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Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

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Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#141

Post by wkat4242 »

samch wrote: post #45
browningstreet wrote: post #37

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.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#142

Post by wkat4242 »

bix6 wrote: post #7

I had a subscription for a year and it was absolutely worthless. Has anyone found any single worthwhile use case?

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.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#143

Post by wkat4242 »

dangus wrote: post #21

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.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#144

Post by wkat4242 »

Havoc wrote: post #40
dangus wrote: post #21

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.

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).

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#145

Post by wkat4242 »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #59

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.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#146

Post by wkat4242 »

a_bonobo wrote: post #8

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 lov…

> 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'.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#147

Post by JdeBP »

wkat4242 wrote: post #129
ryukoposting wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And clippy before that. It's a running joke since the early 2000's with all the memes. And even this hilarious music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo

Clippy has done a complete volte face when it comes to memes, in 2025. This is because of the right-to-repair people.

"Clippy never wanted to harvest you, turn you into the product, and clandestinely copy your stuff into some language model. Clippy only wanted to help."

* https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Clippy_Campaign

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#148

Post by wkat4242 »

fluidcruft wrote: post #114
dangus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 but…

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 tha…

I totally understand their point of view considering the sensitivity of your data.

In power platform it's very easy to make an oopsie and expose huge volumes of data on some unprotected object storage or an external platform. We have a big review process on such developments, we certainly don't want users to cowboy that on their own.

It's basically the old "Thumbdrive left in a taxi" these days. With the huge difference that these things now lead to huge fines under GDPR etc.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#149

Post by mmcnl »

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).

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#150

Post by fluidcruft »

wkat4242 wrote: post #148
fluidcruft wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I totally understand their point of view considering the sensitivity of your data. In power platform it's very easy to make an oopsie and expose huge volumes of data on some unprotected object storage or an external platform. We have a big review process on such developments, we certainly don't want users to cowboy that on their own. It's basically the old "Thumbdrive left in a taxi" these days. With the huge differe…

Right. But it's there and we can start building things is my point
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