Lloyds Banking Group Claims Microsoft Copilot Saves Staff 46 Minutes a Day (theregister.com) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses. According to Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), the rollout is "helping teams summarize documents, prepare for meetings, and reduce administrative tasks." Almost 5,000 engineers are also using GitHub Copilot. Vic Weigler, chief technology officer at the finance corp, said in a statement: "We converted 11,000 lines of code across 83 files in half the expected time."
An insider at the bank, a self-professed fan of the technology, listed some of the ways it was being used in their business area. These ranged from the mundane -- drafting and summarizing emails, transcribing meetings, and comparing documents to group standards -- to the eyebrow-raising, such as drafting legal clauses, undertaking due diligence, and creating complex Excel formulas. They told us the next step is creating bots and agents to perform repetitive data-based tasks and rolling out the technology to customer-facing processes. That said, they also noted the AI tools occasionally make mistakes. The "golden rule," is to "never use the output without checking it."
An insider at the bank, a self-professed fan of the technology, listed some of the ways it was being used in their business area. These ranged from the mundane -- drafting and summarizing emails, transcribing meetings, and comparing documents to group standards -- to the eyebrow-raising, such as drafting legal clauses, undertaking due diligence, and creating complex Excel formulas. They told us the next step is creating bots and agents to perform repetitive data-based tasks and rolling out the technology to customer-facing processes. That said, they also noted the AI tools occasionally make mistakes. The "golden rule," is to "never use the output without checking it."
Day 14,739: Management style now "nano". (Score:5, Insightful)
The "golden rule," is to "never use the output without checking it."
Just gonna state, plainly and flatly, that they are already not following their golden rule, and it will only get worse until disaster occurs.
also (Score:5, Interesting)
What constitutes "checking"? If the AI does something different from how you would have done it, do you rewrite it or say "eh, looks good to me"? What happens when the way the AI did it turns out to have weird corner cases?
Example - I asked ChatGPT for code to do some holiday calculations specifiying that it should only use code from the C standard library. To compare whether two dates were two days apart, it came up with something using mktime that more or less worked. Problem a) it assumed that time_t was an integer number of seconds which is NOT CORRECT in C, only in POSIX, you need to use difftime to compare time. Problem b) is it baked in a number of seconds that would break around daylight savings day. Problem c) is that the code was way more opaque than necessary, all you have to do is have a simple array of 12 months with the number of cumulative days in each month, add in a leap day if needed, compute the julian days and subtract. The code was fundamentally not solving the right problem, when you're asking about days there is no reason to have code that uses seconds.
Other times I've seen the code have a completely helter-skelter way of assigning structure members which makes the code needlessly hard to read.
Anyway my point is, I see AI-generated code as basically a model for code not something that should be adopted wholesale unless there's no intent to ever edit the code, e.g. you need just need a short program to manipulate a data file in a certain way.
Re:also (Score:5, Insightful)
Summarizing a report for a prospective reader of said report is pretty much by-definition not checking it, because checking it would require reading both the generated summary and the actual report.
Summarizing reports seems like a great way for someone writing the report who has to say something about an unfortunate development managing to downplay it where the LLM fails to include it in the summary. It allows obfuscation of negative news or status potentially, and the consequence would likely fall on the person who should have read the report but instead got the not-even-cliffs-notes version.
Re:not how that works (Score:4, Insightful)
If your job in a company is to "summarize a report" it means you are preparing a summary for someone else, or other people. You would still read the original report. You would just ask ChatGPT to make a summary and then you would review the summary to ensure it is accurate and fair. Suppose it takes you an hour to create one page (single spaced, proportional font) of polished business language, but only 5 minutes to read a page. So right there you'd save almost an hour of time.
This kind of thing happens all the time in corporations and at fairly senior levels. For example, when the board of directors meets, someone will present a slide describing what was discussed at the audit committee meeting. Alternatively, when the tax director presents at the audit committee, he needs to briefly describe what is going on with the company's taxes. Basically when you get into higher level management, half the work is about summarizing and reporting up.
The idea that you would receive a memo which was created for you and then not read it, and ask ChatGPT to give you a summary, is moronic.
Yes, it is moronic.
And yes, this is how some people are using these systems. Not everyone in even fairly senior positions have subordinates that can be kept at beck and call to summarize lengthy or highly technical reports for them. In many cases those people who have authority in the org have to do that work themselves because the company has already used existing staff reductions through the older label of management information systems to reduce the number of staff as computers have been able to replace a lot of the work that clerks used to do. Those people in charge of sections or departments or divisions might not be able to just command technical staff that are already burdened by their own work to do this for them, and the clerical/admin staff that handle office functions don't have the technical background to do it either.
Those people really do turn to these platforms to try to distill down the information for them. The whole drive is for efficiency, and reducing staffing costs is usually the principal way to increase efficiency. It's moronic, but it's also occurring as the people using these systems don't really know how they work or why they get the results they do. And it will keep getting worse.
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But what if no one is ever going to use the output anyway? Might not need to check it.
I've dealt with *way* too many business processes that have people generate obscene amounts of prose that no one will ever read or even skim or reference.
I remember one of these companies championed that they used LLM to complete an important 'overhaul' of their source code. The 'overhaul' was generating separate document detailing all these uncommented functions and what the LLM guessed they were supposed to do and how i
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"saving 46 minutes", so they don't need to work thru their lunch break now. Yay?
Added expense of copilot (Score:1)
Does the cost of copilot add up to more than paying those employees for 46 minutes of work? Is it worth the risk of confidential data being exposed?
Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:2)
so the outcome will be: ...therefore the real data is probably much higher savings
- reduced pay for those 46 minutes
- increased workload to fill those 46 minutes
- both
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Reality take: 46 minutes more actual productive work can be gained from this. Invest in the system and increase the workload accordingly.
All others are "I have no idea how reality works/I am a horse pulled cart affectionado and I hate new technology that improves efficiency so I pretend I don't understand how efficiency improvements work".
The best part is that at this point, AI isn't limited by model quality. It's limited to people knowing how to integrate it into their workflows. And this is going to get b
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so the outcome will be: - reduced pay for those 46 minutes - increased workload to fill those 46 minutes - both ...therefore the real data is probably much higher savings
And here I thought you might have been talking about an AI report highlighting how the average executive golfer only works about 46 minutes per week, at an unjustified cost of WTF per hour..
eyebrow-raising (Score:5, Interesting)
> ...and creating complex Excel formulas
By christ, they should put 'guard rails' in that stop you ever doing anything complex in Excel. I dread to think of how much of that bank relies on cronky spreadsheets instead of proper, auditable, tested systems.
You: Create an excel formula to take X and Y and Z, and amortise over 6 months, then leverage A, B and C and exponentially decay adding those month on month to what you first came up with.
Copilot: Certainly! But first, please give me the magic number from your manager authorising this insanely stupid idea
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Of all of the things I've heard complaints about misuse of Excel for over around three decades now, literal financial spreadsheets is a first for me.
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If you're afraid of spreadsheets in the financial industry, you should probably just keep your eyes closed. The entire industry is built on them to a very large degree. I've been in IT for almost 30 years, and over most of that, I've seen Excel spreadsheets used throughout the various accounting departments of companies ranging from small operations of a couple of dozen people up to multinationals with tens of thousands of employees, with some banks in there. Some of those spreadsheets are enormous and are
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And pretty much every macro and function in those dozens of spreadsheets is entirely undocumented.
That was the situation in 1999 among the electricity traders in North America, much of the energy flow was traded back and forth in an enormous and almost entirely undocumented Excel spreadsheet that was swapped back and forth. Fortunately Y2K broke the functions (and even better, no one could figure out how) so the process was entirely revamped. They put the new process in place Thanksgiving weekend of that
How big of a Windows discount (Score:2)
...did MS give them to say that?
If that were true (Score:5, Insightful)
Then the staff can leave 46 minutes early.
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no, it frees them up for a daily team meeting lasting upwards of 46 minutes on how to improve morale.
Gotta love it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Business processes have become bloated because we slowly automate away the actual work. So, instead of actual work, we create unneeded and unnecessary streams of communication, now mostly emails and giant meetings filled with banal nonsense rather than meaningful discussions. And now we're at the point where we're automating away the banal, nonsensical streams of bullshit we've tacked onto work in order to keep people involved in processes as the actual work is automated away. A bullshit spewing, hallucinating LLM is perfect to automating away endless streams of communication that will then need to be summarized by another LLM to be readable by humans. We're at the point where the single sentence communication, "Hey, Bob, I need the price of $widget in March of last year for a report," will now turn into a 10k word essay produced by an LLM, at the other end another process will attempt to summarize that essay to its essence before a human reads it, and Bob will send Joe the projected price of $widget's_other_cousin ten years from now. But, maybe he'll luck out and the LLM he uses to respond will hallucinate the correct answer as it writes up his response, and the LLM at Joe's end won't mangle it completely as it tries to summarize the essay it receives before spitting out the summarized answer from the document produced by Joe's LLM.
This is business efficiency at its absolute peak! No wonder everyone's excited by AI!
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Self-professed fan? (Score:3)
"An insider at the bank, a self-professed fan of the technology"
Lets see how much of a fanboy he is when HE gets replaced by it. And yes, it probably is a man as psychopathy tends to be more common in males.
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly, this self-professed fan isn't worried about his job. Let's watch and see what happens. My money is on the human.
Complex Excel scripts with Copilot? (Score:2)
Shitty longwinded reports now easier to make (Score:2)
Woo. Pee.
Well, it's Lloyd's (Score:2)
But will cost customers ... (Score:2)
Seems a little high, but plausible (Score:2)
Saving 46 minutes per day sounds kind of plausible, but probably is still exaggerated. People are terrible at estimating how long things take, and how long things would have taken without automation. The people who came up with this estimate, probably forgot to subtract the time it took them to properly instruct the AI, and how much time it took them to correct the mistakes AI made.
AI will not help workers (Score:2)
Since I am positive they did not reduce the workday by 46 minutes or increase their employees pay by 9.5% (46min / 8hr), this just means AI only helped the company owners, and not the workers. They will most likely decrease their workforce by 9.5% soon, if they don't increase the workload.
The benefits of AI will never trickle down to the middle or lower class. The fantasy of freedom through AI is just that, a fantasy*. As work gets harder to find, it is difficult to believe that any company will decrease th
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Hope you don't mind if I steal that last line, it's an excellent summary.