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As Microsoft’s Ready-made Ai Agents Work Their Way Into Big Businesses, Workers Fear Unemployment While Managers Fear Disaster
In our increasingly tech-saturated lives, it is unsurprising that yet another advancement in AI has been launched into a burgeoning market.
But it is Microsoft’s new AI employees that has really got the world talking – in some cases with excitement, but in most with an intermingling sense of dread and anxiety.
That’s because the new Microsoft Copilot offers ten ready-made AI employees, designed to take on menial work tasks so that employees and managers can divert their attention elsewhere.
However, the ten AI agents and the capability for businesses to tailor a bespoke AI employee to their requirements, has left employees fearing for their jobs.
With law firm Clifford Chance and UK retailer Pets At Home among the flagship companies Microsoft namedrops as users of their AI program, it’s no wonder that people are concerned. After all, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which office and administrative jobs in particular are deemed no longer necessary.
According to a Microsoft blog post, Pets at Home in particular are using the Copilot agents to assist their fraud detection team.
The company are also leading the way in using AI tools throughout the business, including to help streamline operations and help the employees – both in their retail stores and in their veterinary practices – to maximise their time.
In the blog post, William Hewish – Pets At Home’s Chief Information Officer – explained that the tools were being used to enhance the workers’ roles, not to eclipse them:
“There are lots of demands on clinical colleagues’ time, so to help them with spending more of this time seeing patients, making the admin more efficient is the obvious answer. There’s only so much a person can do in a day.
It’s about freeing up clinicians to do clinicians’ work that they’re trained years for. It’s what they love and what they want to do. They want to save pets. They don’t want to sit at a screen.”
However, despite the wholesome approach and positive results that Pets at Home report, many managers are concerned about the practicalities of ‘hiring’ AI agents. This is especially the case as copious tests around the world have evidenced AI failing at even the simplest of tasks.
The concern here is that while the programme is designed to take boring, simple tasks out of all our our workloads, it may actually cause new tasks – in checking and fixing the AI’s work – to pile up.
As becomes quite clear when watching viral, AI-generated videos online, AI isn’t up to human standards – yet.
In fact, while Andrew Rogoyski – director of the University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centred AI – notes the benefits of AI in big business, he is realistic about the potential drawbacks too. In an interview with The Guardian, Rogoyski explains that it might be some time before businesses see meaningful returns on their monetary and financial investments into AI:
“AI companies have consumed a lot of investment money and need to generate some returns. Assistive agents is a way of showing everyday benefits, although how much revenue these will generate is an open question.
We’ve yet to deliver an agent that is as capable as a human worker.”
And Microsoft Spokespersons are clear too: Copilot agents are designed to support and complement human workers, not replace them.
In The Guardian, Microsoft corporate vice-president Charles Lamanna explained that the tool was intended to boost productivity and employee wellbeing:
“I think it’s much more of an enabler and an empowerment tool than anything else.”
However, given our contemporary reliance on computers, his supposedly reassuring comparison could, to some people, be anything but:
“The personal computer didn’t show up on every desk to begin with but eventually it was on every desk because it brought so much capability and information to the fingertips of every employee.
We think that AI is going to have the same type of journey. It’s showing up in a subset of departments and processes, but it’s only a matter of time till it shows up to all parts of an organisation.”
As AI becomes increasingly interwoven with our everyday life and working practices, the message from Microsoft is clear.
Your job is safe. But for how long, who knows?
