Google and Microsoft will soon offer virtual collaborators

It will be a kind of ChatGPT which feeds on videoconferences or emails, to then give a report, assign tasks and fill the agendas. The objective is to delegate the most time-consuming tasks of a collaborative project to him.

After personal assistants, Google and Microsoft want to go further. Your next office colleague could be an artificial intelligence, a virtual collaborator created with a few clicks on a web page. We will therefore give him a name, an email address, set his department and his responsibilities. Then, we will include him in discussions and share documents with him, as we do with any employee. The objective is to delegate the most time-consuming tasks of a collaborative project to him.

He may be asked to create a summary document or a progress report, to answer specific questions on a shared file or simply to summarize what has just been said in a meeting. In fact, it’s a kind of ChatGPT with which we interact by email or via tools like Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace, except that it feeds on documents, videoconferences, emails, chats, in short, on all of life digitalization of a project team.

Classic meetings, on a corner of the table, must take place on Teams or on Google Meet, this is the only way for this virtual assistant to listen and transcribe what he has heard. The promise being to be able to distinguish the interlocutors and know precisely who said what. To then be able to give a report, assign tasks and fill out agendas.

Some use cases are a little worrying. He will, for example, know how to follow project deadlines and remember priorities, which saves time. Unless he turns into a “micromanager”, the little boss who sticks his nose everywhere, who doesn’t trust anyone and who wants everything to go through him. Nor should it become a tool of copping, especially since he knows exactly who is late, who made a mistake, who did not follow the instructions. Not to mention that AIs tend to hallucinate and make mistakes. This is probably why Microsoft and Google remain quite vague about the availability of these virtual colleagues. One thing is certain, one day we will have to learn to work with these AIs, in one form or another.