Who thought this made sense?
The “AI at Work Roadmap”
The Roadmap still lists a vast number of product updates that have nothing to do with AI. That inaccuracy makes it confusing if you’re looking for updates on non-AI features. Then again, maybe it also proves that, to Microsoft, there are no non-AI features in the company any longer.
The slop problem is the kind of PR problem that kills industries. It’s the Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tank, New Coke, and the iTunes U2 album fiasco all rolled into one. People see all the hype about AI, then experience entire websites and tens of thousands of social media accounts spewing content no one wants, generated by AI.
That’s a perception problem that won’t go away because you want customers to stop talking about it. You have to build a tool that doesn’t create this problem.
I think there are some opportunities in AI for completing tasks, but I also think there is a serious risk in taking action without proper oversight. I’ll be very interested in seeing how Microsoft gets this out to business customers.
This post will be updated throughout the month as new items are added to the tag.
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Will that ever be enough revenue to offset the massive investments they’ve made in AI? Time will tell. Right now, these are some early warning signs, but also small enough that I can’t imagine they’ll move the needle one way or the other. I’m not jumping to any conclusions based on them, but I do have my eyes open.
This is a pretty significant change for many of us who had been concerned about vetting data protection agreements with Anthropic before allowing user access to the Claude option in Coiplot Chat, and who’ve also watched new agents for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint rollout, but not to our tenants with Anthropic model access disabled.
I want to be charitable and say that this doesn’t reek slightly of desperation, but is instead a strategic decision, possibly to be followed by a price increase next year. Or even that they are trying to lessen the confusion around the different versions of Copilot.
Then I counted the number of “Try Copilot Chat Now!” buttons on that page and immediately realized how desperate they are to get people to use Copilot.
Have to agree, branding it as the AI at work roadmap feels a little unnecessarily narrow. As an admin, I would wonder: does it still include non-AI features? Are there any non-AI features? If the intent was just to broaden the scope, I would have called it the “Microsoft at work roadmap”.
But obviously they didn’t ask me.