Examine the art and science of working with AI
Microsoft gained valuable insights into how AI is going to transform work from the tens of thousands of customers and employees who are already using Copilot for Microsoft 365. Its early findings show that there’s both an art and a science to working with AI—and what you get out of it depends on how you ask.
This new way of working is sorely needed. Over the past few years, the pace and volume of work continue to rise. According to data from searches across Microsoft 365 services, on any given workday, Microsoft's heaviest Microsoft 365 users:
- Search for what they need 18 times.
- Receive more than 250 emails.
- Send or read nearly 150 chats.
Across the globe, Microsoft Teams users are in three times more meetings each week than they were in 2020. And on Windows, some people use 11 apps in a single day to get their work done.
AI helps lift the weight of work, augmenting human capability and accelerating everyone’s innate ingenuity. When leaders learn how to effectively harness the power of AI, they can empower their people to embrace this new era of AI-powered productivity—and reap the benefits for their organization.
Building new work habits
The era of the PC democratized access to the word processor, a then-revolutionary technology. The age of AI offers an always-available, never-tiring partner that can help you think through, well, everything.
According to data from Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index survey, information workers who said they didn’t have enough time and energy in their day were nearly 2x more likely to say that they could achieve high performance if they had a personal assistant. AI gives every member of your workforce a personal sounding board whenever they need it, one that has infinite reserves of time and energy.
The potential is enormous, but working with AI requires building new work habits. Although AI can't replicate the magic of brainstorming with other people, it significantly enhances rapid collaboration, especially for flexible and distributed teams who aren’t in the same office or time zone. In fact, Copilot can actually enhance collaboration with your team: Just ask it to pinpoint the unresolved questions during a Teams meeting or suggest any potential discussion points when cocreating in Loop. You can also use the Copilot Lab to experiment with prompts, share your favorites with fellow workers, and get inspired.
Copilot doesn't always get it right. In fact, Microsoft likes to say that those outputs are “usefully wrong.” In that way, it’s similar to when you brainstorm with a person. While what they suggest isn’t always right, those ideas can help you refine your own thinking.
Rarely is any individual’s suggestion the million-dollar idea. But not-quite-right suggestions can stimulate your own creative juices—helping you and your team get to that idea. It’s yet another piece of information that helps you get to an answer. The same is true of AI. Out of 10 suggestions for a catchy presentation title, one may spark some inspiration, leading to the perfect phrase.
Lifting the weight of work
We all struggle under the weight of work. Information, deadlines, and the crush of "always-on" communication can often overwhelm us. AI can help—not just by making work easier or faster, but by making it more fulfilling. When we don’t need to spend as much cognitive energy on figuring out what happened in that meeting, getting caught up on email, or finding that document from that chat last week, we can spend more time on the substance of our work—and our purpose for doing it.
Researchers at Microsoft who study AI-augmented cognition suggest that it may be useful to think of our relationship with AI through a sports analogy.
- At one end of the spectrum, the researchers say, AI can function like a steroid, giving people a short-term superhuman boost—instantaneous email drafts, quick social media copy—just by offloading work to it.
- In the middle of the spectrum, AI is like a high-quality running sneaker. It can speed up routine, time-consuming tasks (think cleaning and reformatting data), freeing up time and making people more productive in the moment without any long-term consequences.
- At the other end of the spectrum is where AI begins to truly transform work. It's at this point when AI serves as a coach, improving people’s own capabilities over time instead of merely assisting them in the moment.
With thoughtful design and use, the researchers explain, AI tools can augment people’s innate abilities—leading to unprecedented boosts in productivity.