For the first time in my life, I’ve found myself in a classroom these days teaching Word and Excel.
No, it’s not a midlife crisis. My path as a facilitator on generative AI has inevitably led me to Copilot.
Even though Microsoft has been offering it for several months now, in my opinion it’s still far from being a fully mature 1.0 version. Too slow and unstable to meet the widespread expectation (or illusion?) of an “office-ready” AI, where you just press a button and immediately get impeccable results.
However, I believe the path is set. Copilot is the leading candidate to become mass-market AI, thanks to three key factors:
- it’s integrated into the most commonly used software
- Microsoft has a strong presence in the Italian and European markets
- it leverages OpenAI’s advanced technology.
But the scenario I envision for the future is very different from the current one.
I foresee personalized AI dashboards and assistants, perhaps created autonomously by users themselves with no-code tools, aligned with corporate IT ecosystems. Not the faded copy of ChatGPT that Copilot is right now.
Looking at products still in their infancy like Copilot Studio and Power Automate, it seems this is also Microsoft’s vision, but it will take time.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, recently compared Copilot to Clippy, the infamous paperclip-shaped assistant that plagued Office in the early 2000s. A provocation that also has a commercial motive: Benioff needs to promote his Agentforce. This further reinforces the idea that we’re still at the dawn of a major transformation.
Artificial intelligence for personal productivity is an incoming revolution: let’s prepare for big changes. In the meantime, I asked Midjourney to imagine a future Clippy.
