In late October, Microsoft announced that it was starting to test the integration of its Copilot AI assistant into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions — consumer versions of Office apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote — in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.
The move coincided with subscription price increases in these markets.
As reported at the time by Ed Bott of ZDNet, this type of regional strategy is often used by Microsoft to gather feedback before rolling out new pricing and product strategies more broadly around the world.
The company’s testing of the default Copilot AI integration into the consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions suggested that its prior approach of offering the AI features via an optional $20/month Copilot Pro service wasn’t working out as expected, reported Tom Warren of The Verge at the time.
With the integration, Copilot can generate drafts, outlines, rewrites and summaries in Microsoft Word; analyze data in Microsoft Excel; create visuals and speaker notes in Microsoft PowerPoint; among many other features.
But Microsoft may want to revisit its approach again, based on the initial feedback from some users who’ve experienced the Copilot integration in the Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions.
A report by the Wall Street Journal last week followed up on the issue, including comments from a user in Australia who was compelled by the Copilot integration to switch from Microsoft Word to Google Docs. Copilot “was very keen to be used, and this was irritating to me as a user,” Alistair Fleming told the newspaper.
The WSJ story cited other users who compared Copilot to Microsoft’s rollout of “Clippy” in the 1990s, likening the new AI to the old Office assistant — which was often more of an interruption than a help.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made a similar comparison between Clippy and the version of Microsoft 365 Copilot for business users, in interviews with GeekWire and other publications.
To be clear, Microsoft is seeing plenty of success with its Copilot AI rollouts across its cloud, developer, and other platforms, from its OpenAI partnership and its own AI initiatives. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the company’s most recent earnings call that its overall AI revenue is on pace to exceed $10 billion annually.
On a related note, Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna, one of the executives leading its Copilot initiatives for businesses, last week disputed Benioff’s recent claim that the Redmond company’s employees aren’t using Copilot themselves.
“I love his passion. But it’s just not true,” Lamanna wrote, linking to a series of case studies published by Microsoft with examples of Copilot usage inside the company. “I use Copilot. My team uses Copilot. And pretty much all of Microsoft has been actively using Copilot for two years. That’s 100s of thousands of us!”
Microsoft’s communications chief Frank X. Shaw fact-checked Benioff’s claims.
Setting aside the competitive jabs from Salesforce, the situation shows the challenge of introducing new technologies into existing products at Microsoft’s scale. The huge base of Microsoft 365 users is one of its biggest assets as it rolls out AI to businesses and consumers, but alienating them is also one of its biggest risks.
https://ift.tt/D3qNErl December 30, 2024 at 06:32PM GeekWire
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