Actual Ad Link: https://www.instagram.com/microsoft365/p/C7j8ipnxIiI/?img_index=1
Awesome article about the ad which sums it up nicely:
https://justinpot.com/watch-me-be-in-three-meetings-at-once/
Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings.
Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job.
Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings.
I already don’t trust AI, there’s no way I’d want it to be the arbiter of potentially critical job-related information in a workplace. For probably less money than licensing and running an AI, a company could just hire a stenographer to sit in meetings all day, take notes, and send those notes to concerned parties. Better yet, why not get certain people to send info directly via email, instead of scheduling a bunch a pointless meetings. How’s that for innovation
Right? If an LLM can transcribe all the useful information out of a meeting, it stands to reason that the entire meeting could just be boiled to an email, instead of enabling middle managers to feel useful by tying up other people’s time.