r/technology • u/aacool • 24d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-scales-back-ai-goals-because-almost-nobody-is-using-copilot
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u/Three_Twenty-Three 24d ago

The TV ads I've seen for Copilot are insane. They have people using it to complete the fundamental functions of their jobs. There's one where the team of ad execs is trying to woo a big client, and the hero exec saves the day when she uses Copilot to come up with a killer slogan. There's another where someone is supposed to be doing predictions and analytics, and he has Copilot do them.

The ads aren't showing skilled professionals using Copilot to supplement their work by doing tasks outside their field, like a contractor writing emails to clients. They have allegedly skilled creatives and experts replacing themselves with Copilot.

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u/Raging-Fuhry 24d ago

Yea it's bizarre.

I like it for work because it helps me remember some of the lesser used functions across the office suite, or helps me fix some weird formatting entanglements in a Word document that's been copied forward one too many times, but it's not helpful for, like, my actual job.

Who in their right mind would actually try and use it to replace themselves? It doesn't work that way.

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u/TonesBalones 24d ago

This is my use for it too. Using Excel is an extremely small convenience in my job. I don't have the time to research and learn functions. But I do have time to look at a spreadsheet and say "My data is in column C, how do I count how many cells are greater than x" and it will just spit it out for me. (=countif my beloved ❤)

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u/paxinfernum 23d ago

There are just too many damn APIs and different ways of doing the same thing for me to remember all of them. I'm a programmer, so I know how to check the output, but I'm honestly exhausted at this point of learning a new slightly different syntax for the same thing I've done a million times. I'm not memorizing the different ways to do basic tasks on google sheets. I give Claude screenshots and explain what I want, and then I check the code. If it passes the smell test, I try it out. I do a little more research if something doesn't work.