This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio. All right, Zoom was certainly an indication of how we were working during the pandemic. But we've really leaned on the team over at Microsoft three sixty five for how we are working, yes, then, but also today, and they've got a new report out that finds that there's not necessarily any need to be worried
about AI. Of course, to be fair, Microsoft is deep into AI, really awakening the world earlier this year with its ten billion dollar investment into Open AI's chat GBT. So even so, our next guest is here to help answer the question will AI fix work? And great to have back with us. Jared's Pataro. He is Corporate VP of Modern Work and Business Applications at Microsoft three sixty five. Once again on Zoom in Redmand Washington. Jared, how are you.
Oh, I'm doing great. Great to be back with you, Carol.
Yeah, great to have you here with us. So tell us about this inquiry into AI? What you guys?
I mean?
The question is I've got the report in front of me, Will AI fix work? And I think everybody's trying to figure it out. I kind of can't wait because I think it can be an assist in my job. But tell us about what you looked into, questions you asked, and who you talk to.
Maybe let's look at what's broken first. So this particular survey is our annual survey thirty one thousand people across thirty one countries, and the first number that popped out to me is exactly that fix that's needed. Sixty four percent of people who responded told us that they just don't have the time or energy to get their jobs done. And we thought that that was really interesting. Coming out of the pandemic. People are tired, but it seemed to be more than that. So we combine that with our
telemetry data. This is the cloud data where we see how people are working, what they're up to. We found that up to about sixty percent of the average day, average workers day is spent communicating and coordinating. Only forty percent is kind of spent on that day job, the thing that they're supposed to provide to the organization. So really interesting setup right now as people are feeling tired and for good reason.
And Jery something that strikes me anytime I talk to anyone they're always concerned about when it comes to AI, maybe they could attenduly be replaced when it comes to their job. Looking at your study, it's interesting as far as how AI is poised to create this whole new way of working, what would be the counter to that, and the benefits of AI were you might not necessarily be losing your job, but it can actually assist you.
Well, we'll start with the fear. There's still a little bit of fear there. Almost fifty percent, it was forty nine percent of people who responded told us that they were afraid that AI would come and take their job, but that was overshadowed by another number, a whopping seventy percent told us that despite that fear, they actually would outsource everything they could to an AI assistant just to
help them relieve the burden. So there's this sense that their optimism, or at least their need for help for AI based help, really outweighs their fears. And that's a pretty interesting nuance on many the headlines that we've been hearing for the last couple of months.
Well, I'm thinking about email alone. I mean, I'm going to be quite honest with you. There's a ton of email that I never even get to read because it's just a ton of stuff that people are either pitching or research. And I definitely have figured out ways to kind of weed through do certain searches so that I really make sure I don't miss some of the important stuff. But how could AI ultimately help us in filtering through what is dumped into our email boxes on a regular basis.
Well, many of your your listeners are probably familiar with chat GPT, introduced last year, and it's particularly good, it's summarizing, and so I've been using a product that we call Copilot Microsoft through sixty five copil it essentially takes the models behind chat GPT, these large language models and integrates it directly into your email into Outlook. And this does
amazing things. It allows you, for instance, get a long those long email threads where you're supposed to go read from the bottom up, and it can summarize that just in one click. And then once it's summarized, it actually gives you a couple of different prompts or those are different things you can choose from to answer, so it will author an answer, allow you to make it longer, shorter, more formal, more casual, it is changed the way I
do email. I never want to do email without it again, so it definitely changes work habits and practices.
Well, so just just share with me, because, like I said at the top, I mean to be fair. You guys are all in on AI, no doubt about it. And in many ways that news of the Microsoft investment really did kind of wake up the world in terms of what you folks were doing. Specifically, Now everybody's talking about it. As you guys have been playing around with it, what are you finding are the great capabilities? What are still the things that need to be worked out?
The five seconds to wow type demo I do with customers is in a meeting. So in a meeting like this that would be just a normal business meeting, we're trading kind of conversation back and forward. And what it can do there is it can literally listen in as if it were an assistant to the meeting and summarize. That means it can write notes. It can respond when I ask questions like what did Carol say again? Or
how did Jared answer this question? It can allow me, for instance, to identify, you know, what are the two sides of this argument and who's in favor of which one it actually is incredibly valuable in a meeting. And then even better than that, Carol, the thing that I love is it allows me to attend meetings, so I can not attend a meeting and then using that same GPT larg language model, query the meeting after the fact, did they ever mention my name or any decisions made?
What decisions? Why did they make them? So it opens up these brand new possibilities for work because it kind of blurs time and space. You know, it's as if you could be there, but you're not there, and you're able to use the power of AI here to kind of get into the dynamics of people even just having regular conversations. So just one example, but it's integrated across all of our products. We talked about email or PowerPoint, all of those things.
What's the thing though, that is still tricky because we talk about AI kind of working alongside of us and we don't have to go to the meeting Yahoo. But I do wonder what are the things that you know, people say you can't really you know, duplicate a human in terms of their perception of things and so on and so forth. So what do would you say that we still need to be cautious about or we're still figuring out, or you guys are still figuring out when it comes to this.
Very stud question, because it turns out while these things are incredibly useful, they do make mistakes. And these things, I mean the AI assistance that we have, so they get it wrong sometimes. In fact, the technical term is hallucination. If you believe that, that literally is the term they make stuff up. So the reason that we use copilot as a name for our product is really the signal to the user, hey, this is an autopilot. You can't just take the answers and say there you go, I'm
going to fire this off as an email. You really have to be in the driver's seat. You have to make the decisions. But the great news is my experience has been when it is wrong, it's what we call usefully wrong. So it doesn't just make things up. To make things up. Sometimes we'll feel in details where it didn't have all the data. You can go in and correct that, tweak that, and then it's put you ahead of the game anyway.
So how long do you think this could take? But before it's more widespread with users that could potentially use this type of things in meetings when you do have still some of these hiccups and glitches that could happen with AI.
We just introduced a couple of weeks ago that we're expanding what we call our Preview program to six hundred enterprises around the world, so we'll have hundreds of thousands of users here in the coming months. So that's kind of the scale that it's out right at right now. But it's moving very quickly. My team, we talk about AI time, the cycle time of the industry has really increased as we're able to build on top of these technologies really quickly. So I don't think it'll be a
matter of years. I do think it'll be a matter of months until you start to see these tools being used all over the place.
You know, for someone who has been you know, focusing on workplace trends and coming off a really crazy period, you know, meaning the pandemic specifically, and we're able to track a lot of things. How are you kind of placing generative AI machine learning in kind of I don't know, is it akin to some other great or interesting development in terms of how we work, Like, how do you position it historically or technologically for that matter.
We think it's as big as the PC revolution or as big as the Internet. We think it's that big. You know, if I again frame it, we would say, Wow, you couldn't write a script like this if you were trying. Really, what the pandemic did is is rewire the where and the when of work, So it changed entirely around the world. You know, those two mentions of work. All of a sudden,
AI is changing the how of work. By the time we get kind of roughly four years out from the pandemic, the combination of those two things will have really just changed patterns practices associated with work. My kids, as they go to work, they're not going to enter a work environment anything like I did you know twenty five years ago?
Is that good or bad? Bodily because you know, things are never right black and white like it's it's that's right. We're worried about people not really talking to each other. I have a colleague, Matt Miller, who laughs that when we all get on a zoom call and we're literally like right next to each other, but I'm sitting there typing, you know, notes, and you know, it's just interesting.
My response to that is I would say, you know, AI giveth an, AI taketh away, Like, we have this moment and the way we think about it is what have we gained and what have we lost? And how do we lose as little as possible and how do
we gain as much as possible? But you're exactly right, these big if it's as big as the PC, you know, if you really believe that it's that type of shift, then you do have to recognize, Wow, this is probably the beginning of an era, a new era, which is be really thoughtful about what we want to make sure we don't lose in that process. But that will take all of us, you know, we're all learning as we go. Yeah.
Right, And the more we use it though, right, the smarter or more specific it becomes. Jared, Nice to check in with you again. Jared's Pataro. He's corporate vice president, head of Modern Work at Microsoft three sixty five on Zoom from Redman, Washington. Yeah, I feel like.
I have that same email problem as you, Carol.
It's crazy. Now. I've said to this though a million times, like I've thought about AI the ability to you know, I like to write kind of intros into our guests and stuff, and just the ability to maybe shoot some information, say here, just draft something, I'll edit it. I'll go through it and make sure it's But to kind of have that framework to try to kick off with would be really cool. Yeah.
Yeah, all my distribution lists that I'm on for banks, I
Just like to filter through staff like, would be really kind of cool.