The last interesting genAI experience I would like to present in this blog post was during my internship at a major telecommunications firm. Different than my usual application of ChatGPT, I had to work with Microsoft Copilot. And let me tell you, I am not a fan.
My team (of less tech-savvy employees I must add) was asked to implement Copilot in a new project. As the gen Z, tech enthusiast intern, I was told to lead this project with a colleague. The project itself was quite simple. It constitutes of a database which had to be summarized, analyzed, and finally presented to the customer. This database was nothing out of the ordinary, a few hundred columns and rows with basic inputs in MS Excel. After working and experimenting with ChatGPT since a good year or so, I was sure that basic prompts would work just as fine with MS Copilot. I was so wrong.
Copilot was able to tell me the largest/ smallest number in each category over the years stated in the database.
That was about it. I prompted “create a pivot table including data from A2:G8 (for example)”. That, apparently, was too difficult to understand so I tried again. “Please create a pivot table using data, starting from cell A1 to cell G8. Include all data in this range”. It still did not work.
Apart from the example of the pivot tables, analyzing this data turned out to be the most demanding task I got during that internship, since writing out the correct prompts alone cost me several hours. I must add, Copilot was just recently published for the private customer, and was far from perfect, however, thinking back to the beginnings of ChatGPT, the level of completeness in Copilot was far from the one of ChatGPT. I was happy that due to several issues with the AI, the project was closed a few weeks after.
In general, MS Copilot is a brilliant idea. I could think of a lot of tasks in my Microsoft applications which would be simplified by implementing AI in the program itself. However, unless Copilot receives a major update, I think I will further rely on ChatGPT.
(It has been over half a year since my internship, so Copilot might have evolved since then)
