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Široká veřejnost se zkraje nového roku načila nový termín mařič elektřiny . Teď to vypadá, že je s ním výhledově konec. Ministr průmyslu a obchodu Lukáš Vlček totiž přišel s úpravou chystané novely energetického zákona (tzv. Lex Plyn), která by měla neefektivní mařiče zakázat. [ArticleBox ORIGINÁL ...

OpenAI on Friday revealed that it banned a set of accounts that used its ChatGPT tool to develop a suspected artificial intelligence (AI)-powered surveillance tool. The social media listening tool is said to likely originate from China and is powered by one of Meta's Llama models, with the accounts in question using the AI company's models to generate detailed descriptions and analyze documents

OpenAI on Friday revealed that it banned a set of accounts that used its ChatGPT tool to develop a suspected artificial intelligence (AI)-powered surveillance tool. The social media listening tool is said to likely originate from China and is powered by one of Meta's Llama models, with the accounts in question using the AI company's models to generate detailed descriptions and analyze documentsRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

US feds are reportedly investigating a $32 million deal inked by CrowdStrike with a government reseller to provide cybersecurity tools for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) — products the agency never used and said it didn’t even purchase.

On the last day of Q3 2023, the security giant signed a contract with top government software reseller Carahsoft Technology Corp. for use of its identity threat detection software by the IRS, according to a Bloomberg report. The timing seems to be a critical component of the investigation, as the transaction was large enough for CrowdStrike to meet Wall Street expectations for the quarter.

Given that IRS usage hasn’t materialized, some, including, Bloomberg said, CrowdStrike’s own employees, have raised concerns about pre-booking — the inflation of sales figures to meet investor expectations.

However, a CrowdStrike spokesperson told Computerworld: “We stand by the accounting of the transaction.” Carahsoft did not reply to Computerworld’s requests for comment.

IRS: We never purchased CrowdStrike software

According to two people who spoke with Bloomberg on agreement of anonymity, investigators for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been conducting interviews with CrowdStrike and IRS staff and collecting records related to the deal, including written documents exchanged between IRS, CrowdStrike, and Carahsoft employees.

Investigators are asking witnesses about any interactions between CrowdStrike sales staff and IRS employees, and have repeatedly queried whether the agency purchased CrowdStrike software, to which they’ve repeatedly been told “no”, according to the anonymous sources.

Previously, CrowdStrike and Carahsoft said they had settled on a “non-cancellable order,” but they haven’t said whether there was indeed a purchase order in place from the IRS.

After the deal was finalized and CrowdStrike reported its third quarter results, company shares jumped 10%. CEO George Kurtz even seemed to call the deal out in the quarterly earnings call, saying that “identity threat protection wins in the quarter included an eight-figure total deal value win in the federal government.”

However, several months later, CrowdStrike appeared to backtrack, excluding roughly $26 million from its annual recurring revenue, citing a federal distributor’s intent to exercise transferability rights.

Carahsoft, for its part, has been under scrutiny for some time now. The FBI searched its Reston, Virginia headquarters last year in a matter related to another partner, and federal prosecutors are performing a separate civil investigation into whether the company conspired to overcharge the government.

Pre-sales a ‘leadership problem’

Experts and analysts say the CrowdStrike-Carahsoft narrative emphasizes the pressure placed on enterprise IT buyers and sellers to sign deals before end-of-quarter (EOQ).

“Quarter-end deal pressure is one of the most predictable yet high-stakes dynamics in enterprise IT negotiations,” Adam Mansfield, commercial advisory practice leader with IT negotiation advisors UpperEdge, told Computerworld.

Vendor sales reps push hard to lock in revenue, typically tied to new product adoption, upgrades, or expanded usage, before closing their books, he said, “often dangling so-called ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ aggressive discounting to secure commitments.”

Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, agreed. “Buyers have been conditioned by vendors who are publicly traded to strategically position deals at EOQ and preferably at the end of the vendor’s fiscal year,” he said.

But while urgency can create opportunity, it also carries significant risks, Mansfield pointed out. Committing to products and/or volumes that aren’t fully vetted, and misalignment of contract terms, can later cause financial damage, particularly when these new products come with non-cancelable subscriptions.

“The practice often creates more problems than it solves,” agreed SaaS and service brand consultant Chad Perry. “Deals get ‘booked’ under false pretenses, contracts get renegotiated (or canceled) post-quarter, and the next thing you know, the company is explaining ‘revenue recognition issues’ on an earnings call.”

While, at the end of the day, the blame may land in the sales department, “pre-booking is never just a sales problem,” he said. “It’s a leadership problem.”

Buyers’ opportunity in EOQ deals

For buyers, EOQ deals can both exploit and be exploited, experts point out.

In the case of IT buyers, understanding this pressure can actually be a strategic advantage, Perry noted. “If you know the seller is under quarter-end stress, you have leverage,” he said. “You can negotiate better terms, push for extras, or even delay and see what they offer to close.”

Mansfield emphasized that the key for IT buyers is to seek out opportunity in vendor urgency, while at the same time maintaining control. This means ensuring pricing is truly competitive and securing proper concessions (such as protections). The worst-case scenario: Committing to costly products and fees only to see plans unravel due to business shifts, internal delays, lack of realized value, or vendor-side complications.

“Smart buyers use quarter-end pressure to their advantage, but never let it dictate the terms of their agreements,” said Mansfield.

Zima konečně dorazila i k nám a chvíle, na kterou řada lidí netrpělivě vyčkávala, je tu. Většina lyžařských středisek dává milovníkům zimních sportů zelenou. Zimní radovánky tedy mohou propuknout. Málokdo se však zamýšlí nad tím, co všechno by se mohlo na svahu přihodit. Přitom jak se říká, štěstí přeje připraveným.

Společnost Clone Robotics vsadila na vysoce humanoidní, až anatomicky věrné roboty. Mají kosti, svaly a šlachy, do značné míry odpovídající lidským. Jsou sice veskrze umělé, ale výsledek je zvláštním způsobem strašidelný. Momentálně je venku prototyp Protoclone, v dohledné době by se měli objevit roboti omezené série Clone Alpha.

Britská společnost Core Power použije přístup legendárního programu „Liberty“ z dob, kdy Spojené státy bojovaly proti nacistům a bude podobným způsobem masově vyrábět plovoucí jaderné elektrárny s reaktory založenými na tavených solích. Flotila těchto elektráren by měla zajistit energetickou bezpečnost pro těžký průmysl a námořní dopravu.

Amazon’s announcement on Wednesday that it is abandoning its Chime collaboration app, while stressing that it will double down on the far more successful Chime software development kit (SDK), was an example of Amazon being Amazon. It knows what it does well, and where to focus.

Analysts said that the Chime app made some sense when it was introduced in February 2017, but that sharply changed in 2000 when the pandemic hit. Microsoft and Zoom added lots of new functionality to their collaboration platforms, but Amazon didn’t add much to Chime. And over the years, rivals have continued to beef up their products. 

Chime’s feature set quickly was outshone and its market share plunged; currently its share is negligible, with one firm placing it at literally 0.0%. 

Amazon itself described its Chime app market share as “limited,” and conceded that its competitors, which it referred to as partners, had outpaced it.

“When we decide to retire a service or feature, it is typically because we’ve introduced something better or our partners offer a solution that is a good fit for our customers as well as our own employees,” said Erik Denny of Amazon media relations. “In Chime’s case, its use outside of Amazon was limited and our partners offer great collaboration solutions, so we will lean into those.”

In an internal memo to Amazon employees, the company threw its support behind key rivals. “Zoom is replacing Amazon Chime as the standard meeting application for Amazon internal meetings,” it said.  “Microsoft Teams will also be available for scenarios where full integration with M365 is needed. Cisco Webex will also be available for communication with customers who use Cisco Webex.”

The app has failed, but popular SDK prevails

The Chime app’s situation is almost the opposite of that of the popular Chime SDK. The lack of functionality that was so important to app users was irrelevant to users of the SDK, as enterprises and vendors used it as the foundation for capabilities they built into their own apps, including Slack Huddles and Intuit’s Virtual Expert Platform. 

Amazon also introduced its SDK much earlier than did Microsoft or Zoom, allowing the Chime SDK to build up a significant market share advantage, said Melody Brue, VP and principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy.

“I’m not surprised at all [about the app’s demise],” Brue said. “They really haven’t invested a whole lot into the Chime app.”

Jeremy Roberts, the senior director of research at Info-Tech Research Group, agreed. He said the decision to kill the Chime app while increasing support for the Chime SDK made perfect sense.

“My takeaway is that this is very logical. They never climbed to the top of the stack [with the app]. [Enterprises] didn’t like the product, but they loved the infrastructure,” Roberts said. “Amazon is a good telescope manufacturer but not a good astronomer.”

Wayne Kurtzman, an IDC research VP, also noted that Amazon never promoted the Chime app, although they certainly could have.

“Amazon is really good at creating narratives, but Chime never had a good go-to-market strategy,” Kurtzman said. “It fell short in creating mindshare in a market that was growing incredibly rapidly.” 

One year warning for users, migration help promised

In Amazon’s public statement, the company said, “After careful consideration, we have decided to end support for the Amazon Chime service, including Business Calling features, effective February 20, 2026. Amazon Chime will no longer accept new customers beginning February 19, 2025. Existing customers can continue to use Amazon Chime features, including Business Calling, scheduling and hosting meetings, adding and managing users, and other capabilities supported through the Amazon Chime administration console.”

It then pledged to help transition the few remaining Chime app users to other platforms, including “solutions provided by AWS, such as AWS Wickr, or from AWS partners, such as Zoom from Zoom Video Communications Inc., Webex from Cisco Systems, Inc., and Slack from Salesforce.”

Alternative AWS Wickr ‘should have its chance to shine,’ says analyst

However, Roberts questioned how long Amazon will support Wickr, given that it suffers from many of the same shortcomings as the Chime app. “I don’t see a lot of Wickr use with our enterprise clients,” he said. But, he added, the robust security capabilities within Wickr may make it viable in select segments, such as governments. 

Will McKeon-White, a senior analyst with Forrester, was more optimistic about Wickr, arguing that an encrypted messaging app is going to have more staying power than a video conferencing one.

“Usually, replacing a messaging solution is much more difficult than replacing a video calling solution,” McKeon-White said. “Messaging needs to have integration into a whole host of different things. What it comes down to is that it’s much harder to replace.”

Part of the issue is that users often need to refer to messages from months earlier, but they rarely have to review old conference calls. That is why employees will often hang onto those old messaging apps even if the corporate standard has changed, because “there is some critical thing that they need that messaging app for.”

IDC’s Kurtzman also said that Wickr should get its chance to shine.

“They have a good security narrative and a good security story, which is advanced cryptography,” he said, noting that should be a critical feature given that enterprises are putting “all of the intellectual property of the business” into their messages. He said that Wickr might be positioned as the glue to integrate different genAI offerings from different companies.

In the end, said Roberts, the key enterprise IT takeaway from this is to stick with the dominant players in the collaboration space. “It validates the decision to consolidate on the blue-chip collaboration solutions.”

Google continues its rollout of gradually disabling uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2-based extensions in the Chrome web browser as part of its efforts to push users to Manifest V3-based extensions. [...]

An Android malware app called SpyLend has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Google Play, where it masqueraded as a financial tool but became a predatory loan app for those in India. [...]

The AI generates gaming “fan fiction” to expand a game’s virtual world.

I admit, since middle school, I’ve spent most of my downtime immersed in video games. There are the quintessential epics: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite. And then there are some indies close to my heart—a game that simulates a wildfire watcher in a forest, a road trip adventure, or one that uses portals to connect improbable physical spaces.

I’m not the only one sucked into games. The multi-billion-dollar video game industry is now bigger than Hollywood. And designers are constantly scrambling to expand their digital worlds to meet endless expectations for new content.

Now, they may have a nifty helper.

This week, Microsoft Research released Muse, an AI that spews out a multitude of diverse new scenarios within a game. Like ChatGPT and Gemini, Muse is a generative AI model. Trained on roughly 500,000 human gameplay sessions from Microsoft-owned Ninja Theory’s multiplayer shooter Bleeding Edge, Muse can dream up facsimiles of gameplay in which characters obey the game’s internal physical rules and associated controller actions.

The team is quick to add that Muse isn’t intended to replace human game designers. Rather, true to its name, the AI can offer inspiration for teams to adopt as they choose.

“In our research, we focus on exploring the capabilities that models like Muse need to effectively support human creatives,” wrote study author Katja Hofmann in a blog post.

Muse is only trained on one game and can only produce scenarios based on Bleeding Edge. However, because the AI learned from human gameplay data without any preconception of the game’s physics itself, the model could be used for other games, as long as there’s enough data for training.

“We believe generative AI can boost this creativity and open up new possibilities,” wrote Fatima Kardar, corporate vice president of gaming AI at Microsoft, in a separate blog post.

Whole New Worlds

Generative AI has already swept our existing digital universe. Now, game developers are asking if AI can help build wholly new worlds too.

Using AI to produce coherent video footage of gameplay isn’t new. In 2024, Google introduced GameNGen, which according to the company, is the first game engine powered by neural networks. The AI recreated the classic video game Doom without peeking into the game’s original code. Rather, it repeatedly played the game and eventually learned how hundreds of millions of small decisions changed the game’s outcome. The result is an AI-based copy that can be played for up to 20 seconds with all its original functionality intact.

Modern video games are a lot harder for an AI to tackle.

Most games are now in 3D, and each has its own alluring world with a set of physical rules. A game’s maps, non-player characters, and other designs can change with version updates. But how a character moves inside that virtual world—that is, how a player knows when to jump, slide, shoot, or tuck behind a barrier—stays the same.

To be fair, glitches are fun to hack, but only if they’re far and few in between. If the physics within the game—however improbable in real-life—constantly breaks, the player easily loses their sense of immersion.

Consistency is just part of the gaming experience a designer needs to think about. To better understand how AI could potentially help, the team first interviewed 27 video game designers from indie studios and industry behemoths across multiple continents.

Several themes emerged. One was about the need to create new and different scenarios that still maintain the framework of the game. For example, new ideas need to fit not only with the game’s physics—objects shouldn’t pass through walls—but also its style and vibe so they mesh with the general narrative of the game.

“Generative AI still has kind of a limited amount of context,” one designer said. “This means it’s difficult for an AI to consider the entire experience…and following specific rules and mechanics [inside the game].”

Others emphasized the need for iteration, revisiting a design until it feels right. This means that an assistant AI should be flexible enough to easily adopt designer-proposed changes over and over. Divergent paths were also a top priority, in that if a player chooses a different action, those actions will each have different and meaningful consequences.

WHAM

Based on this feedback, the team created their World and Human Action Model (WHAM)—nicknamed Muse. Each part of the AI was carefully crafted to accommodate the game designers’ needs. Its backbone algorithm is similar to the one powering ChatGPT and has previously been used to model gaming worlds.

The team then fed Muse on human gameplay data gathered from Bleeding Edge, a four versus four collaborative shooter game in 3D. With videos from the battles and controller input, the AI learned how to navigate the game from the equivalent of seven years of continuous play.

When given a prompt, Muse could generate new scenarios in the game and their associated controller inputs. The characters and objects obeyed the game’s physical laws and branched out in new explorations that matched the game’s atmosphere. Newly added objects or players stayed consistent through multiple scenes.

“What’s groundbreaking about Muse is its detailed understanding of the 3D game world, including game physics and how the game reacts to players’ controller actions,” wrote Kardar.

Not everyone is convinced the AI could help with gaming design. Muse requires tons of training data, which most smaller studios don’t have.

“Microsoft spent seven years collecting data and training these models to demonstrate that you can actually do it,” Georgios Yannakakis at the University of Malta told New Scientist, “But would an actual game studio afford [to do] this?”

Skepticism aside, the team is exploring ways to further explore the technology. One is to “clone” classic games that can no longer be played on current hardware. According to Kardar, the team wants to one day revive nostalgic games.

“Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people. Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, the technology could also be adapted for use in the physical world. For example, because Muse “sees” environments, it could potentially help designers reconfigure a kitchen or play with building layouts by exploring different scenarios.

“From the perspective of computer science research, it’s pretty amazing, and the future applications of this are likely to be transformative for creators,” wrote Peter Lee, president of Microsoft Research.

The post This Microsoft AI Studied 7 Years of Video-Game Play. Now It Dreams Up Whole New Game Scenarios. appeared first on SingularityHub.

Pokud máte macOS, ani si toho nevšimnete. Jestli však k jedněm souborům přistupujete i z jiných operačních systémů, pak jste možná narazili na to, že se v nich objevují skryté soubory .DS_Store . Ty všude možně trousí právě applovský systém a jeho správce souborů Finder. DS_Store, plným názvem ...

Initially called Microsoft 365 Copilot when it launched in November 2023, “Copilot for Microsoft 365” brings a range of generative AI (genAI) features to office productivity apps such as Word, Outlook, Teams and Excel. 

In a blog post announcing the tool, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described it as “the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing …. With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”

At launch, Microsoft explained that the Copilot system consists of three elements: Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel and Teams, where users interact with the AI assistant; Microsoft Graph, which includes files, documents, and data across the Microsoft 365 environment; and the OpenAI models that process user prompts, such as the ChatGPT-4 large language model and DALL-E 3 model for image generation.

With the tool, Microsoft aims to create a “more usable, functional assistant” for work, J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester’s Future of Work team, told Computerworld. “The concept is that you’re the ‘pilot,’ but the Copilot is there to take on tasks that can make life a lot easier.” 

Copilot for Microsoft 365 pricing Microsoft 365 Copilot’s pricing structure is straightforward, but there are a couple of key things to keep in mind:

• Base Price: Microsoft 365 Copilot costs $30 per user per month when paid annually. The monthly payment option at $31.50 per user per month. 
• Prerequisite:: To use Copilot for Microsoft 365, you need an existing Microsoft 365 subscription (like Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, or E5) before you can add Copilot. Copilot is essentially an add-on to your existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

Copilot for M365 is “part of a larger movement of generative AI that will clearly change the way that we do computing,” he said, noting how the technology has already been applied to a variety of job functions — from writing content to creating code — since ChatGPT-3.5 launched in late 2022.

As its most recent fiscal year-ending earnings call, Nadella described Copilot for Microsoft 365 as, “a daily habit for knowledge workers.” Copilot customers increased more than 60% quarter-over-quarter, according to Nadella. “The number of customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter-over-quarter, including Capital Group, Disney, Dow, Kyndryl, Novartis,” Nadella said. “And EY alone will deploy Copilot to 150,000 of its employees.

A recent Forrester report  predicted that 6.9 million US knowledge workers — around 8% of the total — were expected be using Copilot for M365 by the end of last year.

Even priced at $30 per user per month, there’s potential to deliver considerable value to businesses, assuming the Copilot delivers on its promise over time. Said Gownder: “The key issue is, ‘Does it actually save that time?’ because it’s hard to measure and we don’t really know for sure. But even conservative time savings estimates are pretty generous.”

The Copilot for M365 is billed as providing employees with access to genAI without the security concerns of consumer genAI tools; Microsoft says its models aren’t trained on customer data, for instance. But deploying the tool represents significant challenges, said Avivah Litan, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner.

There are two primary business risks, she said: the potential for the Copilot to “hallucinate” and provide inaccurate information to users, and the capability for the Copilot’s language models to access huge swathes of corporate data that’s not locked down properly.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 features: How do you use it?

Copilot interactions within apps can take a variety of forms, depending on the application. In many cases, users will interact with it via the chat interface available in a sidebar. Copilot functionality is also built more directly into some apps, such as a pop-up in a Word document or Outlook email, for instance. 

Here’s how the Copilot works in some M365 apps.

In a Word doc, it can suggest improvements to existing text or let users create a first draft from scratch. To generate a draft, a user can ask Copilot in natural language to create text based on a prompt, and can upload additional files and sources of information to guide the AI assistant. Once created, the user can edit the document, adjust the style, or ask the Copilot to redo the whole thing. A Copilot sidebar provides space for more interactions with the bot, which also suggests prompts to improve the draft, such as adding images or an FAQ section, or summarize the text. 

During a Teams video call, the Copilot provides a recap of what’s been discussed so far, with a brief overview of conversation points in real time. It’s also possible to ask the AI assistant for feedback on people’s views during a call, or what questions remain unresolved. Those unable to attend a particular meeting can send the AI assistant in their place to provide a summary of what they missed and action items they need to follow up on. 

Copilotcan help a Word user draft a proposal from meeting notes. 

Microsoft

In PowerPoint, Copilot can automatically turn a Word document into draft slides that can then be adapted via natural language in the Copilot sidebar. It can also generate suggested speaker notes to go with the slides and add more images. 

These are just some examples. Other apps that feature Copilot integration include Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, and Whiteboard.

The other way to interact with Copilot is via a separate chat interface that’s accessible via Teams. Here, the Copilot works as a search tool that surfaces information from a range of sources, including documents, calendars, emails, and chats. For instance, an employee could ask for an update on a project, and get a summary of relevant team communications and documents already created, with links to sources.

Microsoft will extend Copilot’s reach into other apps workers use via “plugins” — essentially third-party app integrations. These will allow the assistant to tap into data held in apps from other software vendors including Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Mural. Fifty such plugins are available, with “thousands” more expected eventually, Microsoft said. 

Is Copilot worth $30 per user, per month?

The main Microsoft 365 Copilot is available for enterprise customers on E3, E5, F1 and F3 plans, as well as Office E1, E3, E5, and Apps for Enterprise. It’s also available for smaller business customers on the following plans: Businesses Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, and Apps for Business.

In each case, the Copilot for Microsoft 365 costs an additional $30 per user each month.

It’s a significant extra expense given that M365 subscriptions start at $6 per user each month for Business Basic and go up to $55 per user each month for E5. Part of this due to the cost of the high computing costs of the Copilot incurred by Microsoft, said Raúl Castañón, senior research analyst at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“Microsoft is likely looking to avoid the challenges faced with GitHub Copilot, which was made generally available in mid-2022 for $10/month and, despite surpassing more than 1.5 million users, reportedly remains unprofitable,” said Castañón.

In addition to the core Copilot for M365, job role-specific Copilots are available as paid add-ons. Sales and service Copilots each cost an additional $20 per user each month, while a finance Copilot is currently in preview.

The pricing strategy reflects Microsoft’s confidence in the impact that genAI will have on workforce productivity.

Per Forrester’s calculations in the “Build Your Business Case for Microsoft 365 Copilot” report, an employee earning $120,000 annually — roughly $57 per hour — might save four hours a month on various productivity tasks; those four hours would be worth around $230 a month. In that scenario, it would make sense to invest in Copilot for an employee earning even half that amount, and that’s leaving aside less tangible benefits around employee experience when automating mundane tasks.

There are, as Forrester points out, other costs to consider beyond licensing — employee training, for instance, as employees learn the new technology. According Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) report on Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, the average monthly training cost per seat in the first year comes out to a $42.80!. Year 2 cost is $24.40 and year 3 $20.81 per seat per month. Gartner also predicts that enterprise security spending will increase in the region of 10% to 15% in the next couple of years as a result of efforts to secure genAI tools (not just M365 Copilot).

Businesses are likely to take a cautious approach to deploying the Microsoft tool, at least at first. Microsoft expects revenue related to M365 Copilot to “grow gradually over time,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call. On the same call, Nadella noted that Copilot will be subject to the usual “enterprise cycle times in terms of adoption and ramp.”

Even if the pace of adoption is gradual, there appears to be plenty of interest in deploying it. Forrester expects around a third of M365 customers in the US to invest in Copilot in the first year. Companies that do so will provide licenses to around 40% of employees during this period, the firm estimated.

(Note: while not actually branded as Copilot, Microsoft also makes some genAI features available in Teams Premium. This includes AI-generated notes, AI-generated tasks and live translations in video calls, all of which are powered by ChatGPT AI models. For businesses that are mostly interested in AI assistant features for meetings, this offers a cheaper option than a full Copilot for M365 subscription.) 

What are Microsoft’s other Copilots?

Microsoft’s Copilot is embedded in a wide array of products. Beyond the M365 suite, there are Copilots for Dynamics, Power BI, GitHub, and Microsoft’s security suite.

[ Related: GitHub Copilot: Everything you need to know |  GitHub Copilot learns new tricks ]

And then there are Copilots aimed primarily at consumer, rather than business, users. 

Microsoft launched Copilot Pro in January 2024, a $20 a month subscription that provides individuals with similar functionality to the Copilot for M365. Copilot Pro customers gain access to Copilot chatbot and genAI image creation, as well as AI assistant features in free web versions of apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (though not Teams). Those with Microsoft 365 Personal and family subscriptions can also access the Copilot in desktop apps. 

There’s also a free version of the Copilot with access to chatbot functionality only.

The Copilot chat interface is accessible in several ways by both paid and free users. There’s a dedicated web page, a mobile app, and a chatbot built into the Windows operating system, Edge browser, and Bing search engine.

How are early customers using Copilot?

There are two basic ways users will interact with Copilot. It can be accessed directly within a particular app — to create PowerPoint slides, for example, or an email draft — or via a natural language chatbot accessible in Teams, known as Microsoft 365 Chat. 

Interactions within apps can take a variety of forms, depending on the application. When Copilot is invoked in a Word document, for example, it can suggest improvements to existing text, or even create a first draft.

To generate a draft, a user can ask Copilot in natural language to create text based on a particular source of information or from a combination of sources. One example: creating a draft proposal based on meeting notes from OneNote and a product road map from another Word doc. Once a draft is created, the user can edit it, adjust the style, or ask the AI tool to redo the whole document. A Copilot sidebar provides space for more interactions with the bot, which also suggests prompts to improve the draft, such as adding images or an FAQ section. 

During a Teams video call, a participant can request a recap of what’s been discussed so far, with Copilot providing a brief overview of conversation points in real time via the Copilot sidebar. It’s also possible to ask the AI assistant for feedback on people’s views during the call, or what questions remain unresolved. Those unable to attend a particular meeting can send the AI assistant in their place to provide a summary of what they missed and action items they need to follow up on. 

In PowerPoint, Copilot can automatically turn a Word document into draft slides that can then be adapted via natural language in the Copilot sidebar. Copilot can also generate suggested speaker notes to go with the slides and add more images. 

The other way to interact with Copilot is via Microsoft 365 Chat, which is accessible as a chatbot with Teams. Here, Microsoft 365 Chat works as a search tool that surfaces information from a range of sources, including documents, calendars, emails, and chats. For instance, an employee could ask for an update on a project, and get a summary of relevant team communications and documents already created, with links to sources. Microsoft will extend Copilot’s reach into other apps workers use via “plugins” — essentially third-party app integrations. These will allow the assistant to tap into data held in apps from other software vendors including Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Mural. Fifty such plugins are available, with “thousands” more expected eventually, Microsoft said. 

Copilot can synthesize information about a project from different sources.

How are early customers using Copilot?

Prior to launch, many businesses accessed Copilot for M365 as part of a paid early access program (EAP); it began with a small number of participants before growing to several hundred customers, including Chevron, Goodyear, and General Motors. 

One of those involved in the EAP was marketing firm Dentsu, which began deploying 300 licenses to tech staff and then employees across its business lines globally. The most popular use case so far is summarization of information generated in M365 apps — a Teams call being one example.

“Summarization is definitely the most common use case we see right out of the box, because it’s an easy prompt: you don’t really have to do any prompt engineering…, it’s suggested by Copilot,” Kate Slade, director of emerging technology enablement at Dentsu, said.

Staffers would also access M365 Chat functions to prepare for meetings, for instance, with the ability to quickly pull information from different sources. This could mean finding information from a project several years ago “without having to hunt through a folder maze,” said Slade.

The feedback from workers at Dentsu has been overwhelmingly positive, said Slade, with a waiting list now in place for those who want to use the AI tool.

“It’s reducing the time that they spend on [tasks] and giving them back time to be more creative, more strategic, or just be a human and connect peer to peer in Teams meetings,” she said. “That’s been one of the biggest impacts that we’ve seen…, just helping make time for the higher-level cognitive tasks that people have to do.”

Use cases have varied between different roles. Denstu’s graphic designers would get less value from using Copilot in PowerPoint, for example: “They’re going to create really visually stunning pieces themselves and not really be satisfied with that out-of-the-box capability,” said Slade. “But those same creatives might get a lot of benefits from Copilot in Excel and being able to use natural language to say, ‘Hey, I need to do some analysis on this table,’ or ‘What are key trends from this data?’ or ‘I want to add a column that does this or that.’”

How does Copilot compare with other productivity and collaboration genAI tools?

Most vendors in the productivity and collaboration software market have added genAI to their offerings at this point.

Google, Microsoft’s main competitor in the productivity software arena, launched DuetAI for Workspace in 2023, and rebranded it to Gemini with two versions availabe: Enterprise ($30 per user each month) and   Gemini Business ($20 user each month). Google’s AI assistant can summarize Gmail conversations, draft texts, and generate images in Workspace apps such as Docs, Sheets,and Slides. 

Slack, the collaboration software firm owned by Salesforce and a rival to Microsoft Teams, launched its Slack AI feature in February. Other firms that compete with elements of the Microsoft 365 portfolio, such as Zoom, Box, Coda, and Cisco, have also touted genAI plans. 

Meanwhile, Apple announced that it will build generative AI features into its range of productivity tools.

Then there are the AI specific tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as Claude, Perplexity AI, Jasper AI and others, that provide also provide text generation and document summarization features. 

Copilot has some advantages over rivals. One is Microsoft’s dominant position in the productivity and collaboration software market, said Castañón. “The key advantage the Microsoft 365 Copilot will have is that — like other previous initiatives such as Teams — it has a ‘ready-made’ opportunity with Microsoft’s collaboration and productivity portfolio and its extensive global footprint,” he said. 

Microsoft’s close partnership with OpenAI (Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in the company on several occasions since 2019 and has a large non-controlling share of the business), likely helped it build generative AI across its applications at faster rate than rivals. 

“Its investment in OpenAI has already had an impact, allowing it to accelerate the use of generative AI/LLMs in its products, jumping ahead of Google Cloud and other competitors,” said Castañón. 

What are the genAI risks for businesses? ‘Hallucinations’ and data protection

Along with the potential benefits of genAI tools like the Copilot for M365, businesses should consider risks. These include the hallucinations large language models (LLMs) are prone to, where incorrect information is provided to employees.

“Copilot is generative AI — it definitely can hallucinate,” said Slade, citing the example of one employee who asked the Copilot to provide a summary of pro bono work completed that month to add to their timecard and send to their manager. A detailed two-page summary document was created without issue; however, the address of all meetings was given as “123 Main Street, City, USA” — an error that’s easily noticed, but an indication of the care required by users when relying on Copilot.

The occurrence of hallucinations can be reduced by improving prompts, but Dentsu staff have been advised to treat outputs from the genAI assistant with caution. “The more context you can give it generally, the closer you’re going to get to a final output,” said Slade. “But it’s never going to replace the need for human review and fact check.

“As much as you can, level-set expectations and communicate to your first users that this is still an evolving technology. It’s a first draft, it’s not a final draft — it’s going to hallucinate and mess up sometimes.”

Tools that filter Copilot outputs are emerging that could help here, said Litan, but this is likely to remain a key challenge for businesses for the forseeable future.

Another risk relates to one of the major strengths of the Copilot: its ability to sift through files and data across a company’s M365 environment using natural language inputs.

While Copilot is only able to access files according to permissions granted to individual employees, the reality is that businesses often fail to adequately label sensitive documents. This means individual employees might suddenly realize they are able to ask Copilot to provide details on payroll or customer information if it hasn’t been locked down with the right permissions.

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In many cases, the most important data, around payroll, for instance, will have strict permissions in place. A greater challenge lies in securing unstructured data, with sensitive information finding its way into a wide range of documents created by individual employees — a store manager planning payroll in an Excel spreadsheet before updating a central system, for example. This is similar to a situation that the CTO of an unnamed US restaurant chain encountered during the EAP, said Litan. 

“There’s a lot of personal data that’s kept on spreadsheets belonging to individual managers,” said Litan. “There’s also a lot of intellectual property that’s kept on Word documents in SharePoint or Teams or OneDrive.”

“You don’t realize how much you have access to in the average company,” said Matt Radolec, vice president for incident response and cloud operations at Varonis. “An assumption you could have is that people generally lock this stuff down: they do not. Things are generally open.”

Another consideration is that employees often end up storing files relating to their personal lives on work laptops.

“Employees use their desktops for personal work, too — most of them don’t have separate laptops,” said Litan. “So you’re going to have to give employees time to get rid of all their personal data. And sometimes you can’t, they can’t just take it off the system that easily because they’re locked down — you can’t put USB drives in [to corporate devices, in some cases].

“So it’s just a lot of processes companies have to go through. I’m on calls with clients every day on the risk. This one really hits them.”

Getting data governance in order is a process that could take businesses more than a year to get sorted, said Litan. “There are no shortcuts. You’ve got to go through the entire organization and set up the permissions properly,” she said.

Radolec said that very few M365 customers have yet adequately addressed the risks around data access within their organization. “I think a lot of them are just planning to do the blocking and tackling after they get started,” he said. “We’ll see to what degree of effectiveness that is [after launch]. We’re right around the corner from seeing how well people will fare with it.”

More on Copilot for Microsoft 365:

• Copilot for Microsoft 365 deep dive: Productivity at a steep price
• Microsoft Copilot Pro review: Office joins the genAI revolution
• Microsoft extends Copilot access to individuals and SMBs

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Apple is removing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature for iCloud from the United Kingdom with immediate effect following government demands for backdoor access to encrypted user data. The development was first reported by Bloomberg. ADP for iCloud is an optional setting that ensures that users' trusted devices retain sole access to the encryption keys used to unlock data stored in its

Apple is removing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature for iCloud from the United Kingdom with immediate effect following government demands for backdoor access to encrypted user data. The development was first reported by Bloomberg. ADP for iCloud is an optional setting that ensures that users' trusted devices retain sole access to the encryption keys used to unlock data stored in its Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]