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It’s an extremely useful career exercise to write a list of all the different activities you do each month or quarter as part of your job. This could be anything and everything from preparing for calls, presentations, and interviews, to meeting customers, writing and reviewing articles or strategy documents for clients, or analyzing data to produce a sales plan—you name it.
Then, number that list, with #1 being the favorite part of your job, and the highest number, say #40, being your least favorite.
Now ask yourself …
What percentage of your time are you getting to spend on the top five?
When people are forced to spend an unnecessarily high amount of energy on the aspects of their role they like least, they become separated from the soul of their work—out of touch with the reasons why they do the job in the first place.
But what if it didn’t need to be this way? What if you could spend much less time on all those tasks that drain your energy, joy, and creativity?
This ambition—for a totally new and improved way of working—has driven Microsoft to the forefront of efforts to embed artificial intelligence (AI) in the essential tools we use at work every day. And the latest developments promise to revolutionize the way we do almost everything. Especially because generative AI and large language models (LLMs) represent such a radical transformation of how we use and interact with technology, full stop.
For the uninitiated, generative AI refers to AI models capable of creating new and original data—from text and images to music—based on patterns learned from existing data. LLMs are a type of generative AI model that use deep neural networks to generate incredibly coherent and contextually relevant, human-like text, in response to almost any question or prompt, thanks to being trained on truly massive amounts of data.
LLMs’ ease of use and breadth of capabilities make them a genuine paradigm shift, perhaps as significant as the smartphone, cloud computing, and the graphical user interface. They are astonishingly good at repurposing existing content and data at speed.
Responsibility and security are integral to fulfilling AI’s promise
However impressive it may be, for any form of AI to be adopted and effective in the world of work, the technology must warrant people’s trust. Which is why Microsoft is committed to making sure AI systems are developed responsibly, according to six core principles: Fairness; reliability and safety; privacy and security; inclusivity; transparency; and accountability. These principles are applied through guidance and advice from various expert committees to leadership, engineering, and every team across the company.
In healthcare, Microsoft’s enterprise security leadership and acquisition of Nuance is enabling the automation of clinical workflows, combining proven conversational and ambient AI with the advanced reasoning and natural language capabilities with the latest in large language models. This is empowering clinicians to focus more on personalized patient connections—strengthening human interaction in medicine, reducing costs, and easing the administrative and cognitive burdens providers face.
This new generation of generative AI has made the leap from operating as a kind of autopilot—doing all kinds of smart and useful things in the background, albeit largely unannounced and with little interference from us—to supporting us as a professional copilot.
A promise realized—with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Which is precisely what Microsoft has formally announced with the phased arrival of Microsoft 365 Copilot—a new tool that will more deeply embed generative AI in the enterprise software millions of us use every day, revolutionizing the way we work in the process. The company is currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 of its largest customers and will be expanding these previews to more customers in the coming months.
The launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot brings generative AI-driven assistance to Microsoft’s entire suite of work apps, leveraging the power of LLMs and your data in Microsoft Graph—which includes calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more.
And Copilot does all this while maintaining Microsoft’s commitments to responsibility, data security, and privacy by automatically inheriting all your company’s policies and processes. In Word, Copilot can create drafts, pulling in the information you need or rewriting text to make it more concise, offering a range of tonal approaches.
In Excel you can use natural language prompts to pull out information from data sets, identifying and visualizing trends, and modeling outcomes faster and more easily. Copilot in PowerPoint can even transform Word docs into entire presentation decks, while adjusting layouts and reformatting text on the fly, in response to users’ commands. In Outlook, Copilot can summarise lengthy email threads to capture all the key points—who said what, and when—as well as any tasks or questions that remain unresolved, and then instantly draft useful responses. And in Microsoft Teams, Copilot will summarize the outcomes and action plans of meetings, to bring you instantly up to speed.
Another interesting announcement was the launch of Business Chat—which also works across all your data and apps, from docs, e-mails, and meetings, to presentations, contacts, and notes. Business Chat effortlessly pulls together all the information you need to stay on top of your projects, as well as helping you break down, analyze, and present your best business strategies and opportunities more easily.
Can a new era for human productivity mean less drudgery at work?
Generative AI’s rapid evolution follows the persistent growth of, and demand for, hybrid work. Microsoft’s annual Work Trends Index research, which surveys more than 40,000 people around the world, showed a 7 per cent increase in hybrid work in 2022, up to 38 per cent. And more recent data, from the last quarter on LinkedIn, shows that while only 14 per cent of jobs were advertised as remote, they attracted 52 per cent of the total applications.
However, while many of us now have more freedom to decide when and where we work, we’re dealing with more complexity and increased information overload, too, as asynchronous, non-linear, and remote working can leave us playing catch-up. Our new ways of working are liberating—but they also require next-level time and information management.
Which is why the concept of each of us having AI as an always-on assistant, securely fetching and carrying essential information, streamlining workflows, and smartly suggesting next steps, is so exciting. The promise of generative AI, and Microsoft’s upgraded apps, goes beyond powering up productivity and smartly automating tasks, to managing all the critically important information we need at work in a totally new way. It enables us to manage the flow and formatting of information much, much faster, and in ways we might never have imagined—and which are much more useful to us.
This could radically reduce the spiralling time and energy required simply to keep on top of what we are supposed to be doing, thus helping recharge our creativity and enthusiasm.
We can see many of these benefits in action, even before the upcoming launch of Copilot, because generative AI is already included, to some extent, in selected Microsoft tools.
Viva Sales uses generative AI to create suggested customer emails for different scenarios, complete with relevant data, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. And the newly relaunched, AI-powered Bing offers search and image creation via chat, providing complete answers to queries rather than simply suggesting a list of websites or articles, and generating an image with AI, if users can’t find what they’re looking for online.
Workflow shortcuts and smarter management of information can have a powerful impact on satisfaction at work. Microsoft’s 2022 Low-Code Trend Report found that development and use of no-code or low-code platforms or apps had a positive impact on work satisfaction for 83 per cent of users, and a positive bump in morale for 80 per cent. AI’s natural language prompts, which humanize or “de-code” the way we instruct and train technology to manage our time and information, should dramatically amplify this effect.
It’s time for a more rewarding relationship with work
We are about to begin a far more active relationship with AI, and through this technology, a more rewarding relationship with work. Yes, learning the mechanics and dynamics of that relationship will be a long-term journey, as existing roles are transformed and new ones created, and responsible applications of generative AI will be key to maximizing the benefits for employees.
Yet this is just the very beginning of a totally new era in human creativity and productivity, and it will be both fascinating and exciting to see how generative AI and LLMs can increase success and satisfaction in our working lives.
With more time and energy to focus on the creative, fulfilling, and proactive work we’d all prefer to prioritize, perhaps the next most important question to ask ourselves, is: What are we going to do with our newfound power to change our organizations—and the world—for the better?
To learn more about Microsoft Copilot, check out the official launch announcement on the Microsoft 365 Blog.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
