I’ve got my eyes on this: Microsoft is reportedly working on a major UI improvement for its Teams services. The change is supposed to finally merge its text chats and channels into one location in the future. In all the years of being waist-deep in the Teams universe, one common thread for getting users to…
The question is, can the large tech companies come up with a clear explanation of where AI is going that will convince shareholders that there is long-term value? So far, I don’t think they have, and I say that as someone who generally likes some of the AI tools out there. I think they are reasonably helpful around the edges of my work. They cut time out of my research efforts and helped me with writing. They haven’t changed the world, and it’s not clear that they can do that in their present form. Without that, what are the billions in investment and all the electricity usage for?
Big tech will need a better answer to that question than it has, or investors will walk away even more than they did last week.
Like Microsoft, Google claims it will still run all of this using clean energy by 2030. However, the current emissions data do not indicate that this is possible. The need for energy will not go down, and these companies will not walk away from the trillions of dollars invested in AI already.
This is happening while we watch the earliest recorded Category 5 hurricane because of the extremely warm water temperatures in the Atlantic.
That doesn’t mean we won’t make a mess of things getting there. Some employers will go through rounds of layoffs, hoping to replace workers with AI writers, photographers, coders, etc. Plenty of companies will rush to add something they can call “AI” to their products to look innovative, and everyone will stumble along learning what AI might be useful for.
Then, we’ll end up using the AI built into all the same tools we use now.
The M365 newsletter is a year old, and while it’s not been a huge commercial success, it’s been fun to do, and it’s brought some value to folks, whether they are paid or free subscribers. The big thing I wanted to mention is how being a subscriber and referring your peers could help get you a limited paid subscription for free:
You can say that users aren’t allowed to use AI without approval, but as the link above points out, they’re going to anyway. And why wouldn’t they? Most of them are stressed and overworked, and you’re telling them not to use a tool that could cut some of the time spent completing assigned tasks.
Good luck with that.