Finally, some AI news that doesn’t make me want to anxiously check my 401(k) or brush up on my bartending skills. Today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the rollout of Copilot, an “everyday AI companion” that will be integrated into Windows 11 starting next week and available on Office 365, the Edge browser, and Bing later in the fall.
The way it works is this: According to a demo I got to witness firsthand, Copilot has the capacity to spit out a summary of what happened in your workweek based on messages, meetings, and documents. It can also draft an email directly in Outlook to sound like you. Once Copilot has been fed enough information, it can even recommend a particular course of action (for example, suggest a launch date for an upcoming project).
“Copilot will fundamentally transform our relationship with technology and usher in a new era of personal computing,” Nadella said at an event in New York.
Sounds like...we’re all getting a personal assistant?
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, promised that Copilot “will anticipate your needs and increasingly, understand your intent." (Okay, but does it know whether this meeting could have been an email?)
These use cases are not entirely dissimilar to the way that people have already been experimenting with Chatbot GPT since it arrived on the scene earlier this year (and freaked everyone out by chaotically flirting with a New York Times reporter). Indeed, Nadella compared this watershed moment to the emergence of the PC in the ’80s, the World Wide Web in the ’90s, and mobile in the 2000s.
Of course, any talk of AI this year has brought with it the fear of widespread job losses and...the potential end of civilization as we know it. For now, Microsoft wants to keep the focus on weaving AI into the humdrum realities of email and Excel at your 9-to-5 and apply it to other errands-y tasks like meal-prepping and vacation-planning. Their goal is to “eliminate the drudgery” so we can all spend our one wild and precious life doing other things. Microsoft execs said they hope this wave of integrations will make even the Luddites among us (hi, it’s me) less anxious and fearful.
“People have really personified it in their mind as this thing that’s very humanlike, and if it’s humanlike, of course it can replace me. It’s a supermachine,” said Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s responsible AI lead. “But the very way we’re developing this technology is to be good at what people are not good at...People will feel that way more once they start using it.”
