Comment on UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

• ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Its hardly possible to actually test it properly in relation to your work and changes in productivity with a single query per day. It

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  • 31ank@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They probably did multiple queries per day at the beginning, found out it isn’t worth it and stopped using it …

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    • Womble@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Thats complete speculation on your part though. It could equally be people hardly used it at first then started to use it more as they found ways it was helpful. Unless you see the data there's no reason to say one or the other.

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      • k0e3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Ok but if it was actually useful, wouldn’t people actively engage with it?

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    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Maybe, maybe not we actually have no idea as the article doesn’t mention it. Nevertheless, doing infrequent queries is an equally likely scenario, given that people are really bad at changing their habits and existing workflows regardless of potential benefits.

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  • tartarin@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You assume the average usage is representative of the actual usage. You averaged the actions over the time period, nothing’s says the users didn’t performed the averaged 72 actions within the first three days or any time restricted window within the whole period of time and got bored with it seeing no or low value.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s also possible a handful of power users use it a ton and found value, while the quiet majority only used it a few times because they were required to and didn’t see value.

      We need more details to draw conclusions.

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m not a programmer, so it’s got nothing tonoffer 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 maker use of AI and it doesn’t require a PhD and 30!days of constant usage to work that out.

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    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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      • Jhex@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Then maybe it’s not useful for you. That doesn’t mean AI isn’t useful for a number of other roles.

        Case in point, as per the article, AI is pretty useless for regular office work

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