Integrating AI Into Your Workday
We're in a good mood. We're here. We're ready. We're gonna record an episode all about Copilot and Microsoft three sixty five today. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies all about building a better workplace.
Speaker 1:My name is Mitch. I'm I do a lot of operations around here. I'm joined with Matt, Dressel, They and have been on a copilot kick
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And have been talking about it a lot. So this is sort of like, hey, we need to get it all into a podcast, get it into our rotation and share it while it's sort of this new thing that people want to hear about. There have been a lot of questions, good interaction from the community. And so we're hoping that this conversation helps kind of further articulate our point of view and how we're using Copilot and things like that. If you have been to our webinar and are hoping that this content is different, you're in luck.
Speaker 1:We're taking sort of a different angle on some of the content there to try to keep a little bit of variety. But there's a couple parts to this podcast. We're going to try to keep them articulate and tight. Four parts. The first part is the essence of Copilot.
Speaker 1:So what is it at its core? What is its impact on productivity? What is the learning curve like? And what is sort of the future of work with AI in our eyes, and we'll kind of see where things go after that. But let's kind of just start with the essence of CoPilot.
Speaker 1:Like, what is the core idea behind Copilot? If someone is maybe familiar with some of the AI tools today, how is it different? Give me the lowdown of, I don't know at all what Copilot is. Tell me in three sentences or less.
Speaker 3:We'll try to do it in three sentences or less. Copilot as a term is a branding that Microsoft is using for lots of tools within their product suite that is powered by AI. So they have lots of things called Copilot. The one that we have spent the most time talking about and what I think we're going to talk about mostly today is Microsoft three sixty five Copilot, which is the AI tools that are an add on product for Microsoft three sixty five. So, Word, PowerPoint, SharePoint, like all of these tools that they have and all of the content that you have within Microsoft three sixty five.
Speaker 2:And I'd add on to that that Copilot is an interesting term and, like you were saying, sort of branding identity for this because the phrase I'm liking that I keep hearing is it's copilot, not autopilot. And that's an easy visual for you to understand how you're going to interact with the tool. It's literally like a tool that is a copilot flying the plane with you, not necessarily flying it and you're sitting in the back seat. So that's sort of a visual. So
Speaker 1:is it just like, let's say someone doesn't know what ChatGPT is. I wanted to say, is it like ChatGPT inside a tool? But like what give me a little bit more at its core. What is it helping me with?
Speaker 3:I mean, it basically knows how to process large amounts of data, text data primarily or pretty exclusively, and then allows you to ask questions about that data or reinterpret some of that data and recreate some of that data based on your needs. So ChatGPT, as you mentioned, the reason it's called ChatGPT is its primary interface is a chatbot where you ask it questions and it does stuff. Copilot is very similar in what it can do. You can ask questions and ask it to do things, and it will go out and try to do things. But it is the integration with all of the tools that is the differentiation, the important piece of it.
Speaker 3:And the other piece of it that is unique is the data that it has access to. ChatGPT and a lot of these other, what they call, language models or chatbots, AI tools, leverage public data, a lot of public data.
Speaker 1:Anything on the web. Anything on
Speaker 3:the web, anything that you put into it, that's what it's consuming.
Speaker 1:It's like a brain that is constantly learning.
Speaker 3:It's constantly looking at what's out there on the web and is publicly available and try to, you know, bring that into its model. Whereas Copilot, and specifically Microsoft three sixty five Copilot, is grounded or based on the data that is in your Microsoft three sixty five tenant. So it is your private data. And so it opens up lots of doors that you didn't have available with something like ChatGPT or any of the other AI tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That reminds me because there have been security concerns in the past where people use ChatGPT to Like, it's been particularly helpful with like, what's wrong with this code? Or how do I make this more efficient? Or like, Help me write this code. And I think someone from Samsung posted code into it.
Speaker 1:That actually came to light somewhere where people got what was supposed to be internal code and it was effectively a security issue.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Anytime you put something into an AI tool, the question is, what are you doing with that data? In ChatGPT's case, in a of these tools cases, they're just using that as another source of their model. They're building their model. And that model is a public model, which means that everyone else in the world is using it.
Speaker 3:So if I take my brand new book that I plan to sell for millions and millions of dollars, and I put it into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite some of it, ChatGPT now has my book, and somebody can ask for that book, and they're gonna get the book back. Or they're gonna get a summary of the book, or they're gonna get all of those things. If you transpose that into business, if I take my brand new widget that I'm planning on doing, or my patent authorization, or my whatever, and take some of that content and put it into ChatGPT, in the case of Samsung, taking a sensitive security piece of code that deals with the security of my smartphone and put it into JotGPT, other people can ask for that and get it back out.
Speaker 1:Not good.
Speaker 2:But the key thing to note here is that Copilot is different.
Speaker 3:That Copilot is different. Copilot, everything, both the data that it's grounded in and the information that you put into it are protected. That's your data. It's not going to be put into or integrated into the model. Right.
Speaker 3:In The public model.
Speaker 1:And so from what I understand, Microsoft partnered with OpenAI who created ChatGPT to pull in some of that, like the brain into Microsoft so that people can kind of use that brain
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's two different pieces to AI. One is the core technology, which is all about how does a language model get built? How does it process this data and use this data to be able to respond to these questions that are being asked? And then there's the model itself, right? You can, by taking the tooling behind it, you can apply and insert a model from all over the place to get better results, right?
Speaker 3:ChatGPT knows a lot of things about a lot of things, but if you want it to be specific, you can train a model based on a smaller set of data, and it would be more accurate in its results. And what Microsoft did was it licensed the technology about how to create those models, manage those models, maintain those models from ChatGPT, and then basically used that and integrated that into all of their tools and also allowed it to target its model based on private data and some public data, kind of a mix of all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think I remember you're definitely a fan of the private aspect of Copilot because when we wrote our guidebook, you didn't let me put any of it into ChatGPT. And that was
Speaker 3:I tried, at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's not really the whole thing out there. Unless you buy it. Check out our links in the description if you're interested. Shameless plug.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we talked quite a bit about, like, the thing as a whole. Can we dig into, like, okay, how what has your individual experiences been like using Copilot, and how has it affected kind of how you work?
Speaker 3:I mean, can talk to start. For me, the biggest impact has been what other people around me are using it for. Emma uses it heavily for meetings, which we'll get into in a minute. But I'm seeing the output for that. When I have to respond to some customers, a lot of times I will ask it to try to help me summarize an SOW that we might be sending, or I might ask it to summarize or take an email that I've already produced in the past and kind of recreate it for a new customer, as But an for me, I wouldn't say it's something I use daily.
Speaker 3:I would say the biggest reason I don't use it daily is because I'm often in customer environments where I don't have access to Copilot. Honestly, the areas that I miss it the most is when I'm working in an environment, a customer environment that I'm heavily involved in a project for that customer and they don't have it, I miss it. I miss being able to go back and ask for a summary of a meeting or to ask it where this piece of data is or to summarize a huge thread and give me some feedback about what it's about so I don't have to read through all of it. So that's how it's impacted me most recently or relevantly. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I guess we should set the stage of we've only been using Copilot within our business. I really have only been using it for maybe two months, maybe six weeks. So it's interesting that you and I are already feeling like we miss it when we forgot to turn on a transcription or we don't have it available on a meeting. You start to get used to the power of it.
Speaker 2:So I would say for my personal use of it, I use it for a lot of meetings, and this kind of bleeds into our next topic on just the productivity side of it. But I also context switch a lot in my job as a project manager. So I'm constantly going from project to project to project. And sometimes you need to reset your brain a little of, okay, now what am I doing? And what I find really helpful is you can input a bunch of mess and it will give you nice organized
Speaker 1:Can we articulate?
Speaker 2:Yes, detailed thoughts back. So if I'm going from sending a bunch of different meetings and then I need to actually write some emails, I can just write into like Outlook the draft with Copilot what I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to get out of this, and it will give me something that I can then edit, polish up and send out versus having to create the entire thing from scratch. So sometimes I can put down super messy thoughts because that's where my brain's at. I've just got a lot floating around a lot of different projects and it will help me organize my thoughts. So I really enjoy that part of it.
Speaker 1:Nice. Yeah, that is a good segue. I want to kind of end cap this section of the essence of Copilot. I think we've articulated it's AI, it's this helpful model, this thing that you can chat with and interact with and use against data that you have in your Microsoft tenant and really leverage in a way that works well for you. It is a little bit greenfield in some aspects in ways that you can apply it to help you in your work.
Speaker 1:But let's talk about how it's impacted things like productivity. So Emma, you were just talking about context switching and things like that. How would you say it has changed the actual way that you like approach your workday? Like maybe not a specific task, but like, do you think about approaching things in a different way now?
Speaker 2:For me, one of the biggest parts or freedoms, I would say, that I feel like the tool has given me is the ability to feel present at more points during my day because I'm less worried that I'm going to miss or forget something. Again, I'm in a lot of meetings, so this is really true of when you're going, let's say you have six hours of meetings that day, there is a lot of stress of, Am I going to remember everything I'm supposed to do from all those meetings? And Probably so having CoPilot on means I can kind of rest easy that if I need to go back and ask it questions, I'll be able to find the answers relatively quickly versus having to watch six hours of meeting recordings back or something like Right.
Speaker 1:Or like, yeah, when transcription came out and it was a great feature, but it's only as helpful as how much time you have to go review and read through. So to be for someone to it's basically you're asking someone else to go read the thing and tell you a synopsis, which is super helpful. So you get to be more present.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it definitely allows me to feel like I can be, especially if you're a facilitator of meetings or you're trying to also capture notes and be a part of the conversation, you can just be a part of the conversation and know that the notes are going be taken. And then afterwards, you can go back and we kind of use the word interrogate. I don't know if that's the right term.
Speaker 1:Matt used
Speaker 2:that. Interrogate the transcript a little bit. And it probably is kind of how a lot of project managers feel when people are like, What was the summary? What was the Yeah. And you're asking that of the transcript.
Speaker 2:So I think for me, it's created a more present mindset at work, which I don't even know if I can put a value on. It's been really great.
Speaker 1:Sweet. Dollars 30 a month. Matt, has it changed any of your perspective? Like, if you show up to work, is your mind in any different place knowing that you have Copilot?
Speaker 3:I don't feel as bad responding to people's questions or giving feedback on people's ideas, knowing that they can easily take what I'm saying and put it into Copilot and do something different. You know, I think what we're doing right now on this webinar or this podcast is a good example of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We had an idea. You created a list. I was like, Hey, I feel like it's kind of the same as what we're doing for the webinar. What should we do? You kind of sent it through and said, Hey, what are some other ideas?
Speaker 1:Give me a different angle.
Speaker 3:You know, when I've done it personally within my blog writing and some of the other things, I think that also has been very helpful. It really takes a little bit of the pressure off coming up with alternate ideas. I don't always like what it does. It's not always the right thing or even in the ballpark, but it gives you a really quick, easy way to get an alternate idea and get the juices flowing without having to go into a meeting and let's all talk about it. Does anybody have any ideas?
Speaker 3:Or have me try to explain what I'm trying to say? Or it has changed the way that I think about that process.
Speaker 2:And this may resonate with some people, but I tend to enjoy editing and working off of something that's already created. That's just sort of it's easier for me, especially when I'm trying to do, again, context switching of this to that to that to that. So, if I have to sit down and create a lot of things completely new, and I know we've got other creatives on our team who they live and breathe creating content, I'm definitely someone who is more of the editing mindset. I know this is true of people when you like write resumes. It's really hard to write your own resume, but it's really easy to edit other people's.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or a biography. Right.
Speaker 2:Or a biography or whatever. So I in some ways it is sort of what's the word? I think a lot of us have that. It's it's kind of a generic quality.
Speaker 1:A white empty page can be really White text can
Speaker 2:be hard. Or at least it can just be draining. I mean, we can all probably do it, but it takes more energy. So if you're able to throw just, I was telling Matt here before we started, I usually put like 10 word, 20 word prompts in if I'm trying to get it to write me an email. Just something super quick, super messy.
Speaker 2:It usually doesn't spit out the best, but then I edit from there. And for whatever reason, that is more motivating and much easier for me to start with than just a blank
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:White piece of paper.
Speaker 1:And I feel like, tell me if I'm wrong, but most of the time we know we we're not relying on Copilot to give us the idea. We're asking it to put a framework around an idea. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Organize the idea in an actionable
Speaker 1:it's not necessarily list. Inventing So the here's the next 10 blogs for you to write. It's like, no, I have I know kind of what I want to talk about. Can you give me, like, a structure that I can work within? So doing it's everything from start to finish.
Speaker 1:It's like playing this beginning 20% role.
Speaker 2:Mean, I don't know. Was the person when Word came out with the Thesaurus feature and you could right click and choose a different word, I loved that feature because it's just, it gives you, like you were saying, more options, more ways of saying things. And this just takes basically Thesaurus and does it to everything.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, I think the thing to think about when you think about what it's actually doing is it's taking all of the ideas that you have and marrying it with its understanding of language to create content that maybe combines things, right? So maybe it takes a research paper and turns it into something that is more creative in the way it's written and structured, right? It's taking something that was maybe a presentation for an executive team and turning it more into a marketing presentation for an end customer, right? And it doesn't know about the ideas that you're doing or the creativity that you're creating, but it does know how to transform that in the context that you're asking it to do it. And that's the big difference.
Speaker 3:Whereas a thesaurus, it's a very similar metaphor, it's a good metaphor, but it is limited to just a word and to just the context that it has of that one sentence. This expands so much higher, but I think it's a very interesting topic because most people talk about and think about AI as being something brand new: thesaurus, grammar checking, autocorrect Reword this to be more they're all the precursors to what we're talking about. Now, Copilot, ChatGPT, they are way more advanced, can do way more. They're based on a different type of technology, but they're all, it's all similar stuff. Heavy
Speaker 1:language word based, which I read someone say like, these tools don't actually understand language. They understand how to put words in a certain order that makes sense.
Speaker 3:Correct. They've seen a lot that everybody else talks. Yeah. Like that's why what it's grounded in matters because it's basically using that to say, Oh, somebody categorized this book as a creative book and you're asking for a creative thing. I'm going to use it to write like this.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:Right. So you guys have, you obviously like Copilot and a lot of the pros, we've talked about a lot of the pros in the workplace. Have we experienced any cons or seen any cons? What are some of the maybe not so good parts of it? For me, it is not seamless.
Speaker 1:Like, I have to remember and choose and think about how I
Speaker 3:want to do that and to use it effectively. It is there in a lot of different places, but unless you click the button and unless you construct your statement in such a way that it will actually produce something like what you want, it's not going to work, which a lot of that is training and repetition and using it and choosing to use it. And some of it is there ways that they can make it a little bit easier, a little bit more integrated, a little bit better responses, you know?
Speaker 2:We've both experienced times where we think we're being pretty clear with the file that we want it to use or pull information from, I mean, to the you're almost putting the exact title in and it's not finding it. And then you have to actually go find the file, use the exact title, paste it in and say, okay, use And so it's those little moments where just any time that it takes a little bit more time than yeah, maybe just what you would do yourself, that's where I think a lot of the inefficiency or the frustration But comes it's usually outweighed with the value you can get out of it, but those times, yeah, are cons.
Speaker 1:So those are like things that could probably be fixed over time or adjusted or made better. Is there anything that you're genuinely like worried about the long term in the workplace with using these tools?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one that we talked about earlier was just there's not necessarily a disclaimer that comes along with it being confidential or private information. I mean, there's always the disclaimer that it's generated by Copilot. But if you're searching your private data within Microsoft three sixty five, let's say you're asking it for, you know, bullet points from the last quarterly update, and one of those points comes from a slide where there was a disclaimer that said this is confidential information, this is not public, and someone pulls that from Copilot not realizing that it's confidential and then shares it at their next those client types of things are difficult because unless you're doing the work of the reference point and all of that, it's hard. You've got to have that human nuance accounted for.
Speaker 3:And to take that one step further, in general, it is copilot, not autopilot. You're expected to review it. You've had scenarios where in a meeting it attributes what people are saying to the wrong person.
Speaker 2:It
Speaker 3:doesn't quite understand the nuance of what the conversation really was. If you're summarizing a long email thread and if something doesn't make sense, go back and check it because it is not 100%. It is not exact. It's not precise. It's not specific and 100% correct all the time.
Speaker 2:And I can see people getting very comfortable with it.
Speaker 3:Assuming you're good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, over time. And I don't even mean that much time. Look at us, how comfortable we are with it in just a couple of weeks and even a year getting so comfortable that, yeah, those are reference points, but we just trust that it's got it. And that could get you in
Speaker 1:a mess. It's like self driving car. Like,
Speaker 2:yeah. The
Speaker 3:other two things is I've experienced it from the other side. I've had people from Microsoft use Copilot to try to answer a question that I'm asking them and it feels bad. Like, we're getting these responses from people who should be able to find us the answer. Instead of finding us the answer, they're using Copilot and effectively giving us the same thing that I could get if I asked Google or something else to give me the information. And it doesn't feel very good.
Speaker 3:It's one thing to ask it and then research it and then provide the response, but to literally get a response back that says, Hey, I copiloted this. Here's the results.
Speaker 2:The quality of things may greatly suffer if there's not a human.
Speaker 1:Which is why I joke with our marketing coordinator, Olivia, a lot about like, Oh, don't you just spend your whole day in ChatGPT, like coming up with social posts or different ways to word things? And I would say there is, like, that's not real. She doesn't do that. She's told me, at least. Like, what if work just becomes that where we're constantly just, like, using AI to collaborate with each other?
Speaker 1:Like, I don't know. There's a risk, but I think we'll always long for that human touch that you're talking about. And hopefully we all serve each other through that and do good by the other person. Let's close like so this is what has the impact on productivity been? We've talked about some good things, some maybe not so good things.
Speaker 1:What was it like to learn Copilot? Like, let's talk about the learning curve, maybe the first couple days versus where you're at now. How has that gone for you guys?
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Let's start I'll with start
Speaker 2:the Okay.
Speaker 3:Well, I was going to start with the install, like the management piece of it.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Yeah.
Speaker 3:On that website You have to buy licenses. Yeah. It's not cheap. You have to sign licenses. It's kind of annoying to manage the licensing piece of it.
Speaker 3:It can take like several hours to even a twenty four hour period for it to actually show up for somebody. It's not a bad experience. It's very common. It's very similar to all of the other tools, but, you know, it's kind of a little bit annoying because once you activate it, somebody has to go do something with it, which is probably what you experienced on your end.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, obviously, you're specifically asking about Copilot learning curve, but I think there's also just a learning curve to understanding what you can use AI for. So, I think I went through that learning curve first because ChatGPT came out, we were messing around with that, playing around with that, and you do start to really get creative on how you can use these tools. So if you've never used AI before and Copilot's your first, you know, run with the whole thing, I would say I'd first encourage to just mess around with it and kinda try to see what you can do with it, have some fun with it. That's what I did with ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:So then when I had Copilot downloaded, I feel like I was already in the right mindset, which is important because prompts are everything with Copilot. It's creating really creative prompts to get information out. It's not gonna really do that on its own, although Microsoft gives you some prompts to start. So that was really my experience of kind of knowing, oh, this is interesting. This is the types of things I can ask it, and it's gonna actually give me this information back.
Speaker 2:But then finding the actual logo and all of the tools takes a minute of, yeah, where do I open it up? Wow, there's a lot of different places I can open up. Is it grounded in web? Is it grounded in my data? So paying attention to that.
Speaker 1:Talk about that just for a sec. What's web versus that this may be something people don't understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Matt mentioned this earlier, but ChatGPT is something that's completely web based, grounded in web based data, public information, intranet, basically. Internet, not Internet. Internet. Internet.
Speaker 2:Internet. Then if you choose and I think the only place I've really toggled it on and off is in the Copilot app that you grab from the taskbar. You can toggle in the right hand between web based and private, means it's just It's working on your
Speaker 3:hard to talk about the web versus work differentiation without talking a little bit about Copilot as a brand. Copilot as Microsoft three sixty five Copilot, the whole point of buying it is so that you get the private, the work grounded. It's grounded in your Microsoft three sixty five data. At the same time, you lose out on all of the things that would be web based content. And so you are correct.
Speaker 3:The only place that you can really see it often is in it's actually Copilot search, the Copilot Windows app, which is a replacement for Bing search in Windows. In that model, they want you to be able to choose Bing search public, which would be web, versus Bing search, which would be work in the work or the private version. But I found it actually annoying that in all of them, couldn't go, yeah, I don't want to ask this question just about my private data. I really want it to be focused more on web content because I'm just asking about stuff. I want one Copilot experience related to this, and you don't really have that, which is when we talk about learning curve, it's probably the biggest learning curve is that each one of these tools has its own Copilot integration with its own UI a little bit and its own functionality and its own approach to how it's using it.
Speaker 3:They're all very similar. They're all still text based. You ask it a question or give it a piece of data and it spits something else back out, but they're all a little different and you have to find them all, like You you have to know that they're there. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2:I think it's really important to have a flexible mindset when you're first using Copilot, even I'm six weeks in. But if you get frustrated easily, it's not gonna you're not gonna love the tool because you really do get different responses all the time. And you have to be good at just, Oh, I'm gonna just try this a different way. I'm just gonna ask this a different way. Or, Man, this is really not working.
Speaker 2:I gotta change how I'm working. If you want it to work the same way every time, it's not the tool for So having a, yeah, experimental mindset is definitely the way to go.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Would you say, like, when you're using Copilot, has in the different tools, is it sort of a common experience? Like, does every tool kind of does it feel the same or have you found that some tools work better than others? Or how do you like process that, I guess?
Speaker 2:So in my experience, and I wrote about this to you guys the other day, we realized that you can't use Copilot within the Meet Now impromptu Teams button. It doesn't let you integrate the transcript after. So a workaround, I put all of that transcript into the Word document and used the Copilot with used Copilot within Word to ask questions, I did not get very good responses from that. And I don't know if that was just the meeting transcript. I'd have to do more experimenting.
Speaker 2:But I have found that the Copilot analyzing transcripts in Teams is probably the best at giving responses than I've experienced in like PowerPoint, Excel, I haven't done as much experimenting, but it does feel like it understands the nuance of conversation and transcripts better than just text and documents. That's been my experience. But I've also used a lot more meeting transcripts than probably anyone else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, but I think that's important to realize every tool probably has its own, like, they call it a system prompt where it's like, this is how you should be answering these types of questions. Here's who you are and who you're supposed to like be as you're responding. So it sounds like maybe that's what you're experiencing because, yeah, if you're getting quite different answers, it's got to be It something related to the
Speaker 3:is very different because like if I'm in an email and I'm asking it to help me draft an email, but it produces a list of bullet points of analysis of some other thing, it's not what I want. I want an email that I can send to someone. If you're in a Word document, you're looking for pros that you might include in a document. And if it's analyzing something in a Word document, it's expecting prose or something, a very written out, verbose thing, versus transcripts, which is meant to be conversational, right? And so they are very different.
Speaker 3:They all feel similar, but you can get radically different results when
Speaker 2:But you ask can get the radically same different results, not only within the different tools, just within the Yeah, same scope the next right, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like your personal experience with that was we were trying to record for the webinar. Oh yeah. And you were trying to like make a repeatable process. Example.
Speaker 1:Oh
Speaker 3:yeah, went through a whole series of prompts and I was expecting it to not answer the first one very well, and it didn't. And then I went to the next one, and it got a little better. And then I went to the And I'd added more. And I got to the end of it, I'm like, Cool, this works. I can record this.
Speaker 3:Well, the next time I did it, it had a good answer for the first one.
Speaker 1:It's a new learning for me
Speaker 3:about what I was asking, right? And so then I was like
Speaker 1:It's smarter than you, believe it or not, folks.
Speaker 2:Or when you think about it, like from a meeting template sort of mindset, if let's say, every single meeting I go to, I want a summary, action items, and a recap. I can ask every meeting transcript to give me that, but the results that it's going to give, the level of detail, just all the little nuances, it will be different every single meeting. And I guess if you want that to be consistent, that could be a future thing that maybe make it more consistent. But I've found very different results, even in action item lists, how detailed it gets.
Speaker 1:It reminds me a little bit of, like we've joked, Matt Dressel has read the internet three times. How many times do you think Copilot has read the internet? And should we have a face off between you and AI in the next podcast?
Speaker 2:Well, true test is I sit next to Matt Drazol and I usually ask him the question before I ask him about it. So he's so winning.
Speaker 1:How much do you pay for that? Is that
Speaker 2:it's a free work perk.
Speaker 1:Lucky you. All right, let's close this third part about kind of what the learning curve looks like for Copilot. Hopefully that's helpful to someone who might be starting it from scratch and maybe some perspective of how to approach this tool. Let's talk and close this conversation with the future of work in AI. Like, how are we thinking about how this thing might evolve over time?
Speaker 1:You know, what are some of your speculations and then is there any ethical things that we're kind of worried about in the
Speaker 3:future Yeah, so I'll of bringing talk a little bit about the future. Microsoft spent a lot of money to license and get access to this technology. I know that they're heavily working on trying to get money from it, to monetize it, which I think is all great. They need to continue to invest in it. This is not something that they can let what Microsoft often does, which is let a technology sit when they've started to make money at it, just let it sit and rake in some money and not make it better.
Speaker 3:They need to be aggressively doubling and tripling the investment in this technology to make it really worthwhile. Right? We're paying for Copilot, not so much for everything it does today all the time. I think the cost that it is is we would never buy it for everyone. If they can do what I think they can do with it over the next two or three years, there's no reason I shouldn't buy it for every single employee.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right? They just need to continue to improve it. It's much like we've talked about with Loop. We've been amazed with how Microsoft has continued to evolve Loop.
Speaker 3:It has been unlike most Microsoft products where they spend a ton of time behind the scenes, nobody sees it, developing something, and then voila, they're done, and they're done for, like, five years. Yeah. No new features. Yeah. Like, really revolutionary.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Revolutionize it. Revolutionize it. Yeah. Or iterate on it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Which we've learned actually firsthand working in the Loop TAP group. I wanna give a shout out to the Loop team members. You all are great. You've been a bright spot for us in the Microsoft world. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Loop has been they have been doing that and they continue to add more and more and more and it's refreshing and it's great. And if they do the same thing with Copilot, it's gonna be amazing. And when I say that, I don't just mean within Microsoft March, think across the board. If they continue to iterate and make it better and listen to the feedback that you're getting from customers and listen to where customers are looking for more there, I think across their spectrum of products, I think they could see a lot of great things happen, but they have to be willing to do more than just the sales pitch, which is what they're currently doing. Not that they're not spending time on improving it, but I don't have a lot of visibility into what the next big thing is.
Speaker 3:But if they don't have a next big thing that's going to happen in the next year, it's kind of like, what are you doing? Right? You got to keep it moving.
Speaker 2:From my perspective, this is maybe a positive and a negative. As Copilot becomes more and more integrated into different people's just daily work life, you know, the same way that we all use Excel, we all use, you know, different tools. If a team or a company were to decide you were not going to pay for that anymore or it becomes too expensive with the license or maybe you worked somewhere where you had it and then you moved to a company where you don't have it, I can see really the way the tool works, it doesn't give you the chance to what's like the word for it? Like exercise some of those skills because, you know, take me for example. I have to listen to a meeting, facilitate, lead, take notes.
Speaker 2:I'm exercising that muscle if I'm trying to juggle all those hats all the time or juggle wear all the hats, juggle all the balls at the same time. But if I use Copilot, then I'm able to be more present, but I'm also not sharpening those skills. Sure. So I can see with especially people, yeah, jumping companies, if you come from a place that had Copilot to a place that doesn't, yikes, I think that would be actually really hard for a person. And then I think about education as well.
Speaker 2:And if you're using Copilot in school, is it robbing you from some of those learning opportunities? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That reminds me of I brought up the self driving car thing earlier, but that's because of personal experience when my wife first got a car that had sort of, like, lane assist and Smart Cruise. Yeah. All of a sudden, I got in my car and like it wasn't warning me when I was going over the lane or it wasn't keeping me in my lane and it was like, oh, I'm getting lazy.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I need to like be in a different mindset in my car versus her car.
Speaker 2:That's a really great example. Even with the blind spot light. And I know people have gotten in rental cars that don't have certain things that or yeah, you get a used car after having something that has that more advanced. It's dangerous because you think in your head you're so used to this or that. So I don't know yet how that's going to play out.
Speaker 2:Any
Speaker 1:notes on the ethics side of things? When we were reviewing this, I said, Oh, we have this ethics line. I don't really have anything for that. And Matt said, of course, you don't.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 3:Emma talks about a little bit the school situation, You can ask these tools, not necessarily Copilot exclusively, to write in somebody's persona or to create content as if it were, you know, Dave Ramsey or, you know J.
Speaker 2:K. Rowling.
Speaker 3:Yeah. J. K. Rowling's or like and it will do it. Is that okay?
Speaker 3:Right? If I ask it to create a business idea or a business plan based on somebody else's business plan that's not currently public. Right? And it's taking those ideas and merging it with some stuff that I have. Is that okay?
Speaker 1:Right. Like I saw someone built a bot, an AI bot, that was supposed to, like, be a business adviser. And part of the context for that bot was, it's read all the books that this person has And suddenly it's like, oh, you mean you fed all of that content into AI?
Speaker 3:Which is copyrighted content that is supposed to be paid for. But they're not providing that content. They're providing a summary of that content, which how is that any different than if I read that book and then I provided my, you know, my interpretation Like, of the there's lots of questions about all of these things. I don't know the answers. Let's see.
Speaker 3:Lawyers and judges and all of that are figuring that out. There's definitely concerns related to that.
Speaker 2:And it does feel like right now there's just a lot of honor system happening, especially within companies that don't that are rolling out Copilot but aren't necessarily rolling out a brand new employee handbook on how to use it. So I think in the next year, hopefully, there'll be
Speaker 3:I mean, lot of
Speaker 1:people are
Speaker 3:working on it for sure to try to come up with it. Unfortunately, a lot of it is we just don't allow you to use AI tools at all.
Speaker 2:And you know that people aren't necessarily following that. Well, the thing is
Speaker 3:that just because you say they're not to doesn't mean that they're not. Honestly, using Copilot is actually probably a better way to go than saying, Don't use anything. Or, you know, if you have something, at least you can say, You had a choice. You could have done something different. Not having anything, you're really in a sticky situation because people are they're going to want to use these tools.
Speaker 3:You just don't have a good way that's allowed to use So
Speaker 2:I don't have a teenager right now, but my question, I think, to listeners too of this podcast, and I think the self driving car analogy is such a good one, if self driving cars were, know, everyone was using them and it's more convenient, it's more safe for your teenager, do you just put them in a self driving car and rob them of the experience of learning to drive for the rest of their life? Because that's just like where the technology is and where it's going. Because I see that as the same question with Copilot and AI. Do you allow students or people who are just coming up and learning how to create ideas use AI to help them generate all of those things? Because I think you're kind of robbing then someone.
Speaker 2:Or is it expanding it? I don't know. That's my question.
Speaker 1:We got to wrap up, but it does make me think about, I imagine someone asked the same question of, does an automatic transmission make them not learn how to really drive a stick shift? Right? And I'm sure this is not a new idea anytime new technology comes out, but I feel like AI just made it like jump way higher. Yeah, we'll see. Lots of questions around the future.
Speaker 1:Let's recap really quick our four parts. First was the essence of Copilot. We talked about what Copilot is, what it's made up of, how you might use it, and some of our personal experiences and how we're using it. Then we went into sort of how it's impacted productivity in the workplace as a whole, even some kind of cons of things that have come up. And then we went to the learning curve of what was our experience learning it.
Speaker 1:And there's a few things that you should have in your mind as you're approaching these tools that will be helpful to maybe not get upset with them and use them to their best ability. And then the future of work, where it going with AI and what role does it play? And we'll see how that all goes. So any closing thoughts?
Speaker 3:No. I think we covered it.
Speaker 1:Is this everything about Copilot that we're ever gonna say?
Speaker 3:No. A 100% not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Matt's excited to get back to this one. Wait, bonus question before we go. How is Copilot different than Clippy in Microsoft Word? Didn't they do this years ago?
Speaker 2:That be different. Has a better logo. I'm saying.
Speaker 3:It's not at all safe.
Speaker 1:I don't know. He shows up and he's like, hey, let me help you.
Speaker 3:Let me
Speaker 1:help you. Yeah. He's kind of a copilot. I digress. Anyway, I'll let you all go.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, Matt and Emma, for talking copilot. And we'll see you all next time. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes.
Speaker 1:This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulk Digital, and special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to makeotherssuccessful.com, and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office '3 65. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
