Experienced Copilot help is hard to find, warns Microsoft MVP If you want to implement Microsoft's Copilot AI assistants, many consultancies in the software giant's channel may not yet have enough hands-on experience to be very helpful – because they've scarcely had a chance to use it, never mind develop meaningful expertise in the tool. That's coming from Loryan Strant, product and …
This AI lark seems to be requiring an exponential increase in available human skill, which wasn't in the picture I was first shown.
However, if the outcome is that cohorts of freshly-laundered consultants are perpetually trapped in conference rooms furiously arguing their respective competences with Clippy, I'm all for it.
I seem to recall exactly the same back when Exchange first came on the scene. Consultants who'd actually completed an implementation could virtually be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Suffice to say we will not be looking at 365 Copilot but I'm waiting for the first C-Suite to say, "I've heard about this great new tool, when can we have it?"
But Exchange was/is actually useful!
I've been trying to excise Copilot from our systems. Surprisingly (or not) it's quite difficult. M$ added it to the subscription licenses and ticked it by default. Now turned off. It appears on the taskbar in the latest release of W11, and is apparently coming to W10 (testing a Powershell script to remove it at the moment), It appears in Edge (not tackled that yet - anyone got any tips?). If only Intune had a settings option to tell all Copilot iterations to fuck off, but of course it doesn't as they want to force it on their customers, whether they like it or (more likely) not!
I suffered Lotus Notes. As an email client it was awful.
Then they made us use Exchange and Outlook. So far as I can tell this is actually meant to be an email system, among other things. Somehow it was far, far worse in that role than the godawful Notes (/Domino) thing.
Some achievement.
-A.
In my career I worked for both small and large Microsoft Channel Partner and as a consumer/customer in an IT department.
I had more information and support (especially under NDA) from Microsoft as a customer/consumer than I ever had as a partner, unless you're part of someone like Avenade (who are a JV between Accenture and MS) or KPMG. This is because Microsoft always put their own staff first and their internal services department & targets ahead of partners - in the past Partners would get benefits like free licences for stuff like Co-Pilot but partners get very little now.
My company is part of the Early Adopter Program and so far adoption was taken extra slow.
Despite a dedicated internal team which was formed around bringing AI services to the masses and direct support from MS, the article's content is congruent with my experience as someone that had access to it since summer in the capacity of an M365 Engineer.
It boggles my mind how adoption is basically driven by providing generalist prompts and asking "well, what would <b>you</b> do with it?".
What's more is that everyone talks about adoption while uttering no word about the ethics of AI use (power consumption and sources, sociopolitical aspects like how some of these models were trained to behave on the backs of the psychological well-being of Kenyan contract workers being paid pennies, the copyright issues, accuracy issues etc.). It would feel disingenuous to stand in front of users asking them to try it while criticism is heavily politicized and shut down.
Just this week we've experienced an "oopsie" with internet access for Copilot being turned on (resp. made user-configurable) caused by an admin center fault that caused the respective setting to do nothing when trying to turn it off again.
MS and their representatives behave a lot more like salesmen and -women than actual adoption partners all the while.
If you've ever thought your C-Suite was off the rails wanting something without knowing what to use it for - this is exactly the feeling I get, but from the provider, which is somehow worse.
Ah, but which co-pilot is that? MS are vigourously thrusting "co-pilot" into pretty much everything.
[ For code, the consultancy should be about making it produce the right code, that actually works, is secure, efficient, and not plagiarised - so good luck with that. In practice it'll be vague waffle about curated training sets and well-crafted queries. That'll be 2 grand, thanks (per hour or any part thereof). ]
See the Reg article - You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company
First there was copilot for coding - which I use and enjoy myself - I have found it useful, (although not so great helping with accurate meaningful comments).
Because of that success, MS marketing decided to use confusingly similar names for all their new LLM products, which may be more about administration and less about coding.
I know nothing about those other products - I just know the naming is confusing, and could possibly dilute the market value of the name "Co-pilot".
Alongside the equally annoying counterpart, rebranding the same thing with a new name a dozen times over.
Or both, for maximum confusion.
...to quite a few fields within IT.
Cryptography
Network Infrastructure
Cloud Architecture
Systems Administration
etc etc
People get away with murder in these fields because the customer has no frame of reference for the quality of work they are getting...as long as the new thing is faster/most secure/a bit cheaper than the old thing, they got bang for buck...but usually, simply providing a faster, slightly cheaper, a bit more secure solution is just par for the course in these areas...you can achieve that by just upgrading things without any real thought. If you replace a 3 year old bit of kit with a brand new bit of kit, it's almost certainly going to be faster because of the way tech progresses it's highly likely to be cheaper as well, because what was top tier can now be outperformed by mid tier etc.
Hell, in some cases, on cloud platforms, if you deploy a new instance at exactly the same tier as an existing instance, it can also be faster...because the underlying servers might have newer CPU architecture and higher clock speeds...so you can get a performance boost for no extra cost and bill for "optimisation" because you achieved more performance by essentially doing nothing.
*points finger around the room*
You know who you are! You cheeky monkeys you! Working for that MSP scamming money. You caddish bounders! Charging to come and install Windows 11 on Windows 10 machines and just sitting there...sending someone onsite "just in case something doesn't work" after the upgrade. Scallywags! Ooh and that LetsEncrypt certificate you need to renew every 3 months on that webserver that you charge a nifty fifty for...naughty...buying a new Office 365 license for each new starter and not re-assigning licenses for people that have left...and not reviewing it for years because you get a commission...I see you!
I know you're there, I find your handiwork everywhere...people are always creeping out of the woodwork asking for "we need something cheaper the LetsEncrypt, it's costing us £200 a year" or "We need to review our wifi and routers...we have this setup called Meraki and it seems to cost us a fortune".
To be fair, without all this rogue-like behaviour, I'd probably have a much harder time finding work, because shooting down bandits is low hanging fruit...I also quite enjoy it...there used to be a few IT support services in my area that perceived me as the grim reaper. One threatened to sue me because after I helped a few of his customers out (unwittingly, didn't know they used the same IT support firm, and I was quite new to the area, the new sheriff in town if you will), word got around about their pattern of con-artistry and they apparently started losing customers hand over fist. Took them about 6 months to find me. I got followed out of a client and when I stopped to fuel up, a little old Indian guy got out of an old fucked black Jag and he started calling me a "fucking prick" on the forecourt. I had no idea who he was, I just thought he was fucking mental...he called me names for about 15 minutes, then got back in his Jag and buggered off...spotted the same knackered Jag a few days later outside one of the local IT businesses as I was walking past and he came out again and launched into a tirade "You enjoy fucking me? You think you clever guy? You stealing my business! Fuck you, fuck off away from my shop!"...felt like I was in an episode of South Park or something...truly surreal. He never did sue me, presumably because there were no grounds to sue me as I never actually said a bad word about their business, because I didn't know it was all the same business...well I suspected because I had to try and fix the same problem on the same laptop at two different companies...what are the odds of that?
They ended up re-branding and moving their business to a different town...the owner opened a vape shop in place of their old shop.
Becasue the pros and competent ones will never be paid their real worth and won't do the work for the pay offered.
"The person who buys based solely on the cheapest price is fair prey to those who take advantage of them."
- some famous person I can't remember right now.
So there are two different things called Copilot.
Then there is Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, which are two different things.
Then there is .NET, and the legacy version which is now referred to as .NET Framework, which are two different things.
I heard Satya Nadella has two daughters and they're both called Susan.
Wait for two or three years after release for the crash test dummies to iron out the kinks the hard way. Then, and only then, begin considering whether it is actually worth bothering with.
Caveat. For anything advertised as 'AI', give it five years at least.
> Wait for two or three years after release for the crash test dummies to iron out the kinks the hard way
Interestingly, The Kinks split in 1996, around three years after the Crash Test Dummies' big hit, "Mmm mmm mmm mmm".
Is this purely a bizarre coincidence or are you covertly suggesting that, for some strange reason, the Dummies saw the final years of The Kinks as a threat to their own future chart success and (mafia-style) "ironed out" The Kinks by engineering a final falling out between the Davies brothers?
Hmm.
(Or, indeed, "mmm").
> iron out the kinks the hard way
Also, while we're doing odd coincidences, The Kinks had a song called "The Hard Way". (*)
(*) Probably NSFW, assuming you're unfortunate enough to work at the sort of place that'd find an album cover with a silly Beano-style cartoon of a schoolboy with a bare backside (and a silhouette of a teacher with a cane- presumably the one just used to whack him- in the background) objectionable.
I did a search in microsoft.com for different names/versions of Copilot:
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Copilot
Microsoft Copilot
Copilot for Microsoft 365
Copilot - Microsoft AI
Copilot in Windows
Copilot for Work
Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams
Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint
Copilot in Edge
Microsoft Copilot Studio
Copilot in Outlook
Microsoft Copilot for Service
Microsoft Copilot in OneNote
Copilot in Word
AI Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Loop
Copilot in Outlook
Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot
Copilot in Azure
Github Copilot
Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Word
GitHub Copilot extension
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales
Security Copilot
Microsoft Sales Copilot
Copilot in Power Apps
Microsoft Security Copilot
GitHub Copilot Chat extension for Visual Studio
Copilot in Microsoft Stream
Copilot in Power Automate
Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365
Teams AI Library
Sales Copilot for Microsoft Teams
GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022
Copilot in Azure Quantum (only if you don't look at it)
At this point, I got bored (and disappointed, not to find "Copilot for Business").
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