Remember that skinny virtual assistant that used to intern in Microsoft Office? Well, he’s back, overly enthusiastic and with a salary bump.

Already as a stubborn, grumpy old teen I couldn’t be bothered by the unsolicited advice that was delaying my life with 5 extra seconds. The Word assistant was trying to make himself useful by popping up with random suggestions. Apparently, under File/Settings I could change the default blue color of any automatically underlined and linked word that contained the “@” symbol. And if I pressed “-” and “Enter”, Word would automatically draw a long line across the page.

Mr. Paperclip commented that multiple lines could be drawn if I held down the “shift” key. Thanks for the information.

Microsoft mastered machine learning but failed human learning. All I ever wanted was a “neutralize button” in Word so I didn’t have to copy-paste and kill every AI attempt in Notepad.

But times have changed and now our newly hired Co-pilot is impressing everyone one with his skill of elaborating useless data. As if we wouldn’t have enough of that.

Sorry Co-pilot, your interactive and color-changing Excel dashboard has only an esthetic value and does not impact the company’s bottom line. You wrote some first class sales letters but it seems the Co-pilots working at our client’s office are not impressed.

In case you haven’t worked with a human before, let me explain how this will play-out. The report that you asked to be on your table by Monday morning will be 20% thicker, lavishly illustrated and customized in your favorite font. Your employee fed 5 points and a great explanatory prompt to his assisting Co-pilot and voila! Bureaucratic perfection. You will pay co-pilot 30 bucks a month to summarize this report and to read it to you in your favorite actor’s voice. Who knows if the 5 points got lost in translation.

For most large organizations the productivity placebo of AI will eat up more time and RAM that could have been spent better mining Satoshis. Just like the rejuvenated caveman technology of Emojis, the effectiveness comes with a big risk of misinterpretation. I already spend too much time educating temporary employees. Now I have to teach Co-pilot to distinguish a prayer from a high-five?

I hate to be the one to tell you this, Co-pilot. But we have decided to fire our cyber security officer and simply work offline. As long as our computers are not connected to the Internet, our internal network is safe (and we save a lot of money). But that also means that you are pretty useless in our cockpit. But do me a favor and tell your cousin that specializes in voice AI that we have an open position. Screw e-mails. We’re calling everyone over the phone now – it’s all about the human touch, you know?

#co-pilot #AItools #$MSFT