Microsoft Should Focus On Making Copilot The Ultimate Intern

Key Takeaways

Copilot can help people focus by taking on tasks, leaving more time for important work.
Repetitive tasks are perfect for Copilot to handle, freeing up humans for higher-level jobs.
There are no moral issues with an AI intern taking on monotonous tasks, allowing for more efficient work.

Copilot can do a lot of things. Over the course of 2024, we’ve seen it appear in a wide range of Microsoft’s products, gain the ability to draw images using Designer, and even get its own plugins. Microsoft really wants Copilot to be the king of AI, able to take on any task, perform any duty, and perform in any artistic medium, which is why Microsoft will likely be disappointed to hear that companies are using Copilot as a glorified intern.

However, is that necessarily a bad thing? Should Microsoft be aghast that their advanced AI is being used to take meeting notes and summarise reports? Or is it something the company should lean into? I honestly believe that Microsoft should make Copilot the ultimate intern, and here’s why.

Copilot as an intern can help people focus on their jobs

Copilot can take up the slack, leaving you with better things to do

A man behind a computer working on a document in Microsoft Word.

In the example linked earlier, the company Amadeus found that its employees worked best when they offloaded tasks such as meeting transcription and email draft generation to Copilot. And let’s be honest; who really wants to do that kind of work? They often feel like filler around the actual job that you’re trying to do.

So, why not hand it off to Copilot? That way, people can do the job they’re hired to do and Copilot can pick up the slack and do all the menial stuff nobody wants to do. Plus, Copilot doesn’t get tired or bored of the job itis doing, so it’s always doings its best at the more menial of jobs. Seems like a win-win to me.

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Repetitive or monotonous work is perfect for an AI to do

Copilot won’t mind if you tell it to do the same tasks hundreds of times over

Speaking of jobs nobody else wants to do, you won’t find many volunteers for a job that requires doing the same simple task over and over again. But that’s exactly what computers do best; we’ve been using them to do those jobs for years now. So, why not lean into that and allow Copilot to do all the chores everyone else finds mind-numbing?

Focus on making Copilot an excellent transcriber, and people can use it to take notes for meetings. Add in the ability to churn through lots of data and spit out the best parts, and now you also have an AI that can tell you the key points of that same meeting. You can also point it at any large report and have it sum up for you, or even create a mini presentation you can show to your manager. And if it doesn’t do the job right the first time, you can tell it to throw it all out and do it again, and it won’t complain.

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There are little to no moral quandaries with an AI intern

No need to feel bad using your AI tool

AI is a powerful asset, but it can be used for both bad and good. Solving an equation, or translating text? That’s a great way to use AI. Making convincingly fake images of major figures or plagiarising work for an essay? Not so much. Whenever a task involves an AI model scraping examples off of the internet, or does a job that can replace someone else, there’s always the concern of AI stealing or replacing human work.

However, there’s little to no issues with having an AI that can take notes about meetings or sum up large documents. In these cases, the AI isn’t taking things off of the internet as inspiration for its own work; it’s all locally based. Best of all, when AI PCs get good enough to run Copilot locally, you don’t have to worry about what it’s grabbing from the internet; you know it’s pulling from local data instead.

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Copilot doesn’t need to do it all – just the bits we don’t want to do ourselves

I understand why Microsoft wants Copilot to do everything and anything thrown at it. After all, if a competitor model can do something that Copilot can’t, then it looks bad on Microsoft. As such, I don’t blame the Redmond giant for adding as many features as possible. However, when it comes to advertising Copilot to people and companies, I believe Microsoft should hone in on showing off how Copilot can take a major load off of the annoying things we have to do on a day-to-day basis. That, plus some little extra focus on said features, would make Copilot the ultimate intern.