Three meetings at once. It’s so funny that, when I saw people making fun of it, I assumed it was a meme or an Onion parody. Nope: Microsoft really did run this as an ad on Instagram. This is what they think we want from their supposedly world-changing technology: the ability to attend more meetings.
Now, Copilot’s ability to transcribe a meeting and highlight the key points is cool, and in theory it could make meetings more efficient. It’s easy to imagine, in a healthy work culture, where that gain in time allows people to spend more time doing the actually productive parts of their job.
Instead this ad assumes the opposite will happen. It imagines a future where we use our efficiency gains to attend more meetings. Economists sometimes talk about how the current crop of technology hasn’t lead to commensurate productivity gains—it’s a bit of a mystery in some circles. I would hold up this ad as the explanation: we are all, as a society, using the efficiency gains to attend more pointless meetings.
I keep getting roped into 30-60 minute long meetings, where what was discussed could have been summarised into a few points
Which is what people would want, just get an email summary of the meeting if you don’t actually need to be there. The ad is saying you’d still need to go anyway and now because you’re not expected to pay so much attention you can be booked into two more at the same time.
Remember, you’ve already got the generation of folks who watched the transition to computers that were supposed to make their lives “easier” become instead “you are expected to do far more with your workday because we made it easier for you.”
Right now it looks like “wow it will lighten my workload” but what it will look like in the end is “now we can expect more productivity per the same unit time from our workers.”
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I dunno, I kinda like this one.
I keep getting roped into 30-60 minute long meetings, where what was discussed could have been summarised into a few points.
What I don’t like, is that the content is stored/processed outside of a corporate network.
Which is what people would want, just get an email summary of the meeting if you don’t actually need to be there. The ad is saying you’d still need to go anyway and now because you’re not expected to pay so much attention you can be booked into two more at the same time.
Rather than just getting 3 email summaries.
Remember, you’ve already got the generation of folks who watched the transition to computers that were supposed to make their lives “easier” become instead “you are expected to do far more with your workday because we made it easier for you.”
Right now it looks like “wow it will lighten my workload” but what it will look like in the end is “now we can expect more productivity per the same unit time from our workers.”
I’d love to be wrong, but 1% gonna 1%.