[PeterHolzwarth]

I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier.

That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users.

I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.

[dangus]

The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything.

It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.

Is it the IT department’s fault for not enabling something? I don’t know, but does that matter?

If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.

[w0m]

> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.

on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.

I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.

If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.

Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace

It's kind of amazing.

[serallak]

The part where it gave you access to a thread you were not a part of seems scary to me..

In this case your absence from the thread was probably an oversight, but in general there could be a very good reason for it

[noisem4ker]

The only way I can reasonably interpret it is that it was a discussion on a Teams channel they had access to but weren't involved in.

[w0m]

this; it was a public channel I had access to, but never look at (I'm on... too many to keep up with, fairly large company).

[dingaling]

Isn't that just indexed search?

[IanCal]

No.

Search is part of this, but that doesn’t necessarily work from an error message.

It doesn’t mean you get the relevant parts of the thread either.

It certainly doesn’t mean you get a populated meeting invite for a relevant team.

[p_ing]

> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.

We make heavy utilization of Copilot Studio lite and full. Lite has quick access to SharePoint/Teams data. Full has access to _any_ data that has a Power Platform connector, REST API, MCP server, or Copilot [Graph] connector, all of which you can build or buy yourself. SAP, SQL, Databricks, you name it, Copilot Studio full can consume it.

It sounds like you don't have an M365 Copilot license but are instead using Copilot 365 Chat (the naming is horrid, absolutely).

[dangus]

If we have “Chat” it doesn’t even seem to have what I would describe as “quick” access. It seems to just do nothing.

Not a very compelling product in terms of tempting companies to buy a license.

[p_ing]

You can get trial full licenses if you’re interested in it. Chat isn’t meant to be anything more than the consumer experience with some business data.

[dangus]

A company that’s looking to grow doesn’t wait for customers to proactively start a trial. That would involve IT departments and approvals and all that stuff.

In the pattern I described, Microsoft would just enable this feature for everyone and sit back and wait for employees to start begging their employers to expand their license because they got a taste of some great functionality.

That’s exactly what OpenAI does with ChatGPT Pro.

[samch]

The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.

[dangus]

I assume my company isn’t paying specifically for copilot and what you’re saying is exactly true.

I’m just not sure why that makes any bit of sense as a product growth strategy.

Instead of trialing an amazing experience they’re just showing their customers that copilot sucks. But if you buy a license it’s awesome, we promise!

Why not actually give me something useful and then cut me off from access when I hit a usage cap? Then uncapping my usage is the upsell. Literally copy what OpenAI does.

[PeterHolzwarth]

"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything."

I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.

Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.

The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.

That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?

That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.

[dangus]

I’m just conveying my experience. Whatever copilot is at my company’s Microsoft portal seems to do absolutely nothing and connect to nothing.

Even if this is my company not paying for the license, it seems like a pretty miserable way for Microsoft to try to tempt companies into buying one by delivering a completely useless “light” experience.

Everything you’re describing that’s wonderful about the Windows copilot button is the stuff I’m already doing on ChatGPT.com because that brand name came first.

[fluidcruft]

I agree about this. It's very difficult to figure out. In fact my working theory is IT has banned it as much as they can (we get strange and difficult to interpret pronouncements about permission to use LLM).

Windows 11 in general pushes so much unwanted crap at us in ways that we can't control that it's reasonable to assume IT can't make the icons go away if they wanted to. And investing time building a workflow that disappears when IT has finally figured out how to nuke it (if that's the intent) isn't worth the risk.

For reference I work at a hospital so generally IT is extremely sensitive about potential breaches and leaks. In general the policy is we are allowed to use LLM. The organization is on Azure but I can't even find anyone in IT to tell me if we are even allowed to use Power platform (which is also in this weird state of letting you build things but they don't actually work). CoPilot is there ... ish. It's just not very powerful at all.

[wkat4242]

I totally understand their point of view considering the sensitivity of your data.

In power platform it's very easy to make an oopsie and expose huge volumes of data on some unprotected object storage or an external platform. We have a big review process on such developments, we certainly don't want users to cowboy that on their own.

It's basically the old "Thumbdrive left in a taxi" these days. With the huge difference that these things now lead to huge fines under GDPR etc.

[fluidcruft]

Right. But it's there and we can start building things is my point

[raddan]

I was listening to an NPR story yesterday about how fashion designers are now using “AI” to spot fashion trends. Aside from the fact that it is now unclear whether a journalist means “software” when they say “AI”, a recurring thought I had was that maybe lots of people are now using AI to make inconsequential decisions. One of the predictions they hyped in the story was that “yellow will be hot”. Ok, sure… but if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter. I can see that AI “helps” in this scenario to reduce decision fatigue, but you might have been just as well off flipping a coin. Even if you buy yourself an expensive coin, it’s a lot cheaper!

[pjc50]

> LLM will replace web search.

This kills the crab. I mean, kills the Internet. And it's not clear what happens to the existing search advertising business in this scenario.

[wkat4242]

Google already killed the internet as we knew it. There's a reason engines like yagi have their own spider for "the small web" because google basically ignores everything but the big commercial clickbaity crap.

[wkat4242]

Sorry I meant kagi not yagi :)

[wkat4242]

Then you have Copilot Chat, that's the free version. It indeed can't interact with company data unless you manually upload it.

If you have a tab selector "Work / Web" at the top, you do have the paid version. Select Work to make it able to find stuff in sharepoint, look at your calendar and emails etc.

If you don't have this selector you only have the free version.

> If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.

Upselling of course. Finding stuff in the gigantic trash heap that is Sharepoint is its main added value for me.

Also, RAG will cost a lot more compute.

[flykespice]

> That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable.

I'm using Win 11 and I didn't even notice Copilot on my task bar until you mentioned it...

I think that is a wakeup call for me to finally flash my pc to linux

[ankurdhama]

What's worse then copilot on task bar is the copilot key on keyboard. This key doesn't even have its own scan code, instead it send something like Win+Shift+F23.

[1718627440]

Sounds not to bad for me, or have you bound anything to Super-Shift-F23?

[PeterHolzwarth]

I get what you - a HN user - mean. But for the broader planet of Windows users, it just becomes this thing you click to get some general info from on whatever general topic, question, or need comes to mind. I think it is rapidly becoming quit banal - a thing people think of as just being another part of using their computing device. No fanfare; no fireworks; no hand-wringing over rights or privacy or training data: just a thing you click on to ask questions to as part of their normal day.

[lenkite]

Man, you have really bought into the LLM kool-aid. Your latest response feels as if it was spit-balled by ChatGPT.

[PeterHolzwarth]

You misunderstand me: I don't advocate - I'm just expressing what I think is likely for the billion people out there who now have access to these tools. This Hackernews community is a rather rarefied atmosphere. When we step out into the broader public, there is a whole different world going on. Whether we like it or not, that world is what we have to deal with.

[HypnoticOcelot]

Was this generated with an LLM?

[blibble]

if the generic public start associating all AI with the useless "Copilot" then Microsoft will succeed in killing off the entire AI industry

[monster_truck]

Just like using bing by default even if it's outright terrible (to the point of randomly suggesting the suicide hotline if you use it as a calculator), I make it do dumb bullshit for more Microsoft Rewards Points. It pays for xbox game pass for myself and several friends any time we've needed it

[PeterHolzwarth]

I think you'd be surprised at the number of average users who don't think of it as useless. As I've mentioned on comments elsewhere in this thread, remember what we here were talking about a couple years ago: LLM's killing websearch.

[hulitu]

> LLM's killing websearch.

Websearch is dying since some more than 10 years. It was stabbed in the back by greed (ads, SEO). LLM is just the nail in the coffin.

[ryukoposting]

Remember Cortana? Microsoft was eroding consumer trust in these chat-style "agent" tools before we even had a name for them.

[wkat4242]

And clippy before that. It's a running joke since the early 2000's with all the memes. And even this hilarious music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo

[JdeBP]

Clippy has done a complete volte face when it comes to memes, in 2025. This is because of the right-to-repair people.

"Clippy never wanted to harvest you, turn you into the product, and clandestinely copy your stuff into some language model. Clippy only wanted to help."

* https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Clippy_Campaign

[chris_wot]

That little copilot icon will sit there unused and unloved by people who will, much like with online ads, screen it out whilst they do what they actually want to do.

[PeterHolzwarth]

For some, but what about the others? The reddit mentality of "everyone hates LLM AI tools" is just a very loud segment. What about everyone else? What about a random Joe who asks it questions to find some path through figuring out why their computer is acting all wonky? What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem? That is, treating it as an OS-native improvement over a search engine.

The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.

[heavyset_go]

> What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem?

Why would you trust an LLM's advice about an appliance that can hideously disfigure you when they regularly fuck up basic advice about computers?

[userbinator]

Unfortunately the majority of people don't know what they don't know. I've seen plenty of cases where an LLM is grossly wrong, but those don't seem to be publicised as much as "LLM does $awesome_thing" in the mainstream media.

[chris_wot]

Because a new icon in the system tray means nothing to people. People screen out most of what is in the system tray.

If they want to find something via AI, they’ll use their web browser and go to ChatGPT or Gemini.

[olyjohn]

People ignore the system tray so much, because it is so full of garbage, that Microsoft had to provide a "Hide unused icons" option, and eventually made a control panel to manage which icons you see.

I mean I remember when browser toolbar spyware was rampant, people literally ignored half the screen when they managed to install 30 toolbars.

[mulmen]

Ads make money because people click on them.

[chris_wot]

A very tiny number of people is all you need.

[wkat4242]

> I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, late

Yes that is inevitable. But it's exactly why I won't use it. It feels like a scam, the typical drug dealer model. Get them hooked on free stuff, and then milk their addiction.

I almost only use local LLMs now. They're not as good, no. But at least they are mine and nobody will raise the price suddenly. Some pro AI models I just use with API, for the rare instance where local just doesn't cut it. It costs me a few bucks per month that way, not 20 or 30.

[hulitu]

> That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable.

A thing that gets in the way is not usable, is annoying.

[wkat4242]

Yes. We work a lot with Microsoft and they are very hardball on "adoption". They are always pushing us to send weekly "did you know..."? emails, yammer campaigns, seminars blablah. Very American also, this does not work in Europe where people are much less 'team players' and much more critical of advertising.

I personally thinks this just pisses people off. It certainly does me. I don't want to be told what to do, especially by some vendor. If I don't want to use it I don't want to be herded into using it. If they try anyway I will just push back and start hating on it just out of annoyance.

However this has always been Microsoft's adoption model. Very pushy. Unlike for example Apple's where they make things look, feel and work really good so people actually want to use it.

[discordance]

If that's the case, it's a very complacent strategy compared to ChatGPT, which people yearn for and automatically turn to.

It also disregards a big chunk of people not using Windows, where the little Copilot icon is not built in.

[wkat4242]

ChatGPT also don't make a common mistake that Microsoft does, they don't squeeze on the compute too much. Microsoft does which makes it worse than ChatGPT even though it's literally the same engine. That keeps the GPT brand valuable.