Actual Ad Link: https://www.instagram.com/microsoft365/p/C7j8ipnxIiI/?img_index=1
Awesome article about the ad which sums it up nicely:
https://justinpot.com/watch-me-be-in-three-meetings-at-once/
Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings.
Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job.
Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings.
What this will mean is middle management will fire all the line managers. Your only contact with management will be through one of their AI’s.
[Robot Voice] Work harder! Your vacation is denied. Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions! There’s no way your solution will work. Drive this bus off the cliff or find another job! Write a 15-page self-assessment of your accomplishments this quarter. Your performance review is 0 out of 5. Your pay is cut 10%. No, I did not read your self-assessment. I didn’t have time. Our company has failed. I’m giving myself a $2M severance. You are fired.
That was both wild and entirely accurate at the same time.
I already had our CEO send us a speech video of him made with ML during a all-hands, although he said just afterwards it was made with ML. I fully expect this to become the norm in the future, even if we can tell the uncannyness for a while, they will not care.
Iike those encouraging videos of N+5, N+6 and all the way up to N+13 (been there, sleeped through them).
Who actually listens to the dravel? Is it just so bosses can feel meaningful?