Actual Ad Link: https://www.instagram.com/microsoft365/p/C7j8ipnxIiI/?img_index=1
Awesome article about the ad which sums it up nicely:
https://justinpot.com/watch-me-be-in-three-meetings-at-once/
Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings.
Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job.
Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings.
So Copilot is going to make me a transcript of a meeting that could have just been an email to begin with? Brilliant.
No, it’s going to make assumptions about what was important in that meeting and try to bullet point it. And that won’t actually work well enough to count on, and if it misses something, you won’t know.
I also can’t imagine many managers will be happy about this, because the whole point of calling a meeting is that they want your attention. After a manager ends up lecturing a meeting full of bots a couple times, and someone misses something that was brought up in a meeting they ostensibly attended, they’ll complain, and IT will be instructed to block it.
And I can’t exactly blame them, honestly. I’m not fan of unnecessary meetings but if I’m managing a team of people, I’d want to know I’m engaging with them, not Copilot.
And as an employee, I’m not about to let an AI be caught doing any part of my job, because that’s just giving management “ideas”
It’s going to be a bunch of AIs sitting around spewing bullshit since all the humans sent their AIs to the meeting.
Reminds me of this scene in Real Genius: