Microsoft is Filling Teams With AI Agents (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0179358472
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/19/0157250/microsoft-is-filling-teams-with-ai-agents
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/news/781278/microsoft-teams-copilot-ai-agents
> Microsoft is adding a whole load of AI agents to Teams today, [1]promising Copilot assistants for every channel, meeting, and community . The new agents will also work across SharePoint and Viva Engage, and are rolling out for Microsoft 365 Copilot users.
>
> Facilitator agents will now sit in on Teams meetings, creating agendas, taking notes, and answering questions. Agents can also suggest time allotments for different meeting topics -- letting participants know if they're running over -- and create documents and tasks. A mobile version is designed to be activated "with a single tap" so you can make sure the agent doesn't miss out on "a quick hallway chat or a spontaneous in-person sync." Channel agents are designed to answer questions based on a channel's previous conversations and meetings and can also generate status reports for a project the same way.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/781278/microsoft-teams-copilot-ai-agents
Hallway chat? (Score:4, Funny)
[tap] (Agent wakes)
(Joe) Typical - super-positive morale-boosting town hall meeting, but a month later when it comes to salary reviews, things are "pretty tight".
(Frank) Yeah. And did you read about the CEO's bonus? He probably spends more on helicopter polish than he does on me.
(Agent) ...
Oh, for the love of Pete (Score:5, Insightful)
As if Teams wasn't annoying enough already...
I'd say "I hope there's a way to turn that crap off", but somehow I doubt it.
(yeah, I am expected to be on Teams all day, every workday)
Re:Oh, for the love of Pete (Score:5, Interesting)
They will need a reliable way to turn that off, or they will never be able to deploy this in Europe. The GDPR would actually mandate default-off.
Re: (Score:1)
> They will need a reliable way to turn that off, or they will never be able to deploy this in Europe. The GDPR would actually mandate default-off.
Care to elaborate on the GDPR comment?
I’m not questioning the default-off part. I’m more questioning why you assume the default-apply. You’re asking GDPR to protect a What, not a Who. If it currently works this way, don’t hold your breath and assume the AI anti-liability litigation team is done for the day. After all, they have AI also working that “problem” 24/7.
If Corporations Are People, then just imagine how far fucked the legal protections around AI will become i
Re: (Score:2)
> They will need a reliable way to turn that off, or they will never be able to deploy this in Europe. The GDPR would actually mandate default-off.
Absolutely false as demonstrated by the fact that AI agents are already a thing in CoPilot enabled software, and Teams already has CoPilot enabled features. There is zero change from an end user data management perspective from this in teams.
I wish there were, I would like nothing more than to have this useless CoPilot rubbish purged, but the reality is it is built on a GDPR compliant platform, as evident in the fact that it is already in use all over Europe.
Re: (Score:2)
So they do not send any data out and this is completely local to the machine it runs on for Teams? Because otherwise they need informed consent for this use. And last I checked, Teams has never asked me for any such thing. Or maybe the need another $500M fine to remind them what they actually need to do when deploying such tech...
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, you made me think...
If Teams would let me deploy an AI agent to attend a meeting in my stead , and would afterward provide me with a summary I could claim to have read (but would, in truth, have completely ignored)... I could get behind that 100%!
Re: (Score:2)
That already exists! Teams Copilot will do exactly that for you today
Re: (Score:2)
Well, now, I may need to rethink this whole thing!
Embrace, Extend... (Score:3)
Extinguish.
Re: (Score:2)
> Extinguish.
Errr no. Microsoft isn't embracing anything here. Their CoPilot is uniquely useless, Teams is tech they bought.
They aren't extending anything. These are features no one wants.
And they sure as heck are too incompetent to extinguish any competition.
I received CoPilot agent training... (Score:3)
2 weeks ago I was forced by my employer to sit through yet another AI initiative, this time how to setup and work with CoPilot agents. It was presented by Microsoft consultants. They worked from a script. They worked. CoPilot didn't.
Even when doing a (very lamely) scripted demo of CoPilot the thing didn't work. Agents didn't save, didn't do what they were briefed, and generally the entire thing was a waste of time.
I really look forward to having this in Teams. /s
Re: (Score:2)
Question is, is just CoPilot complete crap or is this a more systematic problem. For example, did MS cripple CoPilot with restrictions?
Paperclips (Score:2)
The juxtaposition of clippy and AI is just too perfect.
> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips b
Viva Enrage (Score:2)
Being a corporate spam tool, Viva Engage is mighty annoying as it is. With AI agents it will become completely insufferable.
What kind of loads? (Score:2)
Loads of what?
You can't even turn it off anymore (Score:2)
Initially it was possible to uninstall Copilot. Now, it reinstalls itself every day and shows a "pin me" notification every day if it's not visible at the top of your tiles.
Imagine my profound joy... (Score:2)
...at being recently retired and never, ever having to use Teams again!
collect IP (Score:5, Insightful)
They are collecting IP and insider info.
Re:collect IP (Score:4, Informative)
Why would they need to do that from Teams? If you're already using Teams its because your organization is neck deep in Windows/Office365. Your Crown Jewels are most likely already in the hands of trust of MS. And I think you underestimate *just how much* interoffice drama and "lunch time restaurant votes" and emojis and memes you'd have to crawl through to get that one piece of insider info that actually had value.... And getting an 'agent' to scour that from Teams? I mean.....the data is *already in* Teams, seems super inefficient to have an AI Copilot Agent do the heavy lifting here.
Re: (Score:1)
More data is always better in these deranged minds. Also, any updates will not be in what they already have.
I am undecided whether you are ineptly trying to defend Microsoft or are really this clueless.
Re: (Score:3)
Neither - Teams is an awful product. ;)
LLM is not some magic wand for data - its an API. You feed data in, you get text out. All of that data you are feeding in is ALREADY IN their api the moment you click 'send', it stored in their storage cloud, there for their parsing. If there's any "IP" or trading data in teams its already being consumed on the backend and processed by LLM, if thats your conspiracy...
The only *new* thing it could possibly get is "how are people interacting with an LLM
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously. But too many people are not smart enough to understand that.
Enterprises probably will need to have widespread prohibitions on the use of these "agents" now. I can also not wait for MS to get hacked (again) and all this information getting into the hands of organized crime and hostile nations.
Re: (Score:2)
> They are collecting IP and insider info.
First, the email server went into the O365 cloud. Then the file server followed. All in the name of saving money.
And NOW you’re concerned about “them” getting their hands on the IP? As if they don’t already, by thy own cheap-ass hand?
(No. I’m not going to pretend full end-to-end-encryption-at-rest is protecting secrets. Mainly due to the 95% chance none of that shit is in use. Because, cheap-ass.)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would they? Companies which have deployed Teams and Office 365 have handed over orders of magnitude more important things to Microsoft.
This is the equivalent of a kidnapper stealing $5 from your wallet while holding you for a $50k ransom.
Re: (Score:2)
Is there any reason why it would then be beneficial to have the agent visible to the users?
Re: (Score:2)
They don't need AI for that. Teams - and pretty much all Microsoft products - are honeypots designed to collect data.
Well, no so much "honeypots" in the case of products that employees are forced to use at their workplace: they're no honey needed to attract them and get them to give Microsoft data. If you disagree with Microsoft's privacy invasion, you lose your job.
That's the genius of Microsoft's particular brand of invasiveness: instead of convincing individual people their products are good enough to re