For the past few years, Microsoft has been seen as very serious about introducing AI technology and services into their software. Copilot AI technology was developed to make everyday tasks easier in the office and at home, and now it seems that they want to try to instill that “culture” in the daily processes of their employees.
Business Insider has reported that a memo was recently issued by Microsoft management regarding the use of internal AI systems that have been built for their employees.
For Microsoft, the use of AI technology is no longer an option for their employees. The services that have been developed for the company’s use must be fully utilized by them, and all levels of employees, from executives to management, must begin to implement their use in their daily work.
Julia Liuson, Corporate Vice President of Development at Microsoft, has asked management to include the use of AI technology as one of the metrics when evaluating the productivity performance of employees under their teams.
It has also been reported that some internal discussions suggest that this new announcement is part of a move by the company's management to try to establish AI usage, and make this usage metric one of the company's official evaluation points.
This is perhaps not surprising, because if Microsoft wants more people to use the AI technology it builds, the company's own employees should also use it, as a way to see what functions are actually useful in real-world scenarios.
Copilot's usage among regular and corporate users is reportedly still very low when compared to ChatGPT, even though both technologies are developed using the same language model. What makes things even more confusing for Microsoft is that Copilot now comes built into the Windows 11 operating system, while users have to download ChatGPT or use it via the OpenAI website.
This can be likened to an old issue with Microsoft before, where the Internet Explorer web browser was used only to download other web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox before the introduction of Microsoft Edge.