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Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

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Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#11

Post by hhh »

They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot.

I have been using Copilot for over half a year or something, and I haven't found it to be useful in Word, and it is rarely useful in Outlook. I don't use Excel a lot, so I get a lot of value out of the formulae generation stuff when I have to use Excel.

There are several meetings that I need information from, but don't need to attend. Culture has been to take the summary from a meeting and dump it into the chat after, and if it misses anything add it below it. Really nice for action items and things like that.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#12

Post by hhh »

natas wrote: post #6
Havoc wrote: post #4

I’d imagine the larger companies get discounts?

they usually give it for free, so they can report to markets that there's a strong adoption, then a year or so down the road, they start charging a little bit.

I don't believe this is the case with Copilot.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#13

Post by PreInternet01 »

> After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade

This, combined with the otherwise non-specificity of the article gives me pause.

Is AI bunk? Sure! Even the latest-and-greatest models can't explain how to programmatically create a DNS record in Azure using the latest C# SDK, how to create a searchable/sortable React data-table with a remote data source, or how to achieve world peace (just to cite 2/3 topics everyone utterly failed at the last month when I tried).

Is this article bunk? Yeah, most likely -- no exec in any pharma company in their right mind would admit failure after only six mere months, and without any lawsuits...

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#15

Post by d_watt »

I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck."

Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on?

But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's pretty damning it's so bad 2 years later.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#16

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rvnx wrote: post #14
1970-01-01 wrote: post #9

Office features haven't increased in value since Office 2000. It's been 99% bugfixes, 1% feature evolution since then.

The ribbon actually was a good idea (~2003 I think)

2007. 2003 was the last without that abomination.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#18

Post by voxic11 »

d_watt wrote: post #15

I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck." Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on? But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's p…

Wasn't that a specifically advertised copilot feature? Does copilot not actually support it? They are still claiming to support this it seems https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-new-pres...

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#19

Post by readthenotes1 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #9

Office features haven't increased in value since Office 2000. It's been 99% bugfixes, 1% feature evolution since then.

Yet what it does is really good. Goal seek in excel is fantastic (in the ~2003 version I have).

Being able to install 20 year old software on a new computer and have it work is pretty nice.

Of course, some people may think subscription fees and cloud storage are features, but to me they are bugs...

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#20

Post by taylodl »

d_watt wrote: post #15

I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck." Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on? But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's p…

All my documents - Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel - are all on OneDrive. Give me an NLP interface to query information from these sources. When providing the information, note the source where it came from. That's what I want!
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