Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns
- Reference: 1724245208
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/08/21/microsoft_ai_copilots/
- Source link:
So says Jack Berkowitz, chief data officer of Securiti, who spoke with The Register about how businesses have adjusted to Copilots – largely by booting them from the corporate flight deck.
Microsoft positions its Copilot tool as a way to make users more creative and productive by capturing all the human labor latent in the data used to train its AI models and reselling it.
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But technology reached the market far ahead of safety and security. It was only two years ago that generative AI services started to appear and there's still some work to be done.
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More generally, Berkowitz has started to hear how generative AI projects have been going for corporate clients.
"You can find a few interesting use cases, but broadly, it seems like there's a lot of caution around this," he told us. "There are some systems that have gone into production that have really great ROI capabilities."
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Initiatives that have added generative AI into customer service apps have been generating returns for the companies that have done so, he said. Yet with regard to Copilots, security and oversight concerns are commonplace, according to Berkowitz.
"Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he explained.
Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be picked up by a Copilot service.
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"Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to data."
And it's not just human resources data that may get surfaced inappropriately through interaction with a Copilot service, Berkowitz added.
[6]Writers sue Anthropic for feeding 'stolen' copyrighted work into Claude
[7]Nvidia's latest AI climate model takes aim at severe weather
[8]California trims AI safety bill amid fears of tech exodus
[9]Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years
"A few weeks ago, we hosted a little dinner in New York, and we just asked this question of 20-plus CDOs in New York City of the biggest companies, 'Hey, is this an issue?' And the resounding response was, 'Yeah, it's a real mess.'"
Asked how many had grounded a Copilot implementation, Berkowitz said it was about half of them. Companies, he said, were turning off Copilot software or severely restricting its use.
"Now, it's not an unsolvable problem," he added. "But you've got to have clean data and you've got to have clean security in order to get these systems to really work the way you anticipate. It's more than just flipping the switch."
While AI software also has specific security concerns, Berkowitz said the issues he was hearing about had more to do with internal employee access to information that shouldn't be available to them.
Asked whether the situation is similar to the IT security challenge 15 years ago when Google introduced its Search Appliance to index corporate documents and make them available to employees, Berkowitz said: "It's exactly that."
Companies like Fast and Attivio, where Berkowitz once worked, were among those that solved the enterprise search security problem by tying file authorization rights to search results.
So how can companies make Copilots and related AI software work?
"The biggest thing is observability and not from a data quality viewpoint, but from a realization viewpoint," said Berkowitz. "So that you're sure that your governance is there, that you know where your data assets are, you know what people are involved in your system. Once you can get that observability in place, you can get the right controls in place."
Assistive AI software is all the rage at the moment, with Microsoft and its peers investing substantial sums in developing generative AI models, something they just won't shut up about it. They can't because they need to convince customers to buy opinionated, disclaimer-laden software as a service.
Yet it seems in the rush for revenues and trying to [10]convince businesses of the productivity benefits , other fundamental aspects that govern the way companies are directed and controlled were overlooked. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/anthropic_claude_copyright/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/nvidia_ai_weather/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/16/california_ai_safety_bill/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/gartner_see_payback_from_office/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/18/microsoft_copilot_moneymaker/
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Re: Customer service?
And once the customer has gone elsewhere it will be a long time, if ever, that they then discover the problem has been fixed.
Re: Customer service?
I was just about the comment on the same topic...
AI has been "generating returns" because management is cheap and lazy and AI is a patch on their incompetence. My own experience in "customer service AI", as I noted previously on El Reg , was a website where I was trying to remove an out of date, legacy phone number from my profile. It wouldn't let me because there was no "Delete" available on those data fields.
So to the help AI chat bot I went. After asking me some questions...it deleted the now-redundant phone number.
Which, of course, begged the question: would you *need* to have an AI chatbot if your website was properly designed with a 'Delete' option in the first place??
So, my singular experience simply states that, as expected, corporations are using "AI" to reduce their headcount as well as patch over poor customer experiences. Why hire living people, some in customer service and some in more technical fields, all of which you have to pay, if you can [hope] your "AI" implementation fixes the issues that these real people would have?
It is just another "productivity increase / C-suite pay bonus" scam for the rest of us [working peons].
Re: Customer service?
Contrarian view. For the good deployments - you've used it and not noticed....
Large companies should be able to produce their own software.
Then they will control how it works, won't have to worry about updates or end of life surprises, and can even sell it to others.
The moment you get your software from a third party, you put your resilience, viability and profitability on someone else's chopping block.
If you don't trust Microsoft's behaviour, agenda, reliability or priorities, start your own in-house software unit.
Re: Large companies should be able to produce their own software.
... and in about 10 years of employing the same number of programmers that Microsoft employs for Windows, you'll have a product about like Windows. Now you need to get started on application software...
I see where you're going with it. But at some point, you HAVE to get stuff from someone else. Even most large companies do not have the spare resources to build an operating system or application software. (But there are alternatives to Windows, MS Office, Teams, Outlook, etc.)
Who would have thought
that a software vendor's claims of security and ROI wouldn't be quite accurate? Especially on a product that only recently hit the market. Go figure...
GenAI is good in this instance.
If CoPilot can find the Salary figures - then so can anyone else using Delve or one of the other more creepy O365 products.
Its a scanner for insecure data....and therefore a useful thing.
You dont blame the virus scanner for finding insecurities - you thank it and fix the underlying issue. This is the same but for discoverable data.
Customer service?
Initiatives that have added generative AI into customer service apps have been generating returns for the companies that have done so, he said.
No doubt, but have they asked their customers if they appreciate it? In my experience it provides far worse customer "service", though no doubt it allows the companies to save money on all the people they fired. I have a feeling this will be like the offshored call centres, which all had to be dragged back onshore as customers complained and voted with their wallets.