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UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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I'm not a programmer, so it's got nothing to offer me. Mostly my job is to write documentation for propriety software and hardware, stuff the AI knows nothing about, not everyone in the world can mak use of AI, and it doesn't require a PhD and 30 days of constant usage to work that out.
Then maybe it's not useful for you. That doesn't mean AI isn't useful for a number of other roles.
I'm a software developer and find its code generation to be awful, but I also find that it's great at looking up technical information. Maybe I'm looking for a library to accomplish a task, and I want to compare features. Or maybe I'm having trouble finding usage examples for a relatively niche library. Those are task the AI is great at, because it can look at tons of blog posts, stack overflow questions, etc, and generate me something reasonable that I can verify against official docs.
If my workflow was. mostly email and internal documentation, yeah, AI wouldn't be that useful. If my workflow relies on existing documentation that's perhaps a little hard to find or a bit poor, then AI is great. Find the right use case and it can save time.
Case in point, as per the article, AI is pretty useless for regular office work
"Regular office work" is a pretty broad category. Yeah, it's probably not useful in retrieving records for someone or processing forms, but it should be useful for anything that requires research.
not sure there is any research done by people using office suite...
it sounds like you are conflating LLM in general with the crappy copilot that MS offers with the office suite
an LLM could be useful for research of large (large) datasets... Copilot would not be
I don't know much about copilot, but some quick research shows it uses GPT-5 for the chat feature. I assume that's what's meant by the average queries in the article.
I'm not saying AI specifically is useful, just that people in general tend to resist change in their work methods regardless of what they are.
I also work with a lot of proprietary knowledge, chemical and infrastructure in my case, and AI still can be useful when used properly. We use a local model and have provided it with all our internal docs and specs, and limited answers to knowledge from these, so we can search thousands of documents much faster, and it links to the sources for it's answers.
Doesn't do my job for me, but it sure as shit makes it easier to have a proper internal search engine that can access information inside documents and not just the titles.