I still think there's a potential niche for 365 Copilot in its boringness.
At work (not a tech company), there's an ongoing, slow, 365 rollout. The people who participate in the rollout are not technical in any way, but they all love it because they're not regular ChatGPT/Claude users, either. In a way, the restricted feature-set of Copilot compared to ChatGPT helps them, they're overwhelmed enough by Copilot.
IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises, clearly defined data and risk policies.
I think if they drill down into the boring, slow, predictable, they will capture the market of risk-averse non-tech companies, not people.
I've tried building agents using 365 for our internal documents and they're OK for basic stuff (what's in what document where - max 20 documents only!!), but langchain/RAG/whatever are a million times more powerful.
I am not even sure what is 365 Copilot. But Copilot is included as part of our Office / Teams package, and literally every one is using it in my organisation. And it is perhaps one of the biggest organisations in the country as well.
> IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises,
Umm no, it's the opposite. It's super high-risk right now for us. Microsoft is constantly shifting stuff around leading us to have to constantly change our processes, documentation etc. Often with zero heads-up and often defaults to on. Some incidents:
- They suddenly started a "free promotion" with Sharepoint agents. We don't want to offer that to our users but it just popped in one day and the admin setting defaulted to on so people were already using it before we turned it off. This was a big deal for us.
- Constant rebranding of their product names leading to confusion among users and zero-value documentation and process rewrites for us. Also constantly fiddling with the URLs is sooo annoying.
- Constant changes in features leading to impact to our DPIA. For example copilot chat didn't have history at first. So no data was kept (they also promise they don't store any for training). Suddenly they added that one day, so we had to redo our entire DPIA because it now does suddenly store personal info which it didn't before so a whole lot of overhead comes into scope (data lifecycle, privacy regulations, security, data loss prevention etc). This is exhausting and there is no way to delay these features until we have approved them. Also, it caused our DPIA team to be highly critical after this incident. Because of course: If they did this before, what guarantees that they won't change something worse next month?
- Limited granularity of access controls - a lot is very high-scope on/off style controls. Meaning that if we want to block something we often block unintended features as well.
A lot of these things are definitely 'big jumps' and 'surprises'.
Plenty places seem to treat Microsoft et al as a "force of nature". Employee makes a mistake: terrible. Small vendor breaks something, whoever advocated for them is in hot water. Microsoft fucks something up, same category as if HQ gets leveled by an earthquake: sad, but nobody could've prevented it.
What about the secondary effects of AI? I mean, now large-scale data gathering on your company simply by recording glasses + having AI transcribe the whole thing is possible. Hell, with modern cell phones you could do it live.
And the first product that lets a cell phone control keyboard and mouse sending camera to ChatGPT, having ChatGPT do all the work is not far off either.
Presumably both of these would violate your ... policies something awful. I should say will violate all your policies, because we both know this is going to happen.
You have no way of preventing both of these from occurring with IT policy.
We use it in finance for the reasons above. Microsoft actually just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be. I’ve used it to help write scripts in VBA and it’s really good for my use cases. Before GPT 5 it was worse than useless.
> just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be
Only marginally in general office use. Maybe is has better coding capabilities, but there is no way its the same sized model used on ChatGPT or via. OpenAI API.
Boring is a short term thing - I think it's most useful to think about things like copilot AI for all windows users as a longer term initiative. Right now, I think MS is just letting people get used to a basic free tier. They will observe how Windows users put it to use, see to what degree of involvement people have with it, and evolve the product (and its pricing) from there.
Is it raking in cash right now? No. But that's just now. MS can and I feel is thinking longer term. Everyone is on a "Crash Dammit" Economist front-cover mode right, trying to will a crash into existence. Microsoft can think longer term about it - after all, we see younger generations diving in to make use of related technologies. Older demographics will, and are, slowly finding out what to make of the tech that is free with an OS install, and MS will see what kind of business to make out of that over time.
The problem with this broader topic is that people are restricting the time frame of the conversation to Right Now. MS doesn't need to worry about that so much, in the grand scheme of things.
Oh that's true. If AI is a bubble, and if it implodes, then MS might be the only AI place left standing if it can get its product into all of the non-tech companies in the world.
I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier.
That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users.
I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.
The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything.
It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
Is it the IT department’s fault for not enabling something? I don’t know, but does that matter?
If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.
I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.
If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.
Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
We make heavy utilization of Copilot Studio lite and full. Lite has quick access to SharePoint/Teams data. Full has access to _any_ data that has a Power Platform connector, REST API, MCP server, or Copilot [Graph] connector, all of which you can build or buy yourself. SAP, SQL, Databricks, you name it, Copilot Studio full can consume it.
It sounds like you don't have an M365 Copilot license but are instead using Copilot 365 Chat (the naming is horrid, absolutely).
The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.
"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything."
I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.
Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.
The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.
That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?
That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.
Then you have Copilot Chat, that's the free version. It indeed can't interact with company data unless you manually upload it.
If you have a tab selector "Work / Web" at the top, you do have the paid version. Select Work to make it able to find stuff in sharepoint, look at your calendar and emails etc.
If you don't have this selector you only have the free version.
> If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.
Upselling of course. Finding stuff in the gigantic trash heap that is Sharepoint is its main added value for me.
What's worse then copilot on task bar is the copilot key on keyboard. This key doesn't even have its own scan code, instead it send something like Win+Shift+F23.
I get what you - a HN user - mean. But for the broader planet of Windows users, it just becomes this thing you click to get some general info from on whatever general topic, question, or need comes to mind. I think it is rapidly becoming quit banal - a thing people think of as just being another part of using their computing device. No fanfare; no fireworks; no hand-wringing over rights or privacy or training data: just a thing you click on to ask questions to as part of their normal day.
Just like using bing by default even if it's outright terrible (to the point of randomly suggesting the suicide hotline if you use it as a calculator), I make it do dumb bullshit for more Microsoft Rewards Points. It pays for xbox game pass for myself and several friends any time we've needed it
I think you'd be surprised at the number of average users who don't think of it as useless. As I've mentioned on comments elsewhere in this thread, remember what we here were talking about a couple years ago: LLM's killing websearch.
That little copilot icon will sit there unused and unloved by people who will, much like with online ads, screen it out whilst they do what they actually want to do.
For some, but what about the others? The reddit mentality of "everyone hates LLM AI tools" is just a very loud segment. What about everyone else? What about a random Joe who asks it questions to find some path through figuring out why their computer is acting all wonky? What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem? That is, treating it as an OS-native improvement over a search engine.
The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.
> I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, late
Yes that is inevitable. But it's exactly why I won't use it. It feels like a scam, the typical drug dealer model. Get them hooked on free stuff, and then milk their addiction.
I almost only use local LLMs now. They're not as good, no. But at least they are mine and nobody will raise the price suddenly. Some pro AI models I just use with API, for the rare instance where local just doesn't cut it. It costs me a few bucks per month that way, not 20 or 30.
Yes. We work a lot with Microsoft and they are very hardball on "adoption". They are always pushing us to send weekly "did you know..."? emails, yammer campaigns, seminars blablah. Very American also, this does not work in Europe where people are much less 'team players' and much more critical of advertising.
I personally thinks this just pisses people off. It certainly does me. I don't want to be told what to do, especially by some vendor. If I don't want to use it I don't want to be herded into using it. If they try anyway I will just push back and start hating on it just out of annoyance.
However this has always been Microsoft's adoption model. Very pushy. Unlike for example Apple's where they make things look, feel and work really good so people actually want to use it.
ChatGPT also don't make a common mistake that Microsoft does, they don't squeeze on the compute too much. Microsoft does which makes it worse than ChatGPT even though it's literally the same engine. That keeps the GPT brand valuable.
8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.
Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels.
I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan
In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.
Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
I don't know, does it matter? What I mean is that the product only just, in the grand scheme of things, got rolled out. MS isn't under some instant pressure to make loads of cash off this new feature. Year by year, people will just become used to having a tool, part of their OS, that they can ask questions to to get some general information on whatever topic.
It's easy to pick an arbitrary date and point out the lack of profit. But why don't we pick a date a year from now? Or three years. Or five years.
I think over time users will come to assume that their computing device has, as part of the many tools on it, a tool that they can ask about stuff and get general answers.
Is it profitable right exactly now? No. But I suspect it will become completely commonplace in a few years, and not even worthy of note or comment for the average user.
MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
> MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it.
I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.
I’m pretty sure those figures aren’t global, since very few people at Microsoft have access to that kind of data outside their area of direct accountability.
Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.
Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really.
They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.
Who else can offer that?
For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
Even office isn't that good. It's basically been static in features for 25 years (until copilot came around). It took them a decade to surpass the 65535-row problem in excel. Microsoft get really lazy when they have a virtual monopoly. We saw the same with Internet Explorer. They just left it to whither away until it was too late.
And yeah Teams, I can't stand it. Outlook too, in particular the "new" one that doesn't do half the things the old one could do and requires all your email to be in MS cloud even if you have another provider.
The crazy thing is how the premium M365 Copilot has only gotten worse as the free Copilot Chat has been rolled out. When the AI assistant from Microsoft can't create a calendar entry in Outlook, what are they even doing with this tech at MS?
You either get A) hallucinations of "I created the calendar entry now" (it didn't) or B) an .ics file you need to download, then import to Outlook manually.
The difference is that Copilot will have access to your calendar _and_ associated resources (messages, meeting transcripts, etc.) and be able to relate them to files you have access to. It’s become quite useful in telling me which of the action points for a specific meeting are being handled by whom _now_ and where the resulting documents are even if the meeting was weeks ago.
In true Microsoft spirit, they completely tanked the name. This was launched just shortly after GitHub Copilot was the hottest trend. Everyone associates Copilot with GitHub and think it's a developer-product, not an office-product.
Changing the name of the entire Office suite into Copilot didn't make things better. Now you have no idea of knowing what you are really getting. Is Office Copilot? Is Copilot Office? Is Office AI? Is AI Copilot? Is time real or just a concept? Who knows? The strongest product in Microsoft's portfolio with an established name is now gone.
Give it a year and it will be renamed again to Microsoft Teams 365 Copilot Enterprise with Office subsystem for Windows Business. Just to cover all bases.
Hmm, my first thought was, 1.81% of 440M enterprise customers after two years sure sounds bad, but I had no reference frame to compare to. That's 8 million users, which is negligible compared to ChatGPT numbers, but it is also an enterprise tool, not a consumer product. So I thought it may help to recontextualize this number to the realm of adoption of enterprise tools, maybe even specifically Microsoft enterprise tools.
So I thought, maybe the Copilot GTM is probably following the same strategy as another enterprise tool that was pushed onto its existing customer base: Teams. So I went looking for data on the rate of Teams adoption.
Interestingly, the sources I found suggest that Teams also had 8 million users in 2019, two years after release!
Note, this was before Teams got a massive boost in early 2020 during the Covid push to remote. And for all the hate MS Teams gets, we see where it is today.
So maybe this is just following the normal curve of adoption of Microsoft products. Maybe it's even doing better than Teams, considering Copilot is not free, as Teams was at launch.
1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently.
They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
I agree. Making deals with laptop manufacturers to put their trademark on keyboards is an unhealthy-for-society abuse of their market power and should be treated as such in every jurisdiction that they trade in.
However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently. It shows up in the PowerToys keyboard remapper tool as an F23 key. (Yes, there are more than 12 F key codes! I believe there is 24 in Windows.)
Other OSes will not even be able to say things like "Press your Copilot key to open FEDORA SEARCH" or whatever without being cease'n'desisted to high heaven.
> However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently.
That's probably because you're not using it as a modifier so the OP's complaint of the automatic key-up event doesn't impact you (it's not necessary to have a keep-pressed state in this type of use).
It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.
I am not sure how terrible that number is. They probably have many users with only very limited activity or users that simply do not need AI for the workflows they are doing. Intuitively, I would expect the number of users that actually have some use for AI to be in single digits.
Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence.
Put the LLM on answering (or at least triaging) your support tickets faster.
That's strange, my experience with GitHub and GH Copilot have been great, unlike with other Microsoft products that have their billing integrated in the Microsoft account or MS365, or Entra or whatever they call the "company accounts" today.
Plus for 10$ a month (~8.50 EUR last month) I get more-than-enough-for-me access to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI models from my code editor. I wouldn't pay double for Claude Code or Cursor, so I feel like it's a good enough deal.
> Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's
Copilot doesn't run on Microsoft's own LLMs, they're all third party. ChatGPT in office copilot, in github you can choose various other ones too.
Microsoft is really just a reseller there.
Personally I think Claude Code (with Opus in particular) is far better. Unfortunately they are very aware of this and thus it is eyewateringly expensive.
Instead of fixing critical bugs in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and rolling out actual useful features, Copilot (with limited business context) is being prioritised and poorly shoved into every aspect of the product.
In my limited experience using copilot at work, i think it has been a game changer for non-technical computer users. Many of my coworkers and i use it as the first attempt at research especially now that it is connected to SharePoint within my company and provides references to the documents it is pulling from. Saves hours for things like compiling international regulations or standards documentation. Additionally, it has super charged (maybe too strong of a word) document search within our environment... Sharepoint search is the worst.
The recent Copilot search that was rolled out to replace the traditional M365 search is actually pretty good. When you use that search UI specifically.
If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward.
And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.
Augmenting/replacing search seems to be one of the truly useful benefits of Copilot. Not sure if that's because it's good or because Teams/Sharepoint search is so bad.
Since when has Microsoft had a hit product before version 3? It's simply not in their corporate DNA.
Besides, I just recently saw a review of the newest Copilot for Excel by a serious spreadsheet jockey, and he was truly blown away. Basically, it knows everything Excel can do, how to do it, and it now truly understands numbers as numbers and when to use formulas, etc. etc. Basically, it went from smart automation to full on AI.
If Microsoft doesn't fall for short term thinking, the product will eventually succeed.
Could have been leveraging the new Agen Mode in Excel preview released as a Labs feature. Built on Claude and not GPT-5, this is what the MS teams behind apps like Excel, PowerPoint etc. are now doubling down on.
Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...
Yes I regularly use it for things like “I remember communicating about subject X in 2023, please find all references to that topic since that date”, and it will search and summarize all Teams, Outlook and OneDrive datapoints that I have access to in the organization and neatly summarizing it and linking directly to said datapoints.
I also use it to play around with data and roughly graph it to understand trends without having to roll out a Jupyter notebook.
Use it like chat got ... There is no useful integration with any ms office app. Excel copilot can't edit cells, ms teams copilot cannot look meaningfully through your messages... Never tried it for other office apps...
My partner uses it. Her use cases are often things like "go to all these URLs and collect some information from each one" or "collect all instances of X from these documents"
Yes. Worthwhile in terms of 'worth using it', not 'worth 30$ a month' though.
What I like:
- Meeting catch-up (I don't use meeting minutes much)
- Finding stuff in my messy uncategorised mailbox
- Finding stuff in sharepoint
Things that were a heavy disappointment:
- Everything in excel
- Rewriting text (it's always too noticeable that it's AI, it should be able to learn and match my style)
- Powerpoint presentation generation. It could not modify for a long time and even now it's just not useful
Tbh I only use it a few times per month where it's actually useful. For other things I've tried but it needs so much explaining to get it to do exactly what I want that it's more efficient to just do it myself.
The most pathetic aspect of Microsoft’s Copilot rollout is not Copilot’s poor performance & integration with SharePoint, but that Microsoft actually renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows.
You’re a company whose main product has a brand recognition that ranks right up there with Coca-Cola and Apple, and you rename it after a new product that is a pile of hot garbage. Absolutely mind-boggling.
It’s garbage. My company has it, presumably by default. You ask it a simple question like “find the company holidays document” and it just can’t do it. It’s somehow not hooked up to the basic sharepoint document storage for the company.
Then you probably don't have the paid version. The free version ("Copilot 365 *chat*") does not have the ability to search in any company information even in M365.
If you see a work and web tab at the top, click work. Then it should be able to. If you don't see this, your company is not paying and it just won't work.
I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.
Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.
Thanks for the tip. That function sounds pretty useful. I've been meaning to automate categorising manual survey responses in an excel file. And trying to do it through copilot studio (at my work we don't have access to a simple API option like ChatGPT offers). But if I could put a copilot prompt in every row that would be amazing.
> terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called
Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets?
Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't?
I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan.
I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?
Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory.
If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.
Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite.
Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.
Well to be fair, Entra is still backed by AD behind the scenes as the database. But yeah, I’m also not sure a directory server is still required to store domain objects; tree structures are pretty much solved in all kinds of databases and don’t warrant LDAP anymore anyway.
I suspect in this case, enterprise adoption of chat-based AI is downstream from consumer adoption. Like many things, trendsetting/taste-making happens on the consumer side and then comes to enterprise. ChatGPT was first to the consumer consciousness, while Claude made its mark as most tasteful... Copilot just didn't register.
It’s an annual commitment by default. Admins might enable it if it was monthly. However, you can’t risk one license locking you into an M365 contract. Most admins can’t and shouldn’t make that decision. Failure on Microsoft’s part for the annual requirement. Otherwise, most would toggle the license on and give it a try.
Yeah what we did for a while was just have a bunch of licenses and rotate them through the org, getting people's feedback after a month or so.
Of course all the people asking for these were already very interested in AI so they are not a very representative group. We did take that into account.
This is a strange perspective. Indeed, no one is paying for Copilot, but no one is paying for AI in general. No one is making any profit on AI. This is not a Copilot problem, but a characteristic of the AI market in general. Only the ones who are selling shovels are making money (nVidia).
It costs something ridiculous like £30 per user per month. Imagine trying to justify that for 10,000 employees. It’s obscenely high for something so mediocre.
Wow, perhaps more people feel like me: avoidance of all Microsoft products, unless forced to use them. I just don't trust Microsoft, I mean at all, and the last thing I wanna do is use copilot because it's Microsoft.
It's being shoved down our throats at work, which is really annoying. Beyond being able to search for documents, there is little utility beyond what a local <1B param LLM gives me.
Even the "productivity" suggestions in teams are ridiculous - one of them is "roast me by my calendar"...wtf is that? How is that related to productivity at all?
Sam Altman gave Nadella the most watered down version of ChatGPT he possibly could. The AI embedded into every Microsoft product I've tried has felt like at least 2 - 3 generations old than what you can get directly from OpenAI. You think it would be much better, having native access to tools and data. Nope. I could find no evidence of any of that.
I am just a typical Office user in a small company environment. Copilot buttons started popping in various Office applications. When I asked Copilot in Outlook to summarise mails from one of my contacts it happily searched the Internet and said it found nothing. AAA experience.
I doubt the bleed stops there. Hell, I stopped my outlook subscription and am getting an Apple next after they shoehorned that absolute garbage into my email.
I agree. Copilot 365 has been really underwhelming to me. It was also released way too early, half the features in excel didn't even work. That will have left a bad impression on the earliest of adopters. Which are usually the biggest advocates.
But also, 30$ per month is a lot. For around 300 users you're already talking 100k per year! It's also many times the price that companies pay for their existing M365 licenses including office apps, hosting etc. So it means a completely rebudgeting of their entire IT operations. That kind of money leads to highly critical evaluations that reach the very top. They don't do much volume discount because it's all compute heavy.
Another thing I've been seeing is that users who get Copilot often don't use it at all. From the users buying it, I've heard that in our org only 5-10% actively use it. Others might tap it once a month or use only one or two specific features like the teams meeting summaries. Only the most serious AI bros use it for everything.
I'm in that group myself too. I use it for asking questions about meetings (like "i was distracted for a bit, what did I miss") and for finding stuff in SharePoint which always ends up being a huge mess.
I don't use the email rewriting because Copilot can't match my style which makes it very obvious that I've used it which automatically leads people to devalue the message ("he didn't even bother to write it"). Something the end of this article also alludes to when it refers to an all hands email from Nadella being made with copilot.
Also the pushiness of Microsoft is exhausting. Since that ignite 2022 it's's constant Copilot this Copilot that. For me that has the opposite effect. I just end up rolling my eyes when they rebrand entire product groups and keep rolling their product names. It makes it feel like they have no idea what they are doing and just scrambling to keep up.
The dumbing down is also a problem. When 'researcher' was released first it would spend half an hour on my queries making really great and lengthy well-researched results. It was really powerful and comprehensive. Now all I get is a couple of minutes. It's already lost its value. I'm sure they do this to tune the compute costs but it makes the value prop even worse.
I don't know where this is going but our company is not buying much of it for now. And tbh I can see why.
I still think there's a potential niche for 365 Copilot in its boringness.
At work (not a tech company), there's an ongoing, slow, 365 rollout. The people who participate in the rollout are not technical in any way, but they all love it because they're not regular ChatGPT/Claude users, either. In a way, the restricted feature-set of Copilot compared to ChatGPT helps them, they're overwhelmed enough by Copilot. IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises, clearly defined data and risk policies.
I think if they drill down into the boring, slow, predictable, they will capture the market of risk-averse non-tech companies, not people.
I've tried building agents using 365 for our internal documents and they're OK for basic stuff (what's in what document where - max 20 documents only!!), but langchain/RAG/whatever are a million times more powerful.
I am not even sure what is 365 Copilot. But Copilot is included as part of our Office / Teams package, and literally every one is using it in my organisation. And it is perhaps one of the biggest organisations in the country as well.
> IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises,
Umm no, it's the opposite. It's super high-risk right now for us. Microsoft is constantly shifting stuff around leading us to have to constantly change our processes, documentation etc. Often with zero heads-up and often defaults to on. Some incidents:
- They suddenly started a "free promotion" with Sharepoint agents. We don't want to offer that to our users but it just popped in one day and the admin setting defaulted to on so people were already using it before we turned it off. This was a big deal for us.
- Constant rebranding of their product names leading to confusion among users and zero-value documentation and process rewrites for us. Also constantly fiddling with the URLs is sooo annoying.
- Constant changes in features leading to impact to our DPIA. For example copilot chat didn't have history at first. So no data was kept (they also promise they don't store any for training). Suddenly they added that one day, so we had to redo our entire DPIA because it now does suddenly store personal info which it didn't before so a whole lot of overhead comes into scope (data lifecycle, privacy regulations, security, data loss prevention etc). This is exhausting and there is no way to delay these features until we have approved them. Also, it caused our DPIA team to be highly critical after this incident. Because of course: If they did this before, what guarantees that they won't change something worse next month?
- Limited granularity of access controls - a lot is very high-scope on/off style controls. Meaning that if we want to block something we often block unintended features as well.
A lot of these things are definitely 'big jumps' and 'surprises'.
Plenty places seem to treat Microsoft et al as a "force of nature". Employee makes a mistake: terrible. Small vendor breaks something, whoever advocated for them is in hot water. Microsoft fucks something up, same category as if HQ gets leveled by an earthquake: sad, but nobody could've prevented it.
What about the secondary effects of AI? I mean, now large-scale data gathering on your company simply by recording glasses + having AI transcribe the whole thing is possible. Hell, with modern cell phones you could do it live.
And the first product that lets a cell phone control keyboard and mouse sending camera to ChatGPT, having ChatGPT do all the work is not far off either.
Presumably both of these would violate your ... policies something awful. I should say will violate all your policies, because we both know this is going to happen.
You have no way of preventing both of these from occurring with IT policy.
1 reply →
We use it in finance for the reasons above. Microsoft actually just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be. I’ve used it to help write scripts in VBA and it’s really good for my use cases. Before GPT 5 it was worse than useless.
> just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be
Only marginally in general office use. Maybe is has better coding capabilities, but there is no way its the same sized model used on ChatGPT or via. OpenAI API.
2 replies →
Boring doesn’t bring in the billions and billions in stock though
Boring is a short term thing - I think it's most useful to think about things like copilot AI for all windows users as a longer term initiative. Right now, I think MS is just letting people get used to a basic free tier. They will observe how Windows users put it to use, see to what degree of involvement people have with it, and evolve the product (and its pricing) from there.
Is it raking in cash right now? No. But that's just now. MS can and I feel is thinking longer term. Everyone is on a "Crash Dammit" Economist front-cover mode right, trying to will a crash into existence. Microsoft can think longer term about it - after all, we see younger generations diving in to make use of related technologies. Older demographics will, and are, slowly finding out what to make of the tech that is free with an OS install, and MS will see what kind of business to make out of that over time.
The problem with this broader topic is that people are restricting the time frame of the conversation to Right Now. MS doesn't need to worry about that so much, in the grand scheme of things.
1 reply →
Oh that's true. If AI is a bubble, and if it implodes, then MS might be the only AI place left standing if it can get its product into all of the non-tech companies in the world.
3 replies →
I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier.
That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users.
I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.
The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything.
It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
Is it the IT department’s fault for not enabling something? I don’t know, but does that matter?
If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.
I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.
If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.
Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace
It's kind of amazing.
5 replies →
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
We make heavy utilization of Copilot Studio lite and full. Lite has quick access to SharePoint/Teams data. Full has access to _any_ data that has a Power Platform connector, REST API, MCP server, or Copilot [Graph] connector, all of which you can build or buy yourself. SAP, SQL, Databricks, you name it, Copilot Studio full can consume it.
It sounds like you don't have an M365 Copilot license but are instead using Copilot 365 Chat (the naming is horrid, absolutely).
3 replies →
The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.
1 reply →
"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything."
I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.
Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.
The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.
That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?
That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.
8 replies →
Then you have Copilot Chat, that's the free version. It indeed can't interact with company data unless you manually upload it.
If you have a tab selector "Work / Web" at the top, you do have the paid version. Select Work to make it able to find stuff in sharepoint, look at your calendar and emails etc.
If you don't have this selector you only have the free version.
> If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.
Upselling of course. Finding stuff in the gigantic trash heap that is Sharepoint is its main added value for me.
Also, RAG will cost a lot more compute.
> That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable.
I'm using Win 11 and I didn't even notice Copilot on my task bar until you mentioned it...
I think that is a wakeup call for me to finally flash my pc to linux
What's worse then copilot on task bar is the copilot key on keyboard. This key doesn't even have its own scan code, instead it send something like Win+Shift+F23.
1 reply →
I get what you - a HN user - mean. But for the broader planet of Windows users, it just becomes this thing you click to get some general info from on whatever general topic, question, or need comes to mind. I think it is rapidly becoming quit banal - a thing people think of as just being another part of using their computing device. No fanfare; no fireworks; no hand-wringing over rights or privacy or training data: just a thing you click on to ask questions to as part of their normal day.
3 replies →
if the generic public start associating all AI with the useless "Copilot" then Microsoft will succeed in killing off the entire AI industry
Just like using bing by default even if it's outright terrible (to the point of randomly suggesting the suicide hotline if you use it as a calculator), I make it do dumb bullshit for more Microsoft Rewards Points. It pays for xbox game pass for myself and several friends any time we've needed it
I think you'd be surprised at the number of average users who don't think of it as useless. As I've mentioned on comments elsewhere in this thread, remember what we here were talking about a couple years ago: LLM's killing websearch.
1 reply →
Remember Cortana? Microsoft was eroding consumer trust in these chat-style "agent" tools before we even had a name for them.
2 replies →
That little copilot icon will sit there unused and unloved by people who will, much like with online ads, screen it out whilst they do what they actually want to do.
For some, but what about the others? The reddit mentality of "everyone hates LLM AI tools" is just a very loud segment. What about everyone else? What about a random Joe who asks it questions to find some path through figuring out why their computer is acting all wonky? What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem? That is, treating it as an OS-native improvement over a search engine.
The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.
4 replies →
Ads make money because people click on them.
1 reply →
> I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, late
Yes that is inevitable. But it's exactly why I won't use it. It feels like a scam, the typical drug dealer model. Get them hooked on free stuff, and then milk their addiction.
I almost only use local LLMs now. They're not as good, no. But at least they are mine and nobody will raise the price suddenly. Some pro AI models I just use with API, for the rare instance where local just doesn't cut it. It costs me a few bucks per month that way, not 20 or 30.
> That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable.
A thing that gets in the way is not usable, is annoying.
Yes. We work a lot with Microsoft and they are very hardball on "adoption". They are always pushing us to send weekly "did you know..."? emails, yammer campaigns, seminars blablah. Very American also, this does not work in Europe where people are much less 'team players' and much more critical of advertising.
I personally thinks this just pisses people off. It certainly does me. I don't want to be told what to do, especially by some vendor. If I don't want to use it I don't want to be herded into using it. If they try anyway I will just push back and start hating on it just out of annoyance.
However this has always been Microsoft's adoption model. Very pushy. Unlike for example Apple's where they make things look, feel and work really good so people actually want to use it.
If that's the case, it's a very complacent strategy compared to ChatGPT, which people yearn for and automatically turn to.
It also disregards a big chunk of people not using Windows, where the little Copilot icon is not built in.
ChatGPT also don't make a common mistake that Microsoft does, they don't squeeze on the compute too much. Microsoft does which makes it worse than ChatGPT even though it's literally the same engine. That keeps the GPT brand valuable.
8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.
Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels.
I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan
In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.
Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
8 replies →
I don't know, does it matter? What I mean is that the product only just, in the grand scheme of things, got rolled out. MS isn't under some instant pressure to make loads of cash off this new feature. Year by year, people will just become used to having a tool, part of their OS, that they can ask questions to to get some general information on whatever topic.
It's easy to pick an arbitrary date and point out the lack of profit. But why don't we pick a date a year from now? Or three years. Or five years.
I think over time users will come to assume that their computing device has, as part of the many tools on it, a tool that they can ask about stuff and get general answers.
Is it profitable right exactly now? No. But I suspect it will become completely commonplace in a few years, and not even worthy of note or comment for the average user.
MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
> MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it.
I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.
I’m pretty sure those figures aren’t global, since very few people at Microsoft have access to that kind of data outside their area of direct accountability.
Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.
Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better.
I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?
Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really.
They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.
Who else can offer that?
For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
1 reply →
Even office isn't that good. It's basically been static in features for 25 years (until copilot came around). It took them a decade to surpass the 65535-row problem in excel. Microsoft get really lazy when they have a virtual monopoly. We saw the same with Internet Explorer. They just left it to whither away until it was too late.
And yeah Teams, I can't stand it. Outlook too, in particular the "new" one that doesn't do half the things the old one could do and requires all your email to be in MS cloud even if you have another provider.
2 replies →
well also it's all tied together. no shuffling contracts for slack, email, etc.
I mean, it worked for Oracle right?
The crazy thing is how the premium M365 Copilot has only gotten worse as the free Copilot Chat has been rolled out. When the AI assistant from Microsoft can't create a calendar entry in Outlook, what are they even doing with this tech at MS?
You either get A) hallucinations of "I created the calendar entry now" (it didn't) or B) an .ics file you need to download, then import to Outlook manually.
More tests about this scenario in here: https://www.perspectives.plus/p/assistants-without-hands
The Meeting Management MCP server (aka Outlook calendar) can do that easily with pretty much no configuration required on the end user side.
A year is a long time in the tech industry, let alone LLM (or Copilot) history.
The difference is that Copilot will have access to your calendar _and_ associated resources (messages, meeting transcripts, etc.) and be able to relate them to files you have access to. It’s become quite useful in telling me which of the action points for a specific meeting are being handled by whom _now_ and where the resulting documents are even if the meeting was weeks ago.
In true Microsoft spirit, they completely tanked the name. This was launched just shortly after GitHub Copilot was the hottest trend. Everyone associates Copilot with GitHub and think it's a developer-product, not an office-product.
Changing the name of the entire Office suite into Copilot didn't make things better. Now you have no idea of knowing what you are really getting. Is Office Copilot? Is Copilot Office? Is Office AI? Is AI Copilot? Is time real or just a concept? Who knows? The strongest product in Microsoft's portfolio with an established name is now gone.
Give it a year and it will be renamed again to Microsoft Teams 365 Copilot Enterprise with Office subsystem for Windows Business. Just to cover all bases.
MSN, .NET, Windows Live, Live... Microsoft can't help themselves when it comes to going all-in on new branding.
I can't believe that asking copilot about a Windows issue gives me worse answers than asking chatGPT.
I wonder if the system prompt was written by a committee
Hmm, my first thought was, 1.81% of 440M enterprise customers after two years sure sounds bad, but I had no reference frame to compare to. That's 8 million users, which is negligible compared to ChatGPT numbers, but it is also an enterprise tool, not a consumer product. So I thought it may help to recontextualize this number to the realm of adoption of enterprise tools, maybe even specifically Microsoft enterprise tools.
So I thought, maybe the Copilot GTM is probably following the same strategy as another enterprise tool that was pushed onto its existing customer base: Teams. So I went looking for data on the rate of Teams adoption.
Interestingly, the sources I found suggest that Teams also had 8 million users in 2019, two years after release!
https://www.demandsage.com/microsoft-teams-statistics/
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statisti...
Note, this was before Teams got a massive boost in early 2020 during the Covid push to remote. And for all the hate MS Teams gets, we see where it is today.
So maybe this is just following the normal curve of adoption of Microsoft products. Maybe it's even doing better than Teams, considering Copilot is not free, as Teams was at launch.
1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently.
They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
I agree. Making deals with laptop manufacturers to put their trademark on keyboards is an unhealthy-for-society abuse of their market power and should be treated as such in every jurisdiction that they trade in.
However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently. It shows up in the PowerToys keyboard remapper tool as an F23 key. (Yes, there are more than 12 F key codes! I believe there is 24 in Windows.)
Other OSes will not even be able to say things like "Press your Copilot key to open FEDORA SEARCH" or whatever without being cease'n'desisted to high heaven.
Terrible.
> However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently.
That's probably because you're not using it as a modifier so the OP's complaint of the automatic key-up event doesn't impact you (it's not necessary to have a keep-pressed state in this type of use).
3 replies →
Remapping right control works fine for me on win11
It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.
4 replies →
I did not know that - what an unpleasant choice.
I am not sure how terrible that number is. They probably have many users with only very limited activity or users that simply do not need AI for the workflows they are doing. Intuitively, I would expect the number of users that actually have some use for AI to be in single digits.
Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence.
Put the LLM on answering (or at least triaging) your support tickets faster.
That's strange, my experience with GitHub and GH Copilot have been great, unlike with other Microsoft products that have their billing integrated in the Microsoft account or MS365, or Entra or whatever they call the "company accounts" today.
Plus for 10$ a month (~8.50 EUR last month) I get more-than-enough-for-me access to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI models from my code editor. I wouldn't pay double for Claude Code or Cursor, so I feel like it's a good enough deal.
> Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's
Copilot doesn't run on Microsoft's own LLMs, they're all third party. ChatGPT in office copilot, in github you can choose various other ones too.
Microsoft is really just a reseller there.
Personally I think Claude Code (with Opus in particular) is far better. Unfortunately they are very aware of this and thus it is eyewateringly expensive.
I never understood how 365 Copilot's chat llm was so much worse than the free offerings from OpenAI at the time.
Copilot is often wordy, wrong, and seems like it can't do a lot of the same things I can accomplish without logging in on ChatGPT
Instead of fixing critical bugs in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and rolling out actual useful features, Copilot (with limited business context) is being prioritised and poorly shoved into every aspect of the product.
In my limited experience using copilot at work, i think it has been a game changer for non-technical computer users. Many of my coworkers and i use it as the first attempt at research especially now that it is connected to SharePoint within my company and provides references to the documents it is pulling from. Saves hours for things like compiling international regulations or standards documentation. Additionally, it has super charged (maybe too strong of a word) document search within our environment... Sharepoint search is the worst.
The recent Copilot search that was rolled out to replace the traditional M365 search is actually pretty good. When you use that search UI specifically.
If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward.
And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.
Depends a lot on the context of a chat, since it will prioritize the app you’re in, etc.
Augmenting/replacing search seems to be one of the truly useful benefits of Copilot. Not sure if that's because it's good or because Teams/Sharepoint search is so bad.
Since when has Microsoft had a hit product before version 3? It's simply not in their corporate DNA.
Besides, I just recently saw a review of the newest Copilot for Excel by a serious spreadsheet jockey, and he was truly blown away. Basically, it knows everything Excel can do, how to do it, and it now truly understands numbers as numbers and when to use formulas, etc. etc. Basically, it went from smart automation to full on AI.
If Microsoft doesn't fall for short term thinking, the product will eventually succeed.
Could have been leveraging the new Agen Mode in Excel preview released as a Labs feature. Built on Claude and not GPT-5, this is what the MS teams behind apps like Excel, PowerPoint etc. are now doubling down on.
Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...
Who wants an LLM in their office suite? Of course this is a failure.
I had a subscription for a year and it was absolutely worthless. Has anyone found any single worthwhile use case?
Yes I regularly use it for things like “I remember communicating about subject X in 2023, please find all references to that topic since that date”, and it will search and summarize all Teams, Outlook and OneDrive datapoints that I have access to in the organization and neatly summarizing it and linking directly to said datapoints.
I also use it to play around with data and roughly graph it to understand trends without having to roll out a Jupyter notebook.
I find it quite useful.
Use it like chat got ... There is no useful integration with any ms office app. Excel copilot can't edit cells, ms teams copilot cannot look meaningfully through your messages... Never tried it for other office apps...
My partner uses it. Her use cases are often things like "go to all these URLs and collect some information from each one" or "collect all instances of X from these documents"
Yes. Worthwhile in terms of 'worth using it', not 'worth 30$ a month' though.
What I like:
- Meeting catch-up (I don't use meeting minutes much)
- Finding stuff in my messy uncategorised mailbox
- Finding stuff in sharepoint
Things that were a heavy disappointment:
- Everything in excel
- Rewriting text (it's always too noticeable that it's AI, it should be able to learn and match my style)
- Powerpoint presentation generation. It could not modify for a long time and even now it's just not useful
Tbh I only use it a few times per month where it's actually useful. For other things I've tried but it needs so much explaining to get it to do exactly what I want that it's more efficient to just do it myself.
The most pathetic aspect of Microsoft’s Copilot rollout is not Copilot’s poor performance & integration with SharePoint, but that Microsoft actually renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows.
You’re a company whose main product has a brand recognition that ranks right up there with Coca-Cola and Apple, and you rename it after a new product that is a pile of hot garbage. Absolutely mind-boggling.
It’s garbage. My company has it, presumably by default. You ask it a simple question like “find the company holidays document” and it just can’t do it. It’s somehow not hooked up to the basic sharepoint document storage for the company.
Traditional search works fine.
Then you probably don't have the paid version. The free version ("Copilot 365 *chat*") does not have the ability to search in any company information even in M365.
If you see a work and web tab at the top, click work. Then it should be able to. If you don't see this, your company is not paying and it just won't work.
Implementation issue. Ours is hooked up and it’s really good at finding stuff on sharepoint, emails, chat etc
Sharepoint is automatically integrated. So that should always work on a paid M365 copilot.
But only for paid users. Free users can't have access (and also there is zero custom integration on the free version).
I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.
Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.
Thanks for the tip. That function sounds pretty useful. I've been meaning to automate categorising manual survey responses in an excel file. And trying to do it through copilot studio (at my work we don't have access to a simple API option like ChatGPT offers). But if I could put a copilot prompt in every row that would be amazing.
> terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called
Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets?
Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't?
I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan.
I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?
I am doing exactly this. In stealth, launching soon
1 reply →
Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory.
If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.
Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite.
Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.
Windows Server 2025 included many AD changes that were non-cloud related. They're not actively killing it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
2 replies →
Well to be fair, Entra is still backed by AD behind the scenes as the database. But yeah, I’m also not sure a directory server is still required to store domain objects; tree structures are pretty much solved in all kinds of databases and don’t warrant LDAP anymore anyway.
I suspect in this case, enterprise adoption of chat-based AI is downstream from consumer adoption. Like many things, trendsetting/taste-making happens on the consumer side and then comes to enterprise. ChatGPT was first to the consumer consciousness, while Claude made its mark as most tasteful... Copilot just didn't register.
My company’s security and legal are super paranoid and cannot be convinced to let us use it. So already it’s a dead deal
Realists, not paranoid. The threats are very real, and even very probable at this stage.
It’s an annual commitment by default. Admins might enable it if it was monthly. However, you can’t risk one license locking you into an M365 contract. Most admins can’t and shouldn’t make that decision. Failure on Microsoft’s part for the annual requirement. Otherwise, most would toggle the license on and give it a try.
Yeah what we did for a while was just have a bunch of licenses and rotate them through the org, getting people's feedback after a month or so.
Of course all the people asking for these were already very interested in AI so they are not a very representative group. We did take that into account.
This is a strange perspective. Indeed, no one is paying for Copilot, but no one is paying for AI in general. No one is making any profit on AI. This is not a Copilot problem, but a characteristic of the AI market in general. Only the ones who are selling shovels are making money (nVidia).
Microsoft copilot is literally just Cortana. Which they were forced to remove by users.
I just want to know how I get rid of Copilot. It’s just annoying.
It costs something ridiculous like £30 per user per month. Imagine trying to justify that for 10,000 employees. It’s obscenely high for something so mediocre.
Anyone who's actually used Copilot won't be surprised by this. It's garbage, even the free tiers of other LLMs are better in comparison.
I bought it for 2 months. Was ok. Dumped it and pay for $30 chat gpt and $100 Claude. Covers pretty much nonstop usage between them.
Great, funny image for the piece.
Wow, perhaps more people feel like me: avoidance of all Microsoft products, unless forced to use them. I just don't trust Microsoft, I mean at all, and the last thing I wanna do is use copilot because it's Microsoft.
Full license of copilot is the best user experience. Love it.
It's being shoved down our throats at work, which is really annoying. Beyond being able to search for documents, there is little utility beyond what a local <1B param LLM gives me.
Even the "productivity" suggestions in teams are ridiculous - one of them is "roast me by my calendar"...wtf is that? How is that related to productivity at all?
Think for many people the free component is simply enough.
Yet they get big American companies to pay for this.
something, something, clown world
Sam Altman gave Nadella the most watered down version of ChatGPT he possibly could. The AI embedded into every Microsoft product I've tried has felt like at least 2 - 3 generations old than what you can get directly from OpenAI. You think it would be much better, having native access to tools and data. Nope. I could find no evidence of any of that.
I am just a typical Office user in a small company environment. Copilot buttons started popping in various Office applications. When I asked Copilot in Outlook to summarise mails from one of my contacts it happily searched the Internet and said it found nothing. AAA experience.
Isn't vscode copilot the biggest market share still?
I doubt the bleed stops there. Hell, I stopped my outlook subscription and am getting an Apple next after they shoehorned that absolute garbage into my email.
I agree. Copilot 365 has been really underwhelming to me. It was also released way too early, half the features in excel didn't even work. That will have left a bad impression on the earliest of adopters. Which are usually the biggest advocates.
But also, 30$ per month is a lot. For around 300 users you're already talking 100k per year! It's also many times the price that companies pay for their existing M365 licenses including office apps, hosting etc. So it means a completely rebudgeting of their entire IT operations. That kind of money leads to highly critical evaluations that reach the very top. They don't do much volume discount because it's all compute heavy.
Another thing I've been seeing is that users who get Copilot often don't use it at all. From the users buying it, I've heard that in our org only 5-10% actively use it. Others might tap it once a month or use only one or two specific features like the teams meeting summaries. Only the most serious AI bros use it for everything.
I'm in that group myself too. I use it for asking questions about meetings (like "i was distracted for a bit, what did I miss") and for finding stuff in SharePoint which always ends up being a huge mess.
I don't use the email rewriting because Copilot can't match my style which makes it very obvious that I've used it which automatically leads people to devalue the message ("he didn't even bother to write it"). Something the end of this article also alludes to when it refers to an all hands email from Nadella being made with copilot.
Also the pushiness of Microsoft is exhausting. Since that ignite 2022 it's's constant Copilot this Copilot that. For me that has the opposite effect. I just end up rolling my eyes when they rebrand entire product groups and keep rolling their product names. It makes it feel like they have no idea what they are doing and just scrambling to keep up.
The dumbing down is also a problem. When 'researcher' was released first it would spend half an hour on my queries making really great and lengthy well-researched results. It was really powerful and comprehensive. Now all I get is a couple of minutes. It's already lost its value. I'm sure they do this to tune the compute costs but it makes the value prop even worse.
I don't know where this is going but our company is not buying much of it for now. And tbh I can see why.
[dead]