Microsoft has launched the AI productivity tool Copilot with the aim of increasing efficiency and eliminating menial tasks. But it was the office workers who found out Questionable advertisement For this feature they wonder if Microsoft itself does not add to this unnecessary work.
One user brags in the ad: “Can I attend three meetings at once?” “Watch Me” complete with a woman scowling in front of a computer. Physical office workers are not sold on this job.
“I’m not a Microsoft Copilot expert, but what exactly is the feature that enables this to work?” One of the tech workers said Instagram video In response to the ad. “This means they made the AI sit in the meeting for her, but I haven’t heard about that feature.”
“They’re marketing this like crazy, and I’m impressed how productive it would be if a third of the meeting attendees were just AI people,” another user commented. “Most meetings can be a well-written email.”
Another said: “Co-pilot allows people to be overworked, overworked, underpaid, and die prematurely.”
copilot, Introduced for Microsoft365 In November 2023, it is one of the many productivity tools offered by technology companies Promising situations for artificial intelligence robots To take notes and summarize meetings phone calls. It is a result of the rapid spread of meetings, and the increasing frustration of the people who have to attend them.
Since 2020, Microsoft Teams users have tripled the time they spend in meetings, according to a September 2022 report. Microsoft blog post, with cross-team meeting rates increasing to 46%. A Microsoft spokesman said luck, “Copilot can help users summarize a missed meeting about 4 times faster than non-Copilot users,” internal sources said. research From the company.
But the angry, anonymous comments about the program have validity, according to Jeanine Turner, a professor of management and director of the Communications, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Microsoft even admitted it: There are too many meetings. Rather than solving this problem with apps and tools, Turner said, Microsoft Copilot is at best a symptomatic treatment of a systemic problem — and at worst, enabling a massive disruption in workplace culture.
“Microsoft Copilot solves a small problem that came about as a result of all these other factors that led to a lot of meetings,” she said. luck. “You can see how this doesn’t solve the overall systemic problem of too many meetings. It just allows people to go to more meetings. Because three, why stop at three?
Why can’t you trust your digital twin?
Technology companies are already starting to push the limits of AI capabilities in meetings. Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan hopes to create an artificial intelligence avatar, or “digital twin,” to attend meetings on behalf of employees. Yuan said the feature will eventually be able to reply to most emails and answer calls.
“You and I can have more time to have more personal interactions, but maybe not for work,” Eric Yuan said. the edge Advance this month. “Why don’t you spend more time with your family? Why don’t you focus on some more creative things, giving back your time, giving back to the community and society helping others, right?
But these AI bots enable attendees to zone out: “No one has ever wanted to be in a meeting,” Turner said. With more excuses for not caring, there is “more and more disconnect between this relationship between people and what they’re talking about.”
From a management perspective, segmented meeting attendees don’t miss out on spontaneous interactions with water coolers that boost Interconnectedness in the workplacebut also the magic of using people to uncover a difficult problem and create unique solutions.
“A lot of conversations that are like serendipitous missions don’t happen,” she said.
Behind the separation between people is the potential for a logistical nightmare, Turner said. Sure, your AI dual may be taking extensive notes, but now you, an employee, or a manager has to actually review all of those notes. Without attending the meeting in person, they have no idea what points are most important in the meeting summary. What comes next in this vortex of confusion – employing AI tools to decode the most important parts of the AI-generated feedback summary?
“We are now becoming more and more disconnected from our work,” Turner said. “They are actually perpetuating the insanity,” she added.
Too many meetings
Not only are AI bots likely to be harmful to workplace communication, they are also perpetuating a pandemic-era problem of too many meetings that remains deeply ingrained in post-pandemic workplace culture. Switching to Zoom and other digital productivity tools in March 2020 was a split-second decision many managers made out of necessity, but it’s not a necessity now.
“We basically had 48 hours…to figure out how to deal with the fact that we couldn’t be there in person anymore,” Turner said. “We solved this – in a time of global crisis – with bandaid solutions.”
These temporary solutions have become problems in themselves: not only has the onslaught of remote meetings increased, but along the way 300 million daily users of Zoom By April 2020 – but those meetings are not guaranteed to be a source of productivity. About 30% of employees complete unrelated work tasks during Zoom meetings, such as answering emails or editing a document. Retailer Asos blamed its virtual meetings on the company’s slow post-coronavirus recovery, it told employees in internal correspondence this week.
Turner believes that meetings have lost their effectiveness and power because they are held frequently, but not urgently.
“We use it as a mechanism to put things off, when we should have been thinking, ‘What is it that we’re doing that requires a meeting?’ She said.
Copilot’s promise to relieve workers of mundane tasks may fall short of solving the workplace meeting crisis, Turner said, but it could still provide useful tools: On the one hand, it would likely take better feedback from employees, and for workers with different learning and communication styles, Like people who hate conflict, these comprehensive notes can be a way to follow up with a manager or coworker on a particular issue.
The systemic problems caused by too many meetings mean that programs like Copilot are not inherently harmful to workplace culture, as Turner suggested, but they require intention to make them truly effective. This is an uphill battle: Managers don’t have a track record of intentionally scheduling meetings over Zoom, so why would they start intentionally figuring out how to introduce shortcut technologies like AI bots?
“It can be a time-efficient solution,” Turner said. “But again, we have to be thoughtful and careful about how we use it.”
