<story><title>First look at Microsoft 365 Copilot</title><url>https://paulrobichaux.com/2023/12/14/first-look-at-microsoft-365-copilot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thedougd</author><text>I had similar results trying out Amazon Q. I fed it a copy of our employee handbook and had it scrape our corporate website. My idea is that this could be a good fit for an HR bot.&lt;p&gt;I asked it a few simple fact based questions, such as who our CEO is. It answered with our previous CEO based on an old press release. I asked it what year it is, and it couldn’t say. A few other specific fact based questions were either wrong or unanswered.&lt;p&gt;So I asked it higher level questions about what the corporation does. It was able to answer those.&lt;p&gt;Finally, I began asking questions about policies in the handbook. When I asked about harassment, it refused to provide any answers.  It felt like I was filtered. Filtering will kill the utility of these products. Something like a legal practice is messy business that the filter won’t like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jenk</author><text>The HR bot use case is very close to my domain - literally one of the teams reporting to me are maintaining the HR bot for a large enterprise - and it is a legal minefield. Whatever the bot provides as a response could be legally binding, according to legal. Examples of the kind of prompts we get in a many-thousands sized org:&lt;p&gt;- What are my p&amp;#x2F;maternity entitlements?&lt;p&gt;- When will I be promoted?&lt;p&gt;- What will the bonus pool be this year?&lt;p&gt;- What will happen to me if my boss finds out I have been slacking off?&lt;p&gt;and many more examples of prompts that HR&amp;#x2F;legal simply will not accept a vague, or worse: incorrect, response to. Each of those types of questions require specific and considerate knowledge that LLMs simply cannot produce.</text></comment>
<story><title>First look at Microsoft 365 Copilot</title><url>https://paulrobichaux.com/2023/12/14/first-look-at-microsoft-365-copilot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thedougd</author><text>I had similar results trying out Amazon Q. I fed it a copy of our employee handbook and had it scrape our corporate website. My idea is that this could be a good fit for an HR bot.&lt;p&gt;I asked it a few simple fact based questions, such as who our CEO is. It answered with our previous CEO based on an old press release. I asked it what year it is, and it couldn’t say. A few other specific fact based questions were either wrong or unanswered.&lt;p&gt;So I asked it higher level questions about what the corporation does. It was able to answer those.&lt;p&gt;Finally, I began asking questions about policies in the handbook. When I asked about harassment, it refused to provide any answers.  It felt like I was filtered. Filtering will kill the utility of these products. Something like a legal practice is messy business that the filter won’t like.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradley13</author><text>Your comment about filters is important. These companies are so worried that someone will generate &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; results that they disable whole swaths of potential queries.&lt;p&gt;All sorts of different people may genuinely need those results: Attorneys, doctors and nurses, law enforcement, private investigators. Individuals searching for advice. Doing background checks on other people. Heck, just high school students researching a topic.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure what to do about the (legitimate) concerns of the AI providers. They don&amp;#x27;t want a shitstorm, because someone got their AI model to [whatever]. But [whatever] can genuinely be important.</text></comment>