Microsoft is Filling Teams With AI Agents (theverge.com) 57
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is adding a whole load of AI agents to Teams today, 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.
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.
collect IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:collect IP (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
It's like the company I work for. Usage of AI is extremely limited (by a CYA training session): do not ever upload any company code or files to the AI.
Also the company hosts everything externally on Github, Gmail, and Google Drive.
Apparently the lawyers believe Google is only training AI on questions you make on Gemini and isn't scanning Gdrive and Gmail for everything (which we literally know they are because they announced "agents" for Gdrive files, and Gmail is full of "agents" too)
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
Hallway chat? (Score:5, 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)
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.
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'm pretty sure the OP just meant that Microsoft is finally going triple-E on themselves, and Teams will be the first victim.
Completely pointless so far (Score:1)
I actually work at MSFT and have had facilitator agents on my Teams meetings for ages. Thing is, if I'm talking to colleagues, I'm concentrating on what they're saying and showing me. It would be a complete distraction to look at the Copilot sidebar. I'm more than capable of checking the time myself, and I'm much better placed than the agent to figure out whether a meeting needs to run over (or be cut short). The structured notes at the end can sometimes be useful, but the signal to noise ratio is high, bec
Re: (Score:3)
...the signal to noise ratio is high...
Didn't you mean that the signal-to-noise ratio is low, as in high in noise but low in signal?
What *would* be useful is a meeting prep agent... could even be sophisticated enough to help you think through what you need participants to think / feel / do...
Do the folks in your meetings respond well to having their thoughts and feelings engineered? With most of the bright people I know, attempting to apply that brand of hubris to them usually does not end well.
Your comments about using AI to create a "de-brief" module to enrich the post-meeting analyses made sense to me. And as a corollary to something else you said, I'll offer that maybe meetings should be shorter, al
I received CoPilot agent training... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think so. I think it systemic of two things:
a) AI agents are actually not that good. They constantly make mistakes and hallucinate things. I've had Gemini provide citations that say the opposite of what Gemini summarised, I've had CoPilot screw up meeting summaries, I've had ChatGPT spit out absolute rubbish that didn't make sense.
b) Microsoft is desperate to rush this shit into the market unfinished. It's not just CoPilot. I've updates to Office 365 with active regressions that get fixed in future
Re: (Score:2)
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
Ah yes - when your company pays Microsoft for the 'privilege' of having employees beta-test - or even alpha-test - the latest load of crap from Redmond.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but to be fair that's how things work in cutting edge world. AI LLMs in generic form are a bag of dicks, but on the flip side when we have alpha tested other products they've brought a world of benefits. The idea of testing cutting edge on employees isn't inherently bad, it just failed miserably with copilot.
Paperclips (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The Clippy Army. Clippernators?
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)
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:3)
...at being recently retired and never, ever having to use Teams again!
Re: (Score:1)
Ranting about Teams is our best social gathering.
The agents are watching you ... (Score:2)
That's not creepy at all.
As a Project Manager I took lots of notes and actions and I am pretty sure no one read them until I reviewed them at the next meeting.
Motivated talent needs very little management, just pointing in the right direction.
There are certain jobs that seem to just produce content that is marginally useful. Now you can use an AI agent to screw that up and ignore it some more.
Re: The agents are watching you ... (Score:1)
As a project manager, your best job would be putting the fries in a bag. You are cancer to productivity
Re: (Score:2)
Cancer !? Guess you fell out with a Project Manager.
You missed the tense in "I took". I was working as PM but went back to coding for a quieter life. PM was very stressful, I took the responsibility very seriously.
Careful with your hate speech, the more you practice it the better you'll get at it. You can get shot for that these days.
Peace brother|sister|somewhere in between
Awesome (Score:2)
Waiting for the train wreck..... (Score:2)
Better idea: why not fix these problems? (Score:2)
Whenever I go to use Teams, the following problems occur up to 10% of the time:
Microphone randomly doesn't work
Camera randomly doesn't work
Speakers randomly don't work
Some combination of the above doesn't work
Nothing works unless I reboot
First reboot doesn't work
Etc,
Etc.
Etc.
Thanks so much!
Clippy got a makeover ? (Score:1)
Clippy got a makeover
Jesus (Score:2)
Fuck off with the "AI everything".
I can't do a fucking decent Boolean query of my outlook emails.
Excel combo drop-downs still don't even recognize the mouse wheel.
There are probably 100 things with MS Office that I would suggest fixing before you fucking bolt on a not-really-Al, thanks.
Oh, and onedrive is fucking cancer.
So is teams.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and onedrive is fucking cancer
My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.
Thankfully it must have been that particul
Re: (Score:2)
Awful.
Worse, EVEN IF YOU CHANGE THE SETTINGS the shit will just revert at some random patch in the future (not every one, so you can't get into the habit of always fixing it...).
I'm an idiot, so I've now made the mistake out of perhaps weird optimism TWICE: trying to disable onedrive (or limit it), /as well as/ trying to move things like my documents and downloads folder OFF my superfast C system drive (ssd) and onto the gigantic 3+ tb data drive and both systems are a ficking mess of where files actually a
First Agenda Item ... (Score:2)
Facilitator agents will now sit in on Teams meetings, creating agendas,
... switching the company to Linux.
3rd party agents (Score:2)
If you haven't dealt with it yet, there's 3rd party agents like read.ai which are infesting Teams meetings. At this point, copilot isn't nearly as awful compared to those!
Guess I will need to re-install Lync (Score:1)
Guess I will need to re-install Lync, so we can have a communication channel for people to use. I don't get it. Why would you spam a chat application instead of just using a message bus architecture like they did in the 1990s or 2000s?
Like that old Hollywood bit "My agent will call your agent, and they will do lunch."
Filling Teams with AI agents? (Score:2)
I picture Agent Smith legions hijacking Teams meetings the world over...
If I could send a bot to a long boring meeting (Score:2)
If I could send a bot to a long boring meeting so I don't have to go myself...
I'm SOLD! When can I get my hands on this thing!