Copilots and CoBots | Issue 19

The Unfolding:ai weekly newsletter about AI for Business Professionals

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This weeks content for everyone

  • Microsoft CoPilots

This weeks content for free subscribers

  • Context and Inference (memory and brain power)

  • CoPilots and CoBots,

This weeks content for premium subscribers

  • Making GPTS Public.

  • Where Next?

  • Some Midjourney Fun

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Microsoft Copilots

Whilst all the excitement around openAI and its board, governance, lack of board, new board, still lack of governance. The news from Microsoft’s ignite conference slipped past.

Compared to 2022, which had a theme around predominantly low-code. This year 40% (approx) had AI in the subject. Their CEO (Satya Nadella) described Microsoft as ‘The Co-Pilot Company’

Some early stats on microsoft co-pilots in enterprise

To use Office 365 copilots, you need an E3 Subscription plan with a commitment of 300 users at $30 per user per month. This price is set to test the market and handle demand.

One of the areas for almost every enterprise gain is around meeting summaries, transcriptions, and conversion to actions. We have been taking this approach using otter.ai for a number of months, where we have observed similar (upto 30% time savings) across the teams.

The full report is below, but be aware of bias. Microsoft sees co-pilots and AI consultancy as a multi trillion dollar sales opportunity.

But we are a google user..

Google’s answer ‘bard’ in workspace is taking a slightly different approach to Microsoft. Where as microsoft are ‘applying AI’ into every product, Google are building it first into the underlying frameworks, into drive & search. This is perhaps from a long term perspective more thoughtful. However the underlying LLM which Google uses is much worse than openAI (which underpins Microsoft’s). It’s expected that this will improve next year when Google Gemini is released.

Is it really gpt4 under the hood?

Nope, by playing around with the co-pilots, it looks to me like there is a mixture of gpt3.5 and gpt4. It’s not clear when you get which. Certainly if you compare prose creation in word vs native GPT4 there is a clear difference. This is almost certainly a mixture of compute cost saving and functionality management behind the scenes.

What about ‘GPTs’ or Agents

The production of bots, agents, gpt’s (why that name!) which is the latest technology from openAI, is not obviously in the co-pilots. Carrying on from 2022, microsoft has significant lead on ‘Power Virtual Agents’, and has released ‘co-pilot studio’. This is a far more feature rich version of the solution provided by openAI, it combines the logic flows (like zapier, or make) to allow the agent to perform multiple steps, tasks and integrate into other systems.

Having previously used low-code to generate multi-million £ in industry, low-code and agents to point solve business problems is very powerful. Just beware hidden license costs when you consider scaleout.

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