MICROSOFT'S AI COPILOT'S ENTRY-LEVEL JOB: DOING WORK YOU'D GIVE TO AN INTERN

Despite the tech evangelists constant chorus of praise for the amazing powers of current-generation AI, it's pretty clear that it's not going to be replacing CEOs or out-innovating entrepreneurs building startups anytime soon. AIs are just not that sophisticated. One thing the current AI technology can do well, though, is doing simple format, repetitive tasks. That's how one company appears to be really getting its money's worth out of Microsoft's Copilot AI. It's using it to automate many of the typical, boring bits of office work that might be given to the office noob or the intern. Technology news site ZDNet reports Amadeus, a multinational tech company that sells software systems to the travel industry, has embraced Copilot. The simplest thing it's using Microsoft's advanced AI for may seem blindingly obvious: It's automatically transcribing notes from meetings. In an interview with website Skift.com, Frederick Ros, the company's head of digital services explained that "There is no organization in the world that is really super good at taking notes of meetings." More importantly, he added "it's always difficult to have somebody focusing on what is said and taking notes instead of being part of the discussion." That does sound like many typical business meetings, and it may be why sometimes note taking is left to a staff member who isn't actually expected to take part in the chats, like an intern. But Copilot can apparently do it all, including accounting for different employees' accents and absorbing the company's specific business acronyms. The company also said it was using Copilot to summarize "long threads of chat between co-workers, which is particularly helpful for those who join a chat late." That's something that workplace digital chat app Slack has built into its software recently for the same reason. Amadeus is also using the AI to help employees draft emails -- which they're finding is especially useful "for non-native English speakers" -- and to help staff make better searches when they're looking for relevant information online or even analyzing the company's own data. The company seems to have fully embraced AI, and Ros explained that it's pushing to get staff to use Copilot daily so they "will have this deep understanding of how it works and what they can bring, and it will probably spark some ideas in their mind." That last idea chimes well with recent news from drugmaker Moderna, which also deeply integrated OpenAI's tech into its entire business structure. The company's CEO recently surprised people by saying he expects his staff to be consulting ChatGPT at least 20 times per day in order to streamline their work. It's glib to say that Amadeus is using Copilot to do work an intern would typically do, but the saved seconds from using an AI to, say, start off an email, all add up. Saved time can either contribute to a company's bottom line (since you may actually need fewer staff) or allow staff to get on with more meaningful tasks. And in this way, maybe that's actually the superpower of current-gen chatbot tech: it's all saving small companies with few employess critical time to actually do real work. The one issue with all this, of course, is that AIs can't be 100 percent trusted right now. Just as a junior staff member could make a slip-up when taking notes during a complex finance meeting, AIs are not foolproof, and current-gen chatbots can misunderstand instructions and even hallucinate totally fake responses to queries. So if you're being thorough while using AI to streamline some of your business processes, someone still has to go through and make sure it's giving the right answers -- lest you end up with bad notes or even in expensive legal trouble because of something an AI sent in an email. That sounds like a job for an intern. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON.