An heir to annoying Clippy

Microsoft parachutes an AI little helper into its apps

Jokes have been doing the rounds on social media suggesting Microsoft’s announcement last Thursday that it is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its ubiquitous productivity apps Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams and Outlook means the return of “Clippy”, the Office Assistant.

Readers of a certain age your correspondent among them will remember Clippy, the animated paper clip that popped up in Office at the most annoying moments, interrupting work and driving the world’s cubicle dwellers round the bend.

You would type “Dear Mrs Smith” into Word, and Clippy would pop up out of nowhere and say: “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” It never was much help and trying to disable it never worked properly; Clippy would always return to irritate people who were trying to get real work done.

The anthropomorphic assistant (it had big cartoonish eyes and eyebrows) is arguably the single most annoying piece of software Microsoft has created. It became known as the “Office pest”.

Thankfully, it wasn’t around too long the software giant killed it off after a few years.

Memories of Clippy resurfaced last week when Microsoft took the wraps off Copilot, a new AI-powered assistant in Office now called Microsoft 365 based on the GPT-4 generative AI model developed by OpenAI, the startup in which Microsoft has invested more than $10bn.

While the latest batch of Clippy jokes are funny, Microsoft is taking the AI opportunity seriously. In generative AI or AI that can create its own text, images and even music it sees the opportunity to stick it to longtime rival Google in internet search while giving legacy apps such as Office sorry, Microsoft 365 a new lease of life.

Indeed, Microsoft hasn’t pivoted towards a new technology as aggressively as this since the advent of cloud computing, when it recognised early on that reliable, ubiquitous and high-speed internet infrastructure would transform the way individuals and companies use and deploy information technology. It’s clear the company sees AI as the next transformative wave in computing.

And it’s putting its money where its mouth is, not only investing in OpenAI but spending billions more expanding its Azure cloud infrastructure to cope with millions of requests a day from internet users keen to exploit AI tools.

The company benefiting most from this spend is Nvidia, best known for graphics chips that power the latest video games. It turns out that those chips handle deep learning, an important part of the machine learning that underpins generative AI, rather well.

As a result, Nvidia’s share price has more than doubled in the past six months, giving the company a market capitalisation north of $600bn five times the market cap of Intel.

But back to Microsoft. Last Thursday’s showcase of OpenAI’s GPT-4 integrated into its productivity apps was impressive. If what Microsoft demonstrated in a keynote address works as seamlessly as suggested, its AI-powered Copilot is going to have a meaningful impact on the productivity of office workers.

“It works alongside you, embedded in the apps millions of people use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more,” said Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro.

“Copilot is a whole new way of working.”

He’s not exaggerating. Microsoft’s demo showed how Copilot can give someone joining a Teams video call 20

minutes after its start a concise summary of what they missed so they can quickly catch up. Or how it can build a PowerPoint presentation based on the content of a Word or Excel document (or both), or by simply giving it instructions. Or how Copilot can summarise a lengthy e-mail thread so a user doesn’t have to read each message. It’s astonishing stuff, and the applications seem almost endless.

Also astonishing is how quickly AI tools are becoming integrated into modern computing. It’s been only a few months since OpenAI wowed the world with ChatGPT, yet Microsoft is rapidly bringing these tools into the world of work and breathing new life into products such as Word and Excel that have long been considered mature and staid.

Microsoft isn’t in this race alone, of course. Its competitive rivalry with Google is helping to spur its rapid rollout of AI and its integration into everything from productivity software to its (now excellent) Edge web browser.

Google, aware of Microsoft’s announcements last Thursday, held its own press conference days earlier to talk about how it intends to infuse AI into its web-based productivity tools. But for now, Microsoft has seized the early momentum.

There’s a PR war playing out too, and Google has found itself in the uncomfortable position of being on the back foot, scrambling to demonstrate it can beat Microsoft in this stillnascent field.

There are billions of dollars at stake as these two titans of tech go toe to toe in the world of AI. For now, Microsoft is winning the PR game and that’s no small achievement especially as it’s the same company that inflicted on the world the monstrosity that was Clippy.