[gowings97]

Last week I bought Copilot Pro ($30/month) with a Business Premium License ($27/month), and I'm not seeing the value / justification for Microsoft's AI Hype that has rolled into their stock price.

Most of Copilot Pro is a Chat GPT drop in (Word), which is unremarkable. Yes, you can prompt it to generate context specific responses via referencing a separate Word document that you've saved on your OneDrive, but that's no different than a Chat GPT plugin. In the end, it's just generative text. I haven't seen anything of substance yet for Excel.

PowerPoint's ability to take a Word document and make a presentation out of it (I absolutely hate making Powerpoints so this was why I frankly bought a license) _and_ use my company's Powerpoint brand template is pretty bad (in terms of generative / creative ability of designing the slides and content layout) and nonexistent (can't use my company branding).

The one redeeming aspect of Copilot Pro is Microsoft Teams meeting summaries, but I can't use it because I'm using a Business Premium license on my personal laptop and I can't use the Copilot Pro because my company credentials are with an O365 E3 license / my company will never buy Copilot Pro.

I bought it for myself to automate the tasks I do everyday (very basic Excel stuff) / assist in the more difficult aspects (create PowerPoint decks) and Copilot Pro isn't capable of substantively assisting me in these areas...yet. We will see if this changes.

There's a guy on YouTube that has been doing a great job detailing the differences between Copilot Pro consumer ($20/month) and Copilot Pro Premium ($30 month for 12 months, mandatory $360/year for Business Premium / I think the same single license flexibility is available for E3/E5) - https://youtu.be/UQlwywZ41t8?si=dWGwFsQvDdoqxxIc

[latexr]

> I'm not seeing the value / justification for Microsoft's AI Hype that has rolled into their stock price.

Remember when an iced tea company saw their stock value skyrocket because they added “blockchain” to their name?

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...

You don’t need the value to be there, just the hype.

[ethbr1]

Your experience essentially mirrors the state of the product category.

Incapable of serving as a general purpose tool, outside of specialized use cases (NLP + action, summarization).

There are more generalized things in the works that would improve that (from Microsoft and others), but afaik nothing has been released to consumers.

The issue with Microsoft's Power nee Copilot strategy has always been unification -- it may share one branding, but you're really talking about different teams, writing different integrations, with different amounts of functionality.

It's hard to meet customer expectations when "magic thing that works with PowerPoint Copilot doesn't exist in Excel Copilot."

And right now, GenAI is dependent on access to integration scaffolding with the specific service+activity -- ergo, much more IFTTT and less general purpose magic box.

[gowings97]

Correct.

People say they want an AI but really they want something to automate and complete their daily workflow/tasks.

How that is accomplished is through the integrations, as you've described. But I am at a loss as to how these integrations have anything to do with NLP.

[ethbr1]

What most (non-developer) users want is an ability to describe what they do (in non-code, natural language terms) and have a moderately intelligent system iteratively build/modify a solution for them.

From that perspective, the product is essentially constructing a mapping between NLP and available pre-built code integration points.

[gowings97]

So in some ways it tries to shoehorn what's available via APIs and attempts to shoehorn it based on the NLP parsed prompt...I guess?

[chucke1992]

Except good luck using ChatGPT for corporate environments like banking, healthcare, cars. The core strength of Microsoft is B2B and their ability to support it.