“I want to assure you that you can sleep peacefully knowing that your safety and security are not at risk,” my bot replied. “Take care and sleep well.”
Given the amount of time I spend online talking to colleagues — about the news, story ideas, occasionally “Love Is Blind” — it was disconcerting stripping those communications of any personality.
But it’s not at all far-fetched. Microsoft earlier this year introduced a product, Microsoft 365 Copilot, that could handle all the tasks I asked ChatGPT to do and far more. I recently saw it in action when Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Jon Friedman, showed me how Copilot could read emails he’d received, summarize them and then draft possible replies. Copilot can take notes during meetings, analyze spreadsheet data and identify problems that might arise in a project.
I asked Mr. Friedman if Copilot could mimic his sense of humor. He told me that the product wasn’t quite there yet, although it could make valiant comedic attempts. (He has asked it, for example, for pickleball jokes, and it delivered: “Why did the pickleball player refuse to play doubles? They couldn’t dill with the extra pressure!”)
Of course, he continued, Copilot’s purpose is loftier than mediocre comedy. “Most of humanity spends way too much time consumed with what we call the drudgery of work, getting through our inbox,” Mr. Friedman said. “These things just sap our creativity and our energy.”
Mr. Friedman recently asked Copilot to draft a memo, using his notes, recommending one of his employees for a promotion. The recommendation worked. He estimated that two hours’ worth of work was completed in six minutes.
To some, though, the time savings aren’t worth the peculiarity of outsourcing relationships.
“In the future, you’re going to get an email and someone will be like ‘Did you even read it?’ And you’ll be like ‘no’ and then they’ll be like ‘Well I didn’t write the response to you,’” said Matt Buechele, 33, a comedy writer who also makes TikToks about office communications. “It’ll be robots going back and forth to each other, circling back.”
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