Generative AI will have many impacts on business and society. Here’s another one: Microsoft Copilot will accelerate AI evidence generation.

Earlier this month at the EDRM Symposium, Jerry Bui of FTI Consulting gave a presentation about Microsoft Copilot, which was quite compelling. If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Copilot, it is the application of large language models (LLMs) to your data in the Microsoft Graph—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps which is just starting to be rolled out to 600 enterprise customers worldwide in an invitation-only paid preview program that started this month.

Guess what it’s based on? Yep, it’s the GPT-4 AI model created by OpenAI.

Here’s an example of some of the things that Microsoft says you’ll be able to do with Microsoft Copilot:

In Word:

• Draft a two-page project proposal based on the data from [a document] and [a spreadsheet].
• Make the third paragraph more concise. Change the tone of the document to be more casual.
• Create a one-page draft based on this rough outline.

In Excel:

• Give a breakdown of the sales by type and channel. Insert a table.
• Project the impact of [a variable change] and generate a chart to help visualize.
• Model how a change to the growth rate for [variable] would impact my gross margin.

In PowerPoint:

• Create a five-slide presentation based on a Word document and include relevant stock photos.
• Consolidate this presentation into a three-slide summary.
• Reformat these three bullets into three columns, each with a picture.

In Outlook:

• Summarize the emails I missed while I was out last week. Flag any important items.
• Draft a response thanking them, and asking for more details about their second and third points; shorten this draft and make the tone professional.
• Invite everyone to a “lunch and learn” about new product launches next Thursday at noon. Mention that lunch is provided.

If it works like they say it does, it will be very compelling, right?

As you can imagine, this means that Microsoft Copilot will accelerate AI evidence generation (at least partially). Evidence = impact to eDiscovery. Many people will use it to generate work product (the smart ones will QC the results, unlike these guys).

Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI may not just significantly shake up the enterprise office software market, but it may also significantly shake up the internet search market too. Bing already now offers full access to the GPT-4 model – for free. Bad news for Google on both fronts.

But Google offers Bard, you say? Yes, as discussed a few days ago by ZDNet, the Large Model Systems Organization (LMYSY Org), an open research organization founded by students and faculty from the University of California, Berkeley, created the Chatbot Arena. The Chatbot Arena is a benchmark platform for LLMs where users can put two randomized models to the test by inserting a prompt and selecting the best answer without knowing which LLM is behind either answer.

The leaderboards “unsurprisingly” currently place GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced LLM, in first place with an Arena Elo rating of 1227. In second place with a rating of 1227 is Claude-v1, an LLM developed by Anthropic.

Ranked number eight on the leaderboard is PaLM-Chat-Bison-001, a submodel of PaLM 2, the LLM behind Google Bard. This ranking parallels the general sentiment behind Bard, not the worst but not one of the best.

Not a scientific evaluation (I’m sure I can count on some of our loyal data scientist readers for that!), but certainly a sign that Google is behind in the generative AI market, which could impact their business significantly – across the bard, er, board. 😉

And, as for the image at the top of the post, some of you will see what I did there… 😀

So, what do you think? Do you agree that Microsoft Copilot will accelerate AI evidence generation? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image Copyright © Paramount Pictures

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