Microsoft is on FIRE with its agentic AI announcements at Ignite

[@DavidROliver]

Microsoft has produced a confusing landscape of tools that change very quickly, hence why I have little faith in the products they are demonstrating that will appear 'next year' on whether they will ever arrive at all. I think the challenge Microsoft is experiencing is that they are trying to pivot from established Apps in M365 to new Apps with AI at their core. This is easier for competitors such as Notion.so to achieve because a 'page' can hold text, a presentation and a spreadsheet and AI can act on all of it in harmony and these competitors are making easier and easier to migrate. We can see that Microsoft would like to emulate this functionality hence why Pages and Loop exist. Ironically I think what Open AI is doing could undermine the whole apple cart. Because Open AI are adding the facility to connect with Apps on the desktop, Coding to begin with has opened up a whole new ability. So why is this important? Same reason why Start-ups are beginning to avoid building tools on top of Open AI's platform, because they can easy copy the tool and effectively put the Start-up out of business. So where is the smart money? For me, keeping my ChatGPT subscription sounds like a better investment that buying Copilot for now.

[@brightideasagency]

I’m definitely keeping both. In my view the integration of AI into Microsoft’s existing line of apps is a positive for them, it creates a transition opportunity for workers and processes that never step outside of those apps. And while the computer vision aspect of AI integration to just follow along with what’s on screen is personally appealing to me, I remember the outcry about Recall doing this to store to a local database, let alone sending out to a cloud LLM.

[@DavidROliver]

​@@brightideasagency As someone who designs enterprise systems for a living, the Recall function did not cause me any alarm because logging, monitoring, and observability have been fundamental aspects of software and operating systems for quite some time. A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system, such as Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel, is used to analyze the data and messages generated by programs to identify any unusual activity. This approach is often how complex security breaches are detected when traditional antivirus solutions fall short. SIEMs have been one of the systems that have led the change in the use of AI having used Deep Learning models way before Large Language Models were invented. The security industry has viewed monitoring desktop activity as a logical next step. While Microsoft wasn't the first to propose this idea, the way they announced it with such fanfare may have been the mistake. Usually security announcements aren't given such a spotlight.

[@brightideasagency]

However, Recall is not a security tool, nor does it currently have any broad enterprise capability for the business to utilize that Recall data. This was probably a miss on Microsoft’s part - Recall as an enterprise compliance tool would get people a lot less heated I think.