Il processo del governo britannico di M365 Copilot non trova un chiaro aumento della produttività
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_government/
di F0urLeafCl0ver
Il processo del governo britannico di M365 Copilot non trova un chiaro aumento della produttività
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_government/
di F0urLeafCl0ver
20 commenti
boosting productivity in Government? not even the most powerful AI tool will achieve it.
believe me. I think copilot is not great – to put it lightly, but it is a big lift to try and boost productivity in the government.
Because its dumb as a bag of rocks, doesnt integrate well with products and produces quite low quality products that you need to spend a good amount of time fixing.
It’s not useless, it can actually help some people and I’ve found it useful for a couple of specific tasks, but if you have a bunch of people that are professional researchers and writers the best thing it does isn’t very useful.
If it did the things people were bad at or were too expensive to have a lot of like project management, data analysis, reporting and analysis etc and helped you use digital tools you would otherwise need a trained and experienced person to help with like things in the power suite of apps and functions it would be transformational.
But even even when it can do things with that you end up needing a qualified person to implement because it still hallucinates and it’s not connected to the applications. Which is the mad thing, you want computer from star trek and you have c3p0.
It’s nice to have, but it’s going to be that transformational until it’s more advanced and actually integrated with applications in a meaningful way and can ask for a complex task and get good quality comprehensive directions and advice. Which given its still hallucinating and lying like mad is right that it isn’t a thing… but that is the point it’ll be useful rather than a toy that’s useful for a few specific things.
I have found it useful for searching my emails, summarising information, finding answers to questions, but it’s only useful in comparison with how shit Microsoft, Google, etc. have made their traditional search products.
In the past I could spend 3 minutes Googling my query and get to a stackoverflow thread with an answer that I could adapt to my problem.
Now Stackoverflow is terrible and that’s before I navigate the swamp of irrelevant results Google now serves up. So all AI has accomplished is a return to the same productivity as 10 or 15 years ago.
If the business model relies on enshittification of one user interface and then AI to the rescue to cut through it, it’s not going to work.
AI will have a stab at writing the code for me but it invariably hallucinates a function that doesn’t exist so no productivity gain there either.
The one thing I was giving it unreserved praise for was in researching new ideas and summarising ideas I’d had for solutions in areas I wasn’t that familiar with.
However, after getting burned by workflows and suggestions that simply don’t scale, I can’t even rely on it for this anymore.
It can take meeting notes though. With about as much accuracy as the voice-to-text software we had in the 1990s.
I saw that Copilot has replaced my spell checker in parts of Outlook. So instead of simply clicking red underlined text to correct a typo, I have to click to get the menu up, click ‘Ask Copilot’, wait for Copilot open, then wait again whilst it sends and returns a search, only to find that it’s wrong, then give up and change it manually.
That sort of nonsense being embedded in places where the old tool worked perfectly, is costing me time and my company money. It’s noticeable how the CFO’s ‘AI will save us’ rhetoric has evaporated. The tools on offer, that we’re prepared to pay for, do virtually nothing for our business.
For balance: there are tools that will revolutionise our operations but they aren’t MS or OpenAI so we won’t pay for them.
Likely civil servants and local authority staff tend to be older so less likely to change their work tendencies to incorporate AI.
I should add that I work for a local authority that allows use of copilot.
Out the box AI feels quite far off. Unless you’re a software engineer or a translator I don’t think there are many use cases where you can just throw AI into the mix and expect it to have good results.
Job specific applications are coming; but it sounds like this was just looking for a magic bullet.
You need to have staff who are actively working on making AI solutions bespoke to your company. For instance, you could ‘teach’ (I’m using layperson terminology here) an LLM about your company’s domain, and use it as a quick reference for lookups.
You could ‘teach’ it how to do data entry or checking documents for mistakes (as in information mistakes not spelling/grammar) but somebody has to actually put this in place.
A couple of months ago I wrote some text in a Word document for an update on a project. It was on the iPhone app and for some reason it refused to show me the word count, so I asked the integrated MS Copilot for the word count. It said 1136 words. It couldn’t have been more than 250 words in reality. I asked it again; it apologised and said 950 words. It can’t even do the basic shit.
Hope review was not done by a civil servant worrying about loosing jobs.
It also depends how one uses copilot – if prompts are not efficient the output quality may vary.
My organisation launched it last year, the benefits to deal with admin have been amazing. If i am looking for something, rather trying to search emails etc, I ask co-pilot.
After two weeks holiday had over 490 emails which was a nightmare to deal with, so I asked copilot summary on where I needed to respond, key decisions in that period and if any actions on me. Done all within two hours.
I just finished a piece of work for a large uk gov department on creating use cases, AI service model and training their staff on co-pilot.
In summary, from a people perspective, a third didn’t care and will hardly use it, a third were fully onboard and a third just used ChatGTP or Gemini rather than copilot.
Most used it for Team meetings and that’s it.
Anecdotally, I saw no productivity improvements at all. Worryingly, the new younger member of staff simply struggle to work without asking an AI for anything!!!
What i find funny is that MS is starting to let other agents on their own software. I was using Claude with Dynamics 365 for example for testing, and often worked better than it’s built in Copilot.
Of course it didn’t, for those kinds of jobs all that happens is you run it through AI but then have to go through and recheck the work to make sure it didn’t hallucinate, so you’re basically doing the job twice.
It is difficult to get a person to be productive, when their job depends on them not being productive.
As a company that uses predominantly MS products Copilot is great for checking how to do something, or fix something without bugging IT.
Some users have adopted it – others are still looking for the ‘any’ key.
AI is great when used correctly. We had a macro in Word we use daily to generate emails and reports, and it stopped working when we switched to Windows 11. Put it in copilot and it modified the code to work. Took seconds to fix the issue
Same with formulas in Excel that you may not know
Problem is AI has been forced on people with no clear instructions on how it actual works or how it can benefit you. Its a great tool when you know how to use it
Oh god please don’t get rid of it!
Writing SJAR’s and NSAR’s have never bene easier.
Co pilot is crap, we don’t even touch it at work. We use Chatgpt and there is a productivity boost in some areas, particularly coding,product knowledge and documentation.
Not really surprised. I’ve seen no value to Copilot either yet MS seems to want to push it into everything.
It’s a bit of a shame the government is wasting time and money on bets testing Microsoft’s products but the upside of this is they’ve made their little contribution to bursting the AI bubble.
Introduced at work with a big fanfare. Heavily pushed by ambitious managers. Of limited use. Come to think of it, the same could be said for Copilot.
Copilot is irritating right now. I have the document open. We are working on this document. Why can’t it read the document we are working on to do a specific task I have asked for? I have to copy and paste the text in? What a pile of steaming horse hockey.