SPOKE: GENERATIVE AI AND OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY
#Spoke, #Adoption, #Microsoft 365, #GenerativeAI
Author: Jonathan Stuckey
Audience: Business leaders, Project managers, Change managers and End-users.
The Generative AI merger into Microsoft 365 suite is finally bringing to life the productivity improvements that have been in development for decades. While many organizations see this move with AI as something new, it's not. But it's still a hugely disruptive force in the workplace.
Combining a wide range of tools, apps, and functions with years of user telemetry and human-centric interaction, you can really boost your workforce's capabilities. Good workers can massively excel! Average workers can perform at a high-level - if we measure output accurately and trust the results.
Generative AI is the enabler for actual Office Productivity
Microsoft has been at the forefront of promoting productivity for over 30 years, catering to users and roles across various industries and countries worldwide. The primary focus has been on empowering users to become more productive, efficient, and effective in their evolving organisational tasks. For businesses and organisations, the goal is to enhance effectiveness and capability while managing (and ideally reducing) costs and reliance on specialised roles.
Microsoft 365 is the progression of the ongoing (never-ending) task of streamlining, integration and simplification of tools and services which support user productivity; whether creating documents, sharing information, capturing data, publishing pages, creating drawing's, managing registers... and so on.
And now add in Copilot. Microsoft's spin on ChatGPT 4.o plus 15-years of investment in various development and platform services, from natural-language interfaces, speech-processing, format translation to data-management, search-processing ...and on.
Where is the fall-out?
With all improvements in productivity there have been significant shifts in roles, activities and processing. Going from typewriters to word-processing precipitated the attrition of typing-pool roles and devolved the activity to everybody in the organisation.
Did it improve the quality, or the effectiveness of the output for all the people who were not trained in typing? No. It did democratise skills and access to the tools. It put a lot of people out of jobs, but also opened up a roadmap for more capable individuals as office administrators, PAs, EAs and so on.
We have similar shifts with the introduction of the spreadsheet, presentation tools, note-taking, etc. Each time what was lost was low-level admin and basic repetitive tasks. Up to now though these moves have not impacted what has been thought of as "high-powered" professions or roles.
What Generative AI (read:Copilot) hooked into Productivity tools is doing is a wholesale re-set of what we consider to be a 'professional' task or 'non-trivial' activity. Roles requiring analysis skills, design and basic creativity are being democratised.
Achieving Scale and Speed
Democratisation of non-trivial activities presents some very tricky things to deal in an organisation:
(potential) increase in the ability to generate new output, rapidly
reduction in required skilled roles in an organisation
reduction in number of people in the skilled roles
need for experienced people to QA the increased output
appropriate guidelines and oversight for application of tools
Now if you apply this across what we think of as skilled roles in businesses today, then we face a massive shift with a reduced need for (future) hiring these roles for specialised activities. For example:
Roles Impacted | Activities replaced | reproduced with Generative AI |
Business analysis | case development, requirements capture, trend analysis, model development |
Communications | news and article creation, enterprise and people communication |
Design | image generation and editing, prototype development, brand testing and compliance |
Legal Services | document preparation (template), research assistance - statues, case-law, precedents etc |
Marketing | campaign generation, contact data management, template generation |
People & Culture (HR) | recruitment mgmt, policy development, training content development |
Project management | task reporting, communications for stakeholders, ideation capture, summarise and std. documentation |
Technology | design standards, code generation and testing, documentation creation |
...and those are the ones I thought of while having a coffee.
This is not cutting jobs and roles in the organisation, this is not needing to recruit or hire for roles when a task or activity requires it.
Example: Creating and updating an operational policy
We are small organisation. We do not retain permanent (overhead) of HR advisor on staff. We use a HR advisory service when we need it.
When we need to create an organisation policy, like an employment or privacy policy, historically we would have contacted the Advisor, or searched online to:
find which policies we should have as good practice e.g. looked at https://www.business.govt.nz/
couple of hours of time here
have a look at providers like Grant Thornton, or HR Advise for options
couple of hours, and probably some emails or forms to complete
engage HR Advisor to create/draft one for us
cost of $/hr or sign-up on the service for this option.
run internal review before adopting and distributing.
internal managerial time - couple of hours for consensus, approval and publish
If you are a bigger organisation, and you have a HR personnel on staff, then this can end-up being an even more protracted process with internal development of policy, template, reviews etc.
With Generative AI (Copilot for Microsoft 365) - I create a prompt such as:
"Based on the Privacy Act 2020, Information Security and Data Breach Policy.docx, the Employee Code of Conduct.docx and common corporate policy standards, create a company Privacy Policy with associated Principles for New Zealand private company. Include examples and appropriate scenarios for IT consultancy working with New Zealand organisations, identify: Use, Ownership, appropriate Standards that should be applied and consequences of violating policy as recommended under the Employment Law and Privacy Act"
...review the output (which I tweak in another prompt to structure using our existing template and format) and send for review.
Table: Step through Microsoft 365 tools with Copilot assistance used:
App | Services | Activity | |
 | Microsoft Copilot service | Basic prompt, and reference Word template to put content into |
 | Microsoft Word with Copilot | Add core content with prompt, and wording refinement. |
 | Outlook with Copilot | Referral for review - coaching on email wording to colleagues |
The set of tools used were where Copilot acts as:
raw content generation,
formatting and editing of document and
coaching for wording when engaging peers for review.
Because we already have a number of operational policies, and templates and standards for how to create one, and we are experienced and knowledgeable we skip to the end of the process and QA the output.
This job becomes a couple of hours effort - no external bodies, or additional cost for experts. Now imagine being able to do that for all the roles and activities I listed in the table... What would that be as a cost-saving - if I can be sure of the output?
What is the broader impact across industry?
Historic productivity changes happened over years, and the new roles developed along-side. Re-defining skills required in specific jobs often took a long-time. Because of the speed of change and the ability to adopt, the people and organisations today impacted, do not have time to assess what we need tomorrow that will replace these lost roles.
How do you train for experience with the use of these new tools, so you enable the people you have to produce high-quality output which is accurate and valid? ...especially when the roles and tasks being examined may no longer be difficult, lengthy or (potentially) even required?
What do these new roles look like? What are the attributes, characteristics and skills required to survive and thrive in the new job economy? Right now - no one knows.
One thing you can be sure of is, whatever your role you will need to know how to get the best from your new breed of Personal Assistant because "Gen-i" wont spend the time on the phone or be in a different room - Microsoft's laser-focus on Productivity has put "Generative AI" into everything you'll use.
Our Recommendation:
Take time now, to learn how to work with your Copilot ...and understand how to critically assess that help it provides. It will change your job.
Want to know what we know? Give us a call!
For the best experience for your users, learn how to take Copilot for Microsoft 365 into day-to-day office productivity, figure out how to apply Generative AI to your tasks, or even just learn some of the tricks-of-the-trade? Email us at hi@timewespoke.com
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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