Microsoft Talks Costs of AI and Integration with Office in CoPilot

 Based on experience the integration is very important ... 

CNBC.COM     July 18, 2023

By Todd Haselton  @ROBOTODD

• Microsoft shares rallied to an all-time high after the company announced pricing for its new AI subscription service.

• Microsoft’s Copilot subscription service adds AI to the company’s popular Office products such as Word, Excel and Teams.

• It will cost an additional $30 per month and could increase monthly prices for enterprise customers as much as 83%, bringing in additional revenue through recurring subscriptions.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight event in Seoul, Nov. 15, 2022.

shares closed at a record Tuesday after the company announced pricing for its new Microsoft 365 artificial intelligence subscription service.

The stock jumped 4%, closing at $359.49. It’s now up about 50% for the year. The prior record came on June 15, when the stock closed at $348.10.

Microsoft’s Copilot subscription service adds AI to the company’s popular Office products such as Word, Excel and Teams. It will cost an additional $30 per month and could increase monthly prices for enterprise customers as much as 83%, bringing in additional revenue through recurring subscriptions.

The announcement shows how Microsoft is continuing to build on its suite of Office software, making it more attractive for businesses that are seeking to add AI into their workflows. Microsoft has been pouring money into generative AI, largely through a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Microsoft Copilot, first announced in March, can design presentations, offer writing prompts, summarize meetings and rank incoming emails. It’s already being tested by 600 customers such as Goodyear  and General Motors

, although Microsoft hasn’t said when it will be available to the wider public.

— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot Infuses Generative AI Into Every Office App

I have never used it this way as yet, but useful it would seem.  Clippy, mentioned below, I do remember using. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot Infuses Generative AI Into Every Office App

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ on March 16, 2023 in Voicebot.ai

Microsoft has unleashed a flood of new generative AI features called Microsoft 365 Copilot for its suite of productivity software. Copilot encompasses AI assistance for all of the applications, including Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams.

MICROSOFT 365 COPILOT  

Microsoft 365 Copilot, which shares just a name with the GitHub coding assistant, is designed to help users produce and organize content, including documents, emails, and presentations. The AI’s integration with Microsoft’s services allows it to turn raw data into Excel graphs, design and animate a PowerPoint presentation, and translate a meeting transcription into a long-term strategic plan for a company. The natural language prompts only require a vague description of the user’s goal and a connection to the relevant documents or meeting transcriptions to gather the data, as seen in the PowerPoint example at the top.

The obvious analogy is Microsoft Clippy, the old animated paperclip that would guess what a user was trying to do and link them to a guide on how to do it. Copilot doesn’t just point at a map, though. It hops in the car and drives you to your destination, then walks you through how it got there. You can see an example of how Copilot operates in Excel here.  ... ' 

Return to the Office Has Stalled

Clearly the case, the future?

The Return to the Office Has Stalled

By The Wall Street Journal May 23, 2023

Hybrid work has become the norm for many employers.

When average city office-occupancy rates at the start of the year surpassed 50% for the first time since the pandemic, many viewed the milestone as a sign that employees were resuming their former work habits.

But those office-usage rates have barely budged as most companies have settled into a hybrid work strategy that shows little sign of fading.

About 58% of companies allow employees to work a portion of their week from home, according to Scoop Technologies. The number of companies that require employees to be in the office full time has actually declined to 42%, from 49% three months ago, Scoop said.

"Employees are saying we are going to push really, really hard against being required to be in the office five days a week," said Robert Sadow, Scoop's chief executive and co-founder. "Most companies in the current labor market have been reluctant to push [back] that hard."

From The Wall Street Journal  

Software Robots Gaining Ground in White-Collar Office World

ACM TECHNEWS

Software Robots Gaining Ground in White-Collar Office World

By Bloomberg, October 3, 2022

Software is making inroads into white-collar professions due to innovations enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, fueled by pandemic-surging demand.

Startups are making such solutions available to small companies as well as corporate giants; Kizen, for example, sells licenses to use its Zoe automated assistant, which sales teams can use to conduct initial research and qualify leads.

Old-school automation also remains popular, with the Association for Advancing Automation estimating a record number of robots sold in North America in the first quarter of this year.

This trend is seen as both positive and negative, with advocates believing task automation will free up employees for more challenging work, while skeptics are concerned about automation taking over some occupations that leave displaced workers without obvious alternatives.

From Bloomberg

View Full Article - May Require Paid Subscription

Getting Hybrid Right

Irving Wldawsky-Berger looks at return to the office trends and outcomes, as usual lots of links to studies done, the click through is worth it. 

The 2022 Work Trend Index: How to Get Hybrid Right

“The people returning to the office are not the same as those who left in March 2020,” wrote Jared Spataro, Microsoft Corporate VP for Modern Work, in a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, 5 Key Trends Leaders Need to Understand to Get Hybrid Right. The article summarized the findings of Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index, a report based on various sources of information, including a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries, labor trends from LinkedIn, and trillions of signals from Microsoft 365 suite of productivity apps.

“The data shows that the past two years left an indelible mark on the psyche of workers, altering their expectations and fundamentally shifting the way work gets done,” said Spataro. “This is a pivotal moment, where leadership matters more than ever. Those who embrace a new mindset and shift cultural norms will best position their people and their business for long-term success. Adapting to the influx of change in this business environment is no easy feat.”

“After many false starts, organizations are finally making the shift into a true hybrid work model. Like every other turning point over the past two years, there’s no shortage of perspectives on what this next phase will look like.” However, there’s no going back to the way work once was. Adapting to the many changes in this business environment is a challenge now facing every leader. To navigate the transition to hybrid work, leaders need to understand five key trends.  .....  "

Podcast: Future of the Office

 How well did working at home really accomplish things? 

What’s the Future of the Office?

Wharton’s Peter Cappelli talks about his new book, ‘Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face.’

Audio Player ... of podcast

Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli is the author of the new book, The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face. Cappelli, who has for decades studied the forces shaping and changing the workplace, says the choices employees and employers must make about the future of work could be among the most important they face.

Brett LoGiurato, senior editor at Wharton School Press, sat down with Cappelli to talk about his new book. They discussed work during the COVID-19 pandemic, the complications with return-to-office hybrid models, and how employees and employers can make the best choices about what to do.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows. 

Brett LoGiurato: Could you share your overall message about what you believe is at stake for the future of the office?

Peter Cappelli: I don’t think it’s going to surprise many people to get the sense of how big an issue this is, about whether we go back to the office or not. If you think about the value of commercial real estate, what happens if we don’t need offices and all the supporting services and the little businesses and restaurants that support offices? And commuting? All those sorts of things matter. In addition to whether this might be better for employees, one of the things we know is that not everybody agrees that they want to work from home. There is the issue of whether it’s actually going to work for the employers, and that’s not completely clear.

Part of the message of the book is that we don’t know how well things worked during the pandemic’s work-from-home phase. A lot of organizations said that things were fine. A lot of employees said they got their own work done. But closer examination is suggesting that maybe it wasn’t quite so great and things didn’t work quite as well, and more to the point, there were a lot of things that were unique about the pandemic that are not going to carry over afterward.

For example, most people felt a special effort to pull together and try to get things done [because] we were keeping businesses together and keeping our jobs together. Is that going to continue afterward? Post-pandemic is unlikely to look much like what happened during the pandemic. We know a fair bit about that situation because we’ve studied it. We’ve studied telework for quite a while. That is regular businesses operating more or less as they did, with some people working at home and some people working in the office. The results there were not as nice as you might expect. People working remotely don’t do as well, and their careers don’t do as well, either.    ... '