Think for many people the free component is simply enough.
Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
41–50 of 173 posts
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#42I 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…
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…
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.
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#43I 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.
> 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?
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#44I 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…
if the generic public start associating all AI with the useless "Copilot" then Microsoft will succeed in killing off the entire AI industry
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#45I 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.
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#46I 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…
> 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
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#47I 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…
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…
> 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).
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#48Unsurprising. 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.
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.
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#49Microsoft'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...
Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure
#50I 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