AI Missing a trick
Discussion
With more and more services rolling out their AI to "help you write..." it seems they're all aiming for the very low hanging fruit. It's generative AI, out of the box it writes stuff/generates stuff... so helping you write something is sort of the most expected, unoriginal and simple thing you can do with it.
What got a lot of people excitieted was all the "emergent behaviour", things you wouldn't think it could do, but can. So this is where I think they're missing a trick.
Instead of all this simple generating text, 21st Century clippy type thing... why not read my email for me, and summarise it, provide me with the key emails I must read, or summaries of them, highlight the ones I really should reply to etc. File away the ones I don't ever read, or ones for later etc.
Sure, help me write the response, but do something more than just be a text generator.
What got a lot of people excitieted was all the "emergent behaviour", things you wouldn't think it could do, but can. So this is where I think they're missing a trick.
Instead of all this simple generating text, 21st Century clippy type thing... why not read my email for me, and summarise it, provide me with the key emails I must read, or summaries of them, highlight the ones I really should reply to etc. File away the ones I don't ever read, or ones for later etc.
Sure, help me write the response, but do something more than just be a text generator.
In fairness, our bookings system has just had this feature rolled out, which is similar to what you describe.
It scans incoming emails to determine if they are bookings and then adds as much detail as it can find in the email to a new booking. It is also able to look at bookings already made to add in details that a customer emails in after the fact.
From what I've been made aware... it's been a mixed bag of perfect and made the booking a bigger job due to loads of errors. Early days, I guess.
There has also been some talk about it prioritising incoming emails and maybe even being able to auto respond to questions/queries that are repetitive on your behalf, but this is coming in the future once they get the above working correctly first.
It scans incoming emails to determine if they are bookings and then adds as much detail as it can find in the email to a new booking. It is also able to look at bookings already made to add in details that a customer emails in after the fact.
From what I've been made aware... it's been a mixed bag of perfect and made the booking a bigger job due to loads of errors. Early days, I guess.
There has also been some talk about it prioritising incoming emails and maybe even being able to auto respond to questions/queries that are repetitive on your behalf, but this is coming in the future once they get the above working correctly first.
I'm not talking about AI in someone's proprietary system I'm talking about things like Gemini rolled out to gmail, or apple's Intelligence... stuff the general public can use without needing to gamble money on possible snake oil.
If proven to work more people would be prepared to buy it at work etc.
And no I don't fancy building my own, integrating it with a mail client or acting as a man in the middle of imap.
If proven to work more people would be prepared to buy it at work etc.
And no I don't fancy building my own, integrating it with a mail client or acting as a man in the middle of imap.
phil4 said:
Instead of all this simple generating text, 21st Century clippy type thing... why not read my email for me, and summarise it, provide me with the key emails I must read, or summaries of them, highlight the ones I really should reply to etc. File away the ones I don't ever read, or ones for later etc.
Enterprise licence of CoPilot is suppose to do all of the above, but we haven't implemented fully yet at work due to licencing issues. But I do use the CoPilot app for about 20% of reports/work. But if you actually try to use it for work you will quickly realise it's not really 'Intelligent' more a sense check. It misses a lot of details at times, and will sometimes get totally the wrong end of the stick, the most challenging bit is it will make stuff up and not warn you it has. I had it summarise a document where an acronym wasn't explained in the document, but in the summary it expanded on the acronym with a made up explanation that was totally wrong (not even Google basic search level of accuracy).
You have to be totally mad to let to relie on it totally, I came back to work off the Easter break to about 200 emails, zero chance I would let CoPilot triage/prioritise for me, it takes me sub 30 seconds to scan/pin/delete etc each, missing a viral email isn't something I would trust Copilot to do. But it can 100% make your work life easier and deliver better productivity. The $64k question is of course will it eventually reduce HR costs.......
Edited by gangzoom on Wednesday 23 April 21:00
This is exactly what Microsoft CoPilot already does (and has done since its inception). It integrates with office 365 and Windows, it will summarise, help write replies, suggest urgent follow ups, find relevant documents to attach, show related links from the web.
Problem is, for every one person that sees the potential, the masses seem to complain about privacy, intrusion and data mining and they may have a point. However you can’t have one without the other.
I work in IT, specifically management but have been through the junior tech roles, infrastructure etc etc and there is always something new that is met with suspicion but a few years later, it all becomes something users can’t live without, often the same people who slated it as being ‘pointless’ and ‘why do things have to change’ at the beginning.
Problem is, for every one person that sees the potential, the masses seem to complain about privacy, intrusion and data mining and they may have a point. However you can’t have one without the other.
I work in IT, specifically management but have been through the junior tech roles, infrastructure etc etc and there is always something new that is met with suspicion but a few years later, it all becomes something users can’t live without, often the same people who slated it as being ‘pointless’ and ‘why do things have to change’ at the beginning.
Terminator X said:
Auto replies by AI must be the next gen of hold music or "press button 1". I guarantee it will drive people mad. Can you imagine not being able to email a person?!
TX.
I don’t need to imagine it, it is and has been happening for years. Automated email systems have just been ‘infused’ with AI these days. Same as helpdesk chatbots, it is a thing and is here to stay.TX.
What I don’t like is the actual use of the acronym AI for it all. It really isn’t AI, it’s just a very very advanced version of Google, that scraps, mines and leverages data from many connected sources, and once it starts with one answer it adds, exponentially, any wrong or right answers to its database. It’s pure logic, just calculated at vast speeds with an even more vast amount of data due to our connected lives.
Vibe coding, letting ai do the heavy lifting of coding.
https://youtu.be/YMi5Maeqtxs
Is it is easy as that guy makes it look? No idea.
If it is, that's quite impressive, though he is only at the start and setting up a basic site with little functionality is simple, but getting the donkey work out of the way like that is quite cool.
Getting more complex functions generated is going to be the tricky part, in a way its a lot like outsourcing your dev work, you will probably get what you ask for, but did you ask for the right thing?
https://youtu.be/YMi5Maeqtxs
Is it is easy as that guy makes it look? No idea.
If it is, that's quite impressive, though he is only at the start and setting up a basic site with little functionality is simple, but getting the donkey work out of the way like that is quite cool.
Getting more complex functions generated is going to be the tricky part, in a way its a lot like outsourcing your dev work, you will probably get what you ask for, but did you ask for the right thing?
We use Cursor quite extensively to write blazor apps for internal use (we only use private mode).
Its not going to replace a dev as it can't really understand business logic or integrate with our DAL successfully. But, for bashing out the framework and then freeing up the dev to do the more complex work it works very well and increases their productivity as we're not paying them to sit there for days and write 1000's of lines of code..
We run Azure Dev Ops so we vuln scan the repo and then it gets passed through Burp before UAT to make sure it's not done something stupid.
Its not going to replace a dev as it can't really understand business logic or integrate with our DAL successfully. But, for bashing out the framework and then freeing up the dev to do the more complex work it works very well and increases their productivity as we're not paying them to sit there for days and write 1000's of lines of code..
We run Azure Dev Ops so we vuln scan the repo and then it gets passed through Burp before UAT to make sure it's not done something stupid.
gangzoom said:
You have to be totally mad to let to relie on it totally, I came back to work off the Easter break to about 200 emails, zero chance I would let CoPilot triage/prioritise for me, it takes me sub 30 seconds to scan/pin/delete etc each, missing a viral email isn't something I would trust Copilot to do. But it can 100% make your work life easier and deliver better productivity. The $64k question is of course will it eventually reduce HR costs.......
Interesting stuff, thanks for that. We're a tiny company, and don't spend money needlessly on O365, nor use Exchange cloud or otherwise and aren't about to. But doesn't sound like it's worth it anyway.99flake said:
This is exactly what Microsoft CoPilot already does (and has done since its inception). It integrates with office 365 and Windows,
As above, we're a really small firm, and don't do O365, and don't do Microsoft's mail solutions... so even if free it wouldn't be able to integrate. And as per Gangzoom doesn't sound like it's a good idea to anyway.Edited by phil4 on Thursday 24th April 10:02
phil4 said:
I'm not talking about AI in someone's proprietary system I'm talking about things like Gemini rolled out to gmail, or apple's Intelligence... stuff the general public can use without needing to gamble money on possible snake oil.
If proven to work more people would be prepared to buy it at work etc.
And no I don't fancy building my own, integrating it with a mail client or acting as a man in the middle of imap.
And there'll be an AI you can use which will take all of your "dot points" and turn them into a war-and-peace tome. For the receiver to then put into their AI to get the damned details out and get rid 'o the fluff....If proven to work more people would be prepared to buy it at work etc.
And no I don't fancy building my own, integrating it with a mail client or acting as a man in the middle of imap.
I was looking at a CRM'y thing for managing service, from a rather large software company, and it's great AI contribution was that it'll take the attributes of a service call - date, time, who is coming, what they're doing - and insert those attributes into the typical and wordy "we and the board feel privileged to be able to serve you" bilge and email it. Okay boys - there we go, the future of civilization is now in safe hands....
phil4 said:
Instead of all this simple generating text, 21st Century clippy type thing... why not read my email for me, and summarise it, provide me with the key emails I must read, or summaries of them, highlight the ones I really should reply to etc. File away the ones I don't ever read, or ones for later etc.
My iPhone already does some of this, and would do more of it if I hadn't turned it off.AI is a great assistant.
I use Copilot at work and it's quite reasonable at finding things, summarising things and enhancing language. It's helpful to a great level in Teams calls once you get over the misunderstandings it has on words, especially proper nouns (including, ironically, Copilot). It's image creation is cartoonish but often reasonable, you cannot give it a reference image yet though.
I use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more at home to create images, code, enhance things I create.
It all depends on the prompts.
One thing I would or could expect is that Copilot embedded in Outlook should be better at spotting phishing; I asked CP if a phishing test email was phishing, you'd think it could look at the metadata and have a go. Nope.
As a business, we're looking at many ways to leverage AI to make benign processes run with more automation, solidify client engagement and save people doing mundane error-prone tasks. AI is not a person replacement and it's not Skynet, not for a long time. When the robots come, we'll all ask them to spell stwawbewwy and they'll be stumped.....
I use Copilot at work and it's quite reasonable at finding things, summarising things and enhancing language. It's helpful to a great level in Teams calls once you get over the misunderstandings it has on words, especially proper nouns (including, ironically, Copilot). It's image creation is cartoonish but often reasonable, you cannot give it a reference image yet though.
I use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more at home to create images, code, enhance things I create.
It all depends on the prompts.
One thing I would or could expect is that Copilot embedded in Outlook should be better at spotting phishing; I asked CP if a phishing test email was phishing, you'd think it could look at the metadata and have a go. Nope.
As a business, we're looking at many ways to leverage AI to make benign processes run with more automation, solidify client engagement and save people doing mundane error-prone tasks. AI is not a person replacement and it's not Skynet, not for a long time. When the robots come, we'll all ask them to spell stwawbewwy and they'll be stumped.....
Hoofy said:
gangzoom said:
The $64k question is of course will it eventually reduce HR costs.......
Yikes. Given how it can be completely wrong about things at times, I would not rely on it for legal work. There's a chance it could dramatically increase HR costs if it gets things wrong!
But they’re eating their own dog food, as the expression goes. Think they have slimmed down their HR staffing as a result.
I wouldn’t expect AI to replace more complex dispute type HR tasks yet.
DanL said:
Hoofy said:
gangzoom said:
The $64k question is of course will it eventually reduce HR costs.......
Yikes. Given how it can be completely wrong about things at times, I would not rely on it for legal work. There's a chance it could dramatically increase HR costs if it gets things wrong!But they’re eating their own dog food, as the expression goes. Think they have slimmed down their HR staffing as a result.
I wouldn’t expect AI to replace more complex dispute type HR tasks yet.
AI for use in emails is just not helpful to me.
If people are emailing me, expecting a response, it needs my knowledge and expertise to reply. A generic email drafted by CoPilot does not help me in the slightest. Maybe if replying to standrd-ish customer queries it can help but I don't get that type of email.
Where it is very helpful is for doing notes/actions from Teams meetings. Also, draft strategy/discussion papers where you need starting point. The tools can save a lot of effort there.
If people are emailing me, expecting a response, it needs my knowledge and expertise to reply. A generic email drafted by CoPilot does not help me in the slightest. Maybe if replying to standrd-ish customer queries it can help but I don't get that type of email.
Where it is very helpful is for doing notes/actions from Teams meetings. Also, draft strategy/discussion papers where you need starting point. The tools can save a lot of effort there.
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