Microsoft has launched its AI productivity tool Copilot in a bid to increase efficiency and eliminate menial tasks. But office workers who have discovered dubious advertising for the feature are wondering whether Microsoft itself is adding to this unnecessary work.
In the ad, a user boasts: “Can I attend three meetings at once?” “Look at me,” accompanied by a woman frowning at a computer. Real office workers were not convinced by this feature.
“I’m not an expert in Microsoft Copilot, but what specific feature makes this work? » said a technician in an Instagram video in reaction to the announcement. “It implies they had the AI join the meeting for her, but I haven’t heard of that feature.”
“They are marketing this like crazy and I wonder how productive is this going to be if a third of the meeting participants are just AI stand-ins,” another user commented. “Most meetings could take the form of a well-written email.”
“Copilot, enabling burnout, overwork, underpay, and premature death of people,” said another.
Copilot, introduced for Microsoft365 in November 2023, is one of several productivity tools introduced by tech companies promising AI bot replacements for taking notes and summarizing teleconference meetings. They are the result of the rapid proliferation of meetings and the growing frustration of those forced to attend them.
Since 2020, Microsoft Teams users have tripled the amount of time they spend in meetings, according to a September 2022 Microsoft blog post, with the Teams meeting overlap rate increasing to 46%. A Microsoft spokesperson said Fortune, “Copilot can help users summarize a missed meeting nearly 4 times faster than non-Copilot users,” citing an internal company study.
But angry anonymous comments about the program are valid, according to Jeanine Turner, 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. And rather than solving this problem through apps and tools, Turner said, Microsoft Copilot is at best a treatment for a symptom of a systemic problem and, at worst, enabling a huge cultural failure at the workplace. work.
“Microsoft Copilot solves a micro-problem that arose as a result of all these other factors that create so many meetings,” she said. Fortune. “You can see how it doesn’t really solve the overall systemic problem with too many meetings. It just allows people to attend more meetings. Because three… why stop at three?
Why you can’t trust your digital twin
Tech companies are already starting to push the boundaries of what AI is capable of in meetings. Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan hopes to create an AI avatar, or “digital twin,” to attend meetings on behalf of employees. The feature would eventually be able to respond to most emails and answer calls, Yuan said.
“You and I may have more time to have more in-person interactions, but maybe not for work,” Eric Yuan said. The edge earlier this month. “Why not spend more time with your family? Why not focus on more creative things, giving back to yourself, giving back to the community and society to help others, right? »
But Turner argued that these AI bots allow participants to drift away: “Nobody ever wanted to be in a meeting,” she said. With more and more excuses for not paying attention, there is “more and more of a disconnect between this relationship between people and what they are talking about.”
From a managerial perspective, zoned meeting attendees miss out not only on the spontaneous interactions around a water cooler that foster workplace bonding, but also on the magic of picking on employees for solve a difficult problem and create unique solutions.
“A lot of the incidental conversations about tasks don’t happen,” she said.
Beyond the interpersonal disconnect, there is the risk of a logistical nightmare, Turner said. Sure, your AI double may be taking extensive notes, but now you, the employee, or a manager have to actually go through all those notes. Without having attended the meeting in person, they also have no idea of the most important points in the meeting summary. What’s the next step in this spiral of confusion: recruiting AI tools to decipher which parts of the AI-generated grade summary are most important?
“Now we are more and more disconnected from our work,” Turner said. “In reality, they are just perpetuating the madness,” she added.
Too many meetings
Not only are AI bots potentially harmful to workplace connection, they also perpetuate the pandemic-era problem of too many meetings that remains deeply ingrained in post-pandemic workplace culture. Turning to Zoom and other digital productivity tools in March 2020 was an instant decision for many managers, made out of necessity, but it’s no longer a necessity now.
“We had 48 hours, basically… (to) figure out how to deal with the fact that we couldn’t be in person anymore,” Turner said. “We solved this problem, at a time of global crisis, with band-aid solutions. »
These temporary solutions have become problems in their own right: not only has the onslaught of remote meetings exploded – up to 300 million daily Zoom users as of April 2020 – but these meetings are not guaranteed to be a source of productivity. About 30% of employees perform unrelated work tasks during Zoom meetings, like responding to emails or editing a document. Retailer Asos has blamed its virtual meetings for the company’s slow post-COVID recovery, it told employees in internal correspondence this week.
The meetings have lost their power and potency, Turner argued, because they occur frequently, but not with urgency.
“We’re using them as a mechanism to initiate action later, when we really should have been asking ourselves: What are we doing that requires a meeting?” she says.
Copilot’s promise to relieve workers of mundane tasks may not have solved the workplace meeting crisis, but it can still provide useful tools, Turner said: On the one hand, he probably takes better notes than employees, and for workers with different learning and communication styles, such as conflict-averse people, these in-depth notes can be a way to follow up with a manager or supervisor. ‘a colleague on a particular problem.
The systemic problems caused by so many meetings mean that programs like Copilot aren’t inherently harmful to workplace culture, Turner suggested, but they do require intention to be truly effective. It’s an uphill battle: Managers aren’t used to intentionally scheduling meetings via Zoom, so why would they start intentionally looking at how to introduce shortcut technologies like AI bots?
“It absolutely can be an effective way to resolve time,” Turner said. “It’s just that once again we have to be thoughtful and careful about how it’s used.”