Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the saviour of SMEs and scourge of CEOs
- Reference: 1718173929
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/06/12/microsoft_recall_sme_benefits/
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I spend a lot of my time working with the latter – and don't have much time for folks who see AI only as a means to write human effort out of the [1]economic picture . Everything I've learned about AI tells me that as you add automations, you increase the need for oversight.
[2]Hallucinations are only a small part of that. The vagaries of everyday life also complicate matters by always throwing up edge cases that no automation – however clever – can anticipate or resolve without human assistance.
[3]
That won't keep folks from [4]seeking the fools' gold of the "one-man band": a massive entity, controlled from a central point, by a single person, perhaps informed by AI. Ironically, leaders of such orgs often prove their fitness for the job by being efficient cutters of costs and people, rather than capable of devising and executing growth strategies.
[5]
[6]
In the real world of SMEs, the drive to automate is hoped to [7]massively increase the productivity of staffers and thereby grow the business. That sounds easy, until you discover that workers fill unique roles within smaller organizations – and many don't know what they do that truly delivers value.
That gap comes because jobs involve explicit work as well as many things we don't even know we're doing. That tacit work keeps organizations alive – if it gets lost in a drive to automation, the organization will suddenly founder.
[8]
It's hard to identify and measure tacit work. Nearly a century and a half ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of "scientific management" developed into practices that recorded, systematized and scaled mass production processes. Scientific management works well with processes generating physical outputs, but struggles to codify processes dependent on communication and collaboration. On the shop floor, Taylorism; in the office, tacit work remains supreme.
[9]When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?
[10]Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history
[11]Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC
[12]It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down
To capture the workflow within an office, you need to be down in it – keenly observing both the processes and all the interactions that shape those processes. SMEs seeking to amplify employee productivity must start here with a little light anthropology – or even a full organization analysis – that explores their own habits.
A proper analysis, of course, costs more than most SMEs can afford to pay.
But what if there were some way to automate the observations? Could that make it more accessible to SMEs who need to do that first bit of work, so they can understand how to increase worker productivity?
That conversation has been consuming my business partner and me over the last months, as we've learned what it takes to bring the benefits of AI to smaller firms.
[13]
Then, last month, Microsoft dropped a tool that no one had expected or asked for – and which seemingly no one needs.
That tool is Recall, the software that records everything done with a PC and regurgitates it.
Much has been written about the [14]manifold privacy and security issues Recall poses. To me, so much seemed weird about Recall that I never really saw the sense of it.
My clear-eyed business partner saw through it immediately: "It's [15]Robotic Process Automation ."
The most straightforward path toward automating any process is brute force: capture it in detail, then replicate what you've captured. Recall provides the perfect tool to capture all interactions with the computer, generating a compact plaintext database, organized by application and time – the sort of thing that's perfect for ingestion by a large language model, like Copilot.
Imagine using that Recall database with a prompt like "This is a sequential series of user interactions. Explain in a detailed, step-by-step analysis, what the user is doing, from beginning to end."
A few minutes later, any SME might find themselves reading an account of their key processes, neatly laid out and ready for automation.
It's the one blindingly obvious use case for Recall – even if Microsoft can't say so publicly. Why? Because most of Redmond's enterprise clients are obsessed with the fantasy of a " [16]one-man band ". Let slip the real purpose of Recall, and every worker in a mega-corp will suddenly realize that – with every keypress and mouse click – they're automating their way out of their jobs.
For SMEs, it's a very different story. Recall offers an inexpensive path toward process capture in the office, reducing the cost of bringing AI into the business. Recall opens the door to a range of agent-based workflow automations for SMEs – that Microsoft will [17]happily host on its own cloud.
How long until Microsoft admits the real purpose of Recall is to give businesses the tools they need to improve staff productivity by automating their everyday chores? SMEs will hear that message and embrace Recall – even with all of its [18]privacy and security concerns – to race past businesses so centered on cutting costs they would rather bleed out than grow. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/ai_gdp_inequality
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZmlxxKwe9IT7lpu-sIFWGQAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/06/ai_will_reduce_workforce_41/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZmlxxKwe9IT7lpu-sIFWGQAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZmlxxKwe9IT7lpu-sIFWGQAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/15/ai_coding_complications/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZmlxxKwe9IT7lpu-sIFWGQAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/15/ai_coding_complications/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/devaluing_ai_content_is_lazy/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/age_of_ai_pc/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/friction_is_good/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZmlxxKwe9IT7lpu-sIFWGQAAAIU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/25/microsoft_build_kettle/
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/10/intel_ceo_ai_automation/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/21/microsoft_extends_reach_of_copilot/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/windows_recall/
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Nope
micros~1's Recall only records WHAT the user did on their computer. It cannot capture WHY they did it.
Therefore, the LLM's analysis of that log will not reveal any picture which captures why the user is doing what they are doing and will miss the most important part of the process. You can't automate things where you don't understand the reasoning behind them.
Sadly, your business partner is merely engaging in the same blue sky thinking which probably motivated the creation of Recall in the first place.
Re: Nope
Also it's only capturing what's on the screen every 5 seconds, and it's not recording inputs - so that alone won't be sufficient to automate processes.
Re: Nope
Don't. Give. Them. Ideas.
Re: Nope
the businessman in the example is only asking the AI to document what is being done, one inference is that they know the why.
Eg if the computer is that of an office worker who processes orders, then they get the traffic analysis of moving between software as they entering the order details, consulting stock records, emailing the customer and so forth.
Re: Nope
Without knowing the "why" it would be difficult to correctly automate the process. Take, for instance, a situation where the business is down to the last few items of some product. Orders come in from two customers. Whoever's doing the stock allocation chooses one customer rather than the other.
Why? Is it random? Is it based on knowledge that one might have a more urgent need? Is it that one is a faster payer than the other? Does the business have more sales to one rather than the other. Is one customer a good mate?
Without knowing why the system has gained no information to enable it to make a similar trade-off in the future in the way the business might approve.
A more useful approach would be software that analyses demand and lead times to avoid that stock level issue entirely but that would be ordinary statistical analysis that needs no fancy clothes.
Oh dear
See title.
Power Platform
MS Power Platform already has tools for this, no AI necessary, it simply tracks email flows, files shared and forwarded etc and diagrams your processes from that. Did I mention, no AI necessary?
Oh dearie me...
What a load of drivel from some MS brown nose.
It's a shite idea, own it and say sorry.
All I can say is...
I'm relieved that I retired some years ago, and software development is now fun again.
El Reg needs a joke alert on these articles
That's good satire but a bit long winded.
So...
So while engaged in a task at random time open excel and add two random numbers and convert the sum into a date, then proceed until another random time, then open word on the org's procedures manual or code of conduct and spell/grammar check a random page, then proceed...
Get the idea? Use your imagination - spell checking invoices probably good too.
With these diversions Recall's AI should be producing some LSD standard hallucinations.
Throwing clever clogs into the looms the AI revolution. :)
Re: So...
I like that idea. Could simplify if even further by creating a webpage containing an IFRAME that randomly moves between a list of websites. Lots of fun ways to bugger up MS' data capture.
"Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated"
Hey man you look silly in those rose tinted specs, and stop hogging the spliff.
Is this really 'process capture'?
" Recall provides the perfect tool to capture all interactions with the computer "
I challenge the assumption of 'process capture' by recording interactions with the computer. For example, I once had to sort out PCI-DSS compliance for a client, and found that they were completing their self-certification without referring to what was actually being done -- a staffer was merely filling in the periodic computerised compliance report by tweaking the previous one, which had been completed by tweaking the previous one, and so on. The interactions with the computer were all perfectly reasonable. The problem was that the information entered bore no relation to reality. So a review via "Recall" would have yielded a positive report on a process that actually yielded utter garbage.
Ego
The problem with this is no different to the problem with business improvement using traditional tools - the egos of the directors. My experience is that none of them like you turning up and saying stuff like "we've collected data, done the analysis and it turns out that need to change xxx to yyy to improve zzz by 28% with a confidence limit of 2%." The concept that you can improve the business with some observation and data crunching is seen as threat by directors who assume that any business success is wholly due to their genuis (and any failures are someone else's fault, of course). It's bad enough when highly-paid consultants do it, but a "free" app running in the background.....?
What happened to ask the user?
That's how you capture processes, and even more so in an SME. Not just stare at tea leaves snapshotted by Recall and hope to divine something from them.
Re: What happened to ask the user?
Just asking the user is unreliable. You need to observe them actually doing things. But whether Recall is the right tool, that's another matter…
Re: What happened to ask the user?
Quite. The idea that knowing what's going on in your business "costs more than most SMEs can afford" seems bizarre to me. Particulary in an SME it probably means someone in a senior position spending a total of a few days' time spread across the year actually down on the shop floor. If you can't be bothered to do that, you probably chose the wrong career.
And business process development is not simply be about snapshotting current practice and codifying it:
with every keypress and mouse click – they're automating their way out of their jobs
Except that it doesn't record any keypresses or mouse clicks - it just OCRs text from screenshots several times a minute. The article assumes that literally everything is recorded and that's not the case. In which case you can't automate workflows from it unless you're making lots of guesses at what the user is actually doing - which are likely to be horribly wrong because there's nowhere near enough information there to do so accurately.
Lots of weird and bad understandings would be made by doing this. Imagine if an error message came up on screen whilst doing a task and that got captured by Recall. Your attempt to understand the workflow would then assume that that message was part of the work. And that's a simple problem - users task switch between applications constantly, often for unpredictable reasons : how do you construct a reproducible workflow from that?
Captured without context
If all this is doing is snapshotting what it sees, without understanding why the thing that's on the screen is on the screen, then I don't see how the data could be of any real value. Certainly, if they tried this with one of my colleagues, the analysis would likely show that completion of most business processes routinely include steps which involve playing Solitaire.
More likely is that MS will embrace and then extinguish those small businesses that it has captured fork flows for?