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.
If we can’t trust Microsoft’s own tools to work, people will look for other tools. The advantage of being the built-in tool disappears when we can’t trust it.
Microsoft has made efforts to make it clearer when a call is from outside the tenant, and I think that helps. Still, it might now be a good idea to review the proper procedures with your users, and for larger organizations where users may not recognize the support team, an identity verification step might also be worth considering.
If you can get Copilot to drop a link into the auto-summary, it would be less suspicious than an email sent from outside with a link. That’s probably true. After all, if you trust your AI Summarization tool to summarize the email instead of reading it, why wouldn’t you trust any links it included?
It just isn’t clear to them that they would need to pay for that when they’re already using Copilot to help them write emails and summarize log documents. They are using AI for free on their work PC, their home PC, everywhere. Microsoft has done a really good job of explaining the difference to people who follow Microsoft blogs, but an extremely poor job of explaining it to the average M365 user.
It doesn’t help that they keep changing what is included in the free version, either.
I’m glad we can now record only the audio. It makes it slightly less intrusive to record a meeting that others may need to listen to later.
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.
Here’s why this is such a big problem. Microsoft recommends blocking Copilot from accessing sensitive information in emails, meetings, documents, and related content by assigning a label to those items and creating a DLP policy that defines the block. This bug renders the system unusable for the affected emails. You simply can’t provide a governance tool that doesn’t deliver the governance it claims to provide. It’s a bad look, Microsoft. It doesn’t help build customer trust.
No, Copilot did not make these emails public or access private information and make it non-private. It accessed information in response to your prompt that it should ignore. That creates a risk that many users might assume does not exist. That is a significant issue, but it’s not equivalent to a data breach. There is another check in place before data leaks out: the end user.
In the case of a departed user on OneDrive, there may be a cost associated with data from now-unlicensed accounts remaining in your tenant. Many people might not like hearing that, and it does seem a little petty of Microsoft to count it differently from the overall amount of storage you are allocated. On the other hand, for the Information Governance part of my day job, it’s not the worst thing to have a mechanism that forces you to consider why that data is being retained and what decisions were made about it.
One of the biggest irritations for M365 users is recurring meetings set to run for years, with the organizer having left the organization. How do you get them off people’s calendars, or have them managed by another user?
