Opinion A year ago it looked as if the world could be Microsoft's oyster. The software giant dominated the enterprise, was catching up to cloudy rivals, and then managed to purchase forty-nine percent of the for-profit subsidiary of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Having secured a stake in the leading purveyor of generative AI, it started to build it into products that attracted enormous attention, like Bing. Microsoft dangled the enticing prospect that its long-suffering search services could improve to the point at which they would challenge arch-rival Google.
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Microsoft's missteps started in May 2023 when it launched a company-wide strategy that could have been titled "Copilot all the things!" Windows 11 got a Copilot assistant and a Copilot key. Edge got a Copilot panel, while Microsoft 365 got the full treatment.

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There is one shining star in the Microsoft 365 Copilot firmament: Teams. The one app everyone loves to hate – created to undercut Slack – Teams became an indispensable hybrid working tool during the pandemic. Copilot for Teams acts as the perfect secretary – taking transcripts of meetings, generating a summary, complete with action items. It even mails the participants. It's very helpful, but with a caveat: you might not want your every meeting recorded and transcribed. Anecdotally, a few of those transcripts have ended up as evidence in lawsuits.