A New Copilot in our Lives: Boon or Bane?
Everything in our lives comes with advantages and disadvantages. There is one thing in the world which is typically a boon for everyone associated with it. A copilot in an airplane. A copilot works in tandem with the pilot to fly us to our destination. Copilot ensures that the flying duties are well divided and core teamwork is at its display in the cockpit of the plane. This week, another copilot was introduced to the world with the intent of simplifying our lives. Microsoft introduced 365 Copilot leveraging the GPT4 rolled out by OpenAI. Let’s understand what Microsoft 365 Copilot is before contemplating how it can change our lives.
The Copilot is a processing engine which will have GPT 4 at its core to summarise long mails, build presentations and draft work documents with the intent of increasing the productivity of people and simplifying the lives. This comes at the back of ChatGPT’s revolution which is leading many people to rely on ChatGPT to get answers to their questions and have an easier time completing their tasks. This will use the chat functionality of ChatGPT which will take user instructions before performing tasks. While, this Co pilot is still a pilot being released to 20 enterprise customers, the intent is to build an ecosystem where Copilot becomes a service which no enterprise can decline just like Office 365 is ubiquitous in our lives.
The ongoing innovations in natural language processing comes at the back of ChatGPT and increased competition from rivals, Google, who are also working on pilots like BARD and new processing engine to have generative AI enabled. This is leading companies to fast track their development and let the proof of concepts out into the market to make a standing for their offering. However, there are still question marks over products like Copilot being a boon or bane for everyone.
1. Simplify daily tasks (Boon): With Copilot expected to take up multiple daily tasks like summarizing mails or preparing quick presentations, this can really be a bless in disguise for the tiresome work people from all walks of line have to do in their professional domain. This will end up simplifying our daily lives and give us some respite from making multiple minutes or sending quick decks for review.
2. Missing Human touch/emotion (Bane): Any email, word document or a presentation often has templates, but there is a writing style that everyone develops, and a person is often identified by their style of documents and mails. The introduction of Copilot will bring uniformity and reduce the human touch that often comes in mails to convey excitement or disappointment. There would be a robotic sense to a lot of content generated through Generative AI.
3. Susceptibility to errors (Bane): The success of generative AI tools relies heavily on accuracy of information and content. Any Natural language processing engine is susceptible to errors and Copilot is no different. As it enters the market, its accuracy of content will not be extremely high and will become better with time. However, the word documents, emails and PowerPoint often need to be fairly accurate as misinformation can lead to extreme results as well like poor performance rating or loss of job. Copilot will face stiff competition from humans to build the confidence in using this on an ongoing basis.
4. Ability to focus on other tasks like strategizing or critical thinking (Boon): The improvement in productivity by simplifying our daily tasks via Copilot will allow all of us to have more time to indulge in critical thinking instead of navigating our day through building documents or sending mails. This is one key aspect of our daily lives which can be strongly influenced by Copilot.
5. More Layoffs (Bane): Company layoffs is at an all time high with majority of the tech companies going into a lean operating mode. A lot of job profiles involve strategizing and then building content presentable to the customers. With 60% of the tasks being taken over by Copilot, there could be more layoffs in the industry or limitation in the skillset that the employee has to offer.
While it is too early to say whether this Copilot will also be a boon like the aviation industry, only time will tell whether Copilot can address the potential issues of accuracy, ongoing training data and trust deficit of humans to be a boon in the professional sphere of everyone’s lives.
