Locked in a battle over the integration of their respective machine learning assistants into their office suites, Microsoft and Google have announced a number of very attractive, and very similar automation features — email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentation programs, etc.,.
Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT has resulted in Copilot — as it did after it bought Github in 2018 — that works as a personal assistant with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, and applies generative AI to anything from writing documents or creating spreadsheets to developing presentations, transcribing meetings, etc. The video below convincingly demonstrates applications, albeit in a rather idealized way: performance will depend on each case, fluency and the respective tools, as well as on the ability to formulate those tasks through the appropriate prompts at each moment:
Google’s Workspace includes AI features for Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides or Calendar, and can carry write emails and texts, create a presentation, a spreadsheet, etc. Again, the demonstration video makes it all look extremely easy.
Watching these videos (it’s worth the effort), and regardless of whether we use Google or Microsoft tools, anybody would think that our generative AI assistants can now do all our work for us, changing our lives for ever. Anyone with a minimum of work experience and common sense will take this with a pinch of salt. Or as the Americans usually say as a precaution, “your mileage may vary”. Are you really going to show up at a meeting with a presentation or send someone a document entirely prepared by your generative assistant? Good luck with that. The third or fourth time you do so, someone will notice, and it might occur to your employer that if your work really could be done that way, why not replace you with a generative AI assistant? Do Google and Microsoft really think that’s work? Maybe that tech industry worker was right: nobody in the sector actually works…
But as an initial understanding of the potential of integrating generative AIs into the tools we use on a day-to-day basis, it’s interesting to see not only the extent to which both companies assume we’ll be able to use them to carry out complex tasks, as well as how similar their products are. In the meantime, let’s wait to see what happens when people really put them to use.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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