To begin with
Copilots?!
The following software products are in many ways different from one another. Yet they carry the same name.
- Microsoft Copilot
- Github Copilot
- Sessions Copilot
AI assistants are the emerging field of software that is autonomous enough to take decisions, solve problems and create content on their own. They’re not reliable enough to take charge yet, but you can use them to speed up your mundane processes.
This article may trigger emotional discomfort.
Pause for a few moments.
Take a 4-second breath,
hold for 4 seconds,
and then slowly exhale.
It feels intrusive. Tasks that sometimes take a whole day at our jobs can now be done in minutes by AI. It may make you feel discomfort and question your place at the job. It’s only natural to feel that way.
We may need to take a moment to breathe in, so we can objectively look at facts and consider the positive ways we can use these AIs in our work lives.
Now let’s take them bit by bit.
AI Assistants
Microsoft Copilot
Announced this March ’23, the best place for this AI will be enterprises. It is connected with most Microsoft Products. You give it prompts like you would give ChatGPT. But it knows a lot more than writing poems and articles.
Powerpoint will create a beautiful presentation with only a prompt. Tell Copilot what you need and Excel will start analyzing trends and creating data visualizations for you.
Outlook will now summarize long email threads to you and help you draft quick replies. Teams will transcript a video meeting and create an action plan for its agenda.
Lastly, PowerPlatform will create the chatbots and apps you need in no time.
Microsoft promises to build a knowledge model of your business so your Copilot can answer all sorts of questions. How will this data be stored and what are the privacy concerns about it?
At Microsoft, we are guided by our AI principles and Responsible AI Standard and decades of research on AI, grounding and privacy-preserving machine learning.
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your companyโs valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.
Check out the full Microsoft article here. There’s also a presentation video. For me, it looked like a product coming from the future.
Github Copilot
It precedes the Microsoft Copilot. It was released in October ’21 as a code completion tool for developers. I have colleagues using it for suggestions but they don’t trust it enough to use it regularly. Sometimes the code it generates is hard to understand. And this introduces the risk of functional bugs later on in the development stages.
This March ’23, Github Copilot X has been announced. It’s due to be an upgrade to the older Copilot. It will make use of OpenAI ChatGPT 4 and include chat and voice interfaces, support for pull requests, and answers to questions on documentation.
Documentation is a big part of programming and honestly, quite cumbersome. I can’t wait for a potent AI to help me explain the code clearly and fast.
You can read more about Github Copilot X on their website after you finish reading this article.
Sessions Copilot
Sessions is a platform for managing customer webinars. It helps you manage bookings, calendars, recordings, workspaces, and agendas. All in one place.
And with the help of its AI, you can now generate agendas for a meeting based on a topic, so you don’t have to start from a blank page. It automatically transcripts the webinar for you. And furthermore, it summarizes the key points.
It plays well with how Sessions is laid out and feels like a true copilot to real-time webinars.
To conclude
AI Copilots are probably just the beginning. These advancements make me very excited for the future. More and more of the tasks that seemed hard and tedious to us may be soon enough to be delegated to AI tools like the ones above. This is probable to speed up our creation process.
And given that content is in very high demand, I am thankful for the opportunity to use AI. And I’m looking forward to new and upgraded tools coming out.
Question to ponder
Will we lose our jobs to AI?
AI has advanced a lot in the last few months. That’s no surprise. The impact it will have on the job market is yet to be seen. Adapting and learning new tools will probably be the skill of most importance in the following years.
How will this impact developers? Stay tuned to the TeckStar Newsletter to learn more on the matter.
This article includes human style and opinion. ChatGPT was NOT used in its making.