million people (mostly for low-value tasks). Next step : conquering the office to complement and enhance everyday white collar workers.

A research paper titled “Early LLM-based Tools for Enterprise Information Workers Likely Provide Meaningful Boosts to Productivity” comes at a crucial juncture. Authored by a team from Microsoft, including Alexia Cambon (Senior Research Director), Brent Hecht (Director of Applied Science), Ben Edelman (Chief Economist), and others, the paper delves into the impact of AI, specifically LLMs, on workplace productivity, using Microsoft’s own Copilot as a case study. Given its provenance, this study should be taken with a pinch of salt… but nevertheless offers fascinating insights.

Focusing “common enterprise information worker tasks for which LLMs are most likely to provide significant value” (email / intranet information retrieval, content creation, meeting summarization…), the research demonstrates that Copilot tools can…