Comment by PeterHolzwarth

> 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.

> 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.

Also, RAG will cost a lot more compute.

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.

Remember Cortana? Microsoft was eroding consumer trust in these chat-style "agent" tools before we even had a name for them.

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.

Ads make money because people click on them.

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.