Comment by dangus
11 days ago
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.
The part where it gave you access to a thread you were not a part of seems scary to me..
In this case your absence from the thread was probably an oversight, but in general there could be a very good reason for it
The only way I can reasonably interpret it is that it was a discussion on a Teams channel they had access to but weren't involved in.
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Isn't that just indexed search?
No.
Search is part of this, but that doesn’t necessarily work from an error message.
It doesn’t mean you get the relevant parts of the thread either.
It certainly doesn’t mean you get a populated meeting invite for a relevant team.
> 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).
If we have “Chat” it doesn’t even seem to have what I would describe as “quick” access. It seems to just do nothing.
Not a very compelling product in terms of tempting companies to buy a license.
You can get trial full licenses if you’re interested in it. Chat isn’t meant to be anything more than the consumer experience with some business data.
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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.
I assume my company isn’t paying specifically for copilot and what you’re saying is exactly true.
I’m just not sure why that makes any bit of sense as a product growth strategy.
Instead of trialing an amazing experience they’re just showing their customers that copilot sucks. But if you buy a license it’s awesome, we promise!
Why not actually give me something useful and then cut me off from access when I hit a usage cap? Then uncapping my usage is the upsell. Literally copy what OpenAI does.
"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.
I’m just conveying my experience. Whatever copilot is at my company’s Microsoft portal seems to do absolutely nothing and connect to nothing.
Even if this is my company not paying for the license, it seems like a pretty miserable way for Microsoft to try to tempt companies into buying one by delivering a completely useless “light” experience.
Everything you’re describing that’s wonderful about the Windows copilot button is the stuff I’m already doing on ChatGPT.com because that brand name came first.
I agree about this. It's very difficult to figure out. In fact my working theory is IT has banned it as much as they can (we get strange and difficult to interpret pronouncements about permission to use LLM).
Windows 11 in general pushes so much unwanted crap at us in ways that we can't control that it's reasonable to assume IT can't make the icons go away if they wanted to. And investing time building a workflow that disappears when IT has finally figured out how to nuke it (if that's the intent) isn't worth the risk.
For reference I work at a hospital so generally IT is extremely sensitive about potential breaches and leaks. In general the policy is we are allowed to use LLM. The organization is on Azure but I can't even find anyone in IT to tell me if we are even allowed to use Power platform (which is also in this weird state of letting you build things but they don't actually work). CoPilot is there ... ish. It's just not very powerful at all.
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I was listening to an NPR story yesterday about how fashion designers are now using “AI” to spot fashion trends. Aside from the fact that it is now unclear whether a journalist means “software” when they say “AI”, a recurring thought I had was that maybe lots of people are now using AI to make inconsequential decisions. One of the predictions they hyped in the story was that “yellow will be hot”. Ok, sure… but if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter. I can see that AI “helps” in this scenario to reduce decision fatigue, but you might have been just as well off flipping a coin. Even if you buy yourself an expensive coin, it’s a lot cheaper!
> LLM will replace web search.
This kills the crab. I mean, kills the Internet. And it's not clear what happens to the existing search advertising business in this scenario.
Google already killed the internet as we knew it. There's a reason engines like yagi have their own spider for "the small web" because google basically ignores everything but the big commercial clickbaity crap.
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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.