In October, the Australian Government released the results of a six-month trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The results proved somewhat underwhelming. For instance, only one in three participants used Copilot daily.
Meanwhile, just 40 percent agreed that they could reallocate time to higher-value activities.
There were some more positive signs. For example, almost two-thirds of managers perceived uplifts in the efficiency and quality of their teams.
However, does this make for a convincing argument for the $30 per user per month price tag?
For Simon Kriss, Chief AI Officer at simonkriss.ai, it would appear not. In a viral LinkedIn post, he noted:
Even at $25, if you have 1,000 staff, that's $300,000 annually. Will you really get $300k worth of productivity gain through summarisation and re-drafting?
Moreover, the study uncovered several adoption barriers faced by the Australian Government.
For instance, it found a big need to train staff to use Copilot effectively and tailor it to their specific needs. It also realized it must create clear policies to set expectations for using Copilot.
Additionally, the Australian Government needed to adjust its plans for Copilot’s regular updates and set up proper governance and advice on using AI safely.
These are just some examples from the report that spotlight the difficulties of implementing today’s Copilot.
They also came through in a recent Gartner study that found only six percent of surveyed IT leaders had completed a Copilot project and moved to widescale adoption.
Of course, there are more positive case studies, with Microsoft posting several success stories from brands like Air India, EY, and Lenovo. Meanwhile, the Copilot in GitHub often receives online praise.
Yet, general customer feedback remains mixed, with Reddit providing a hive of opinions. Some are baseless. After all, it is Reddit. However, there are some golden nuggets.
"The key is being trained,” one user wrote in a popular thread. "If you aren’t shown HOW and WHY it’s beneficial to you, it’s just a lame ChatGPT.
"Once you are shown proper workflows that help you, it makes a big difference.
"A few thoughts based on our internal pilot groups and deploying to other customers:
- It’s not for EVERYONE. Some users just won’t benefit. It’s that simple.
- Understand the need/pain point and solve for that specifically.
- It’s not ALWAYS about big time saving… regularly, a two- or three-minute saving multiple times in a day is a bigger win than you initially think."
Still, there remains an excess of commentators referring to it as "Clippy 2.0", like Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who has repeatedly jabbed the virtual assistant, especially after his company launched Agentforce.
Nevertheless, Microsoft has made several announcements recently to distinguish it further from the notorious virtual paperclip and drive AI deeper into the enterprise.
In doing so, Microsoft introduced a new-look Copilot Studio and gave rise to the future of autonomous agents.
The Copilot of Tomorrow
As Microsoft signaled last month at its Ignite event, the next frontier of generative AI is here: agentic AI.
That transition beckons the start of Copilot’s evolution from a virtual assistant that supports employees in their everyday tasks to a hub for autonomous agents.