AI in the Workplace: Is Copilot & Slack AI Worth It?

TL;DR

AI tools like Copilot and Slack AI are flooding the workplace, but they're not all created equal. From frustrating limitations to game-changing potential, here’s what you actually need to know. #VentureStep #AI #Productivity

INTRODUCTION

It seems like every week brings a new, game-changing announcement about artificial intelligence. ¹ These developments are no longer abstract concepts; AI is rapidly integrating into the essential tools we use for work every day, whether we like it or not. ² From Microsoft Teams and Slack to the world of video game development, AI is promising to streamline workflows, enhance creativity, and boost productivity.

In this episode of Venture Step, host Dalton Anderson dives into the practical reality of these new AI features. ³³Drawing on his background in programming and data science, along with hands-on experience using a trial of Microsoft Teams Premium, Dalton cuts through the marketing hype to reveal what works, what doesn’t, and where these tools are falling short of their potential. ⁴⁴⁴

This conversation offers a critical look at the current state of workplace AI, explores groundbreaking applications in the gaming industry from EA, and uncovers the massive energy demands pushing tech giants toward nuclear power. ^5555555It’s an essential guide for anyone looking to understand how AI will concretely affect their daily tasks and the industries of tomorrow. ⁶

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Microsoft Teams Premium with Copilot offers automated meeting notes, but lacks the customization and proactive features needed to be truly transformative. ⁷⁷⁷
• Slack AI appears more advanced than its competitors, offering robust summaries of specific channels and threads to significantly reduce time spent tracking down information. ⁸⁸⁸
• The gaming industry is being transformed by AI, with companies like EA developing tools that can generate entire games from text prompts and create in-game assets to speed up development. ⁹⁹⁹
• The massive adoption of AI is creating an unprecedented energy demand, pushing tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to invest in nuclear power to fuel their data centers. ^{10101010101010}
• AI is dramatically improving efficiency in media production, with Warner Bros. reducing captioning costs by 50% and speeding up the process by 80% using Google's Vertex AI. ¹¹

FULL CONVERSATION

Dalton Anderson: Welcome to Vigistep Podcasts where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional worldview. ¹²It seems like everywhere you turn, there is some new announcement about artificial intelligence. ¹³This week, we're going to be diving into these more recent AI developments that will soon affect you. ¹⁴

AI is coming to your workplace and into your life if you like it or not. And so it's good to be informed about what's going on. ¹⁵

Dalton Anderson: What are the new features and how may you potentially utilize them? ¹⁶And if I've already tried them, I'll give you my opinion on what I think it's good at and what it's lacking. ¹⁷Today we're going to talk about, in no particular order, Teams first, then I'll move over to the other items. ¹⁸EA's new suite of tools related to AI. ¹⁹They have an AI tool related to generating 3D assets, which are very time consuming. ²⁰They have an AI tool that does text to gaming, which is pretty cool. ²¹Warner Bros. Discovery partnered with Google using Vertex Studio for captioning. ²²Copilot is becoming more integrated with other Microsoft apps, and Slack AI is here. ²³Before we dive in, I'm your host Dalton Anderson. ²⁴My background is a bit of a mix of programming, data science and insurance. ²⁵

The Rise of AI in Workplace Apps

Dalton Anderson: As I mentioned, there's Slack, there's Teams, there's Outlook, Excel—Microsoft is integrating Copilot into their suite of products. ²⁶I have personally tried out the Teams products, so that's what I'll talk mostly about. ²⁷I went on my work computer to try and see if I could access Copilot within Teams and I wasn't able to. ²⁸I'm assuming it's blocked by my administrator. ²⁹ It would help you draft an email. You would do forward slash and then it would pop up and it could help you draft your email or improve your email. ³⁰ You can do the same thing elsewhere. Nothing special. ³¹

Dalton Anderson: I haven't tried Excel; I don't have access to that, blocked by my administrator, but I think it'd be similar to Google Sheets. 32Google Sheets works okay. 33 Sometimes it really hits the mark. I'm like, wow, I don't know how it knew what I was talking about. 34And then other times I'm like, my goodness, this is so far off what I needed. 35

Dalton Anderson: Google's Gemini for Gmail is pretty good because it will read the email, summarize it for you, and then you can also ask it to write the email for you. ³⁶ It would be cool to have the summary and then have options. Maybe someone sends you an RSVP to a Thanksgiving dinner. ^37373737From there, I would like a summary so I don't have to read the whole thing, and then have options of what I should do. ³⁸Like option one, if I want to go, have it send the email that I want to go and also put it on my to-do list. ³⁹Maybe in the future it does it on my behalf, makes the appointment, books the place, whatever. ⁴⁰I give it a budget of $500, and the AI agent goes and does these tasks by itself. ⁴¹

But then at a certain point is AI just responding to AI and are humans even drafting their own messages? ⁴²

Dalton Anderson: I don't know. I'd like to automate my job and other people's jobs and work on higher value tasks. 43 I'm all right with it, but I do think it's funny. At a certain point, it's going to become like LinkedIn when people make those posts and it's like, congrats, congrats, congrats. 44A lot of the comments aren't human-generated; they're just these text prompt suggestions. 45

A Hands-On Review of Microsoft Teams Premium

Dalton Anderson: So back to the original subject. That's where I want things to go. Where are we at currently? I have been using Teams. ⁴⁶I think I have a 60-day trial for Teams Premium is what they're calling it. ⁴⁷Why they have a separate subscription for Teams, I have no idea. ⁴⁸Why don't you just have one Copilot licensing fee for Microsoft's suite of products? ⁴⁹Like, okay, here's AI, you can use AI in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams. ⁵⁰ But they have a separate license for Teams. It doesn't make any sense to me. ⁵¹

Dalton Anderson: Regardless, I have Teams Premium. They're showing a lot of features online I don't have access to. 52I don't know if it's blocked by my administrator, but I can talk about some of them that I can use. 53 They have a feature called "Catch up." The feature will allow you to catch up on your action items when you go on PTO. 54 So you'd be like, "Show me the last 14 days of messages, summarize them, and tell me what things I need to work on." How well that works, I don't know. 55I can't use it. 56I will note that by default, a 30-day history is stored with Copilot. 57575757So if you want to recall 60 days' worth of data, you can't do that unless you change your history settings. 58

The Problem with AI-Generated Meeting Notes

Dalton Anderson: Apparently when you're on a normal call, you can have Copilot listen in as a teammate and be the note-taker. ⁵⁹And after the call, Copilot will send you notes and takeaways. ⁶⁰I have used Copilot for meeting notes, and that works if there's a transcript and a recording. ⁶¹I am currently the main meeting notes distributor at the moment because I have the Teams Premium trial. ⁶²

Dalton Anderson: With Teams Premium, it just makes the recap for you, and you don't have to worry about it. ⁶³ The issue that I have is a couple of things with it. One, it won't automatically send it to me. ⁶⁴I feel like if I'm recording the call, it should automatically send me the notes recap of my meeting. ⁶⁵It doesn't do that. ⁶⁶You have to initiate that flow and then distribute everything yourself, which is kind of annoying. ⁶⁷It's better than me having to copy and paste the transcription into a different AI chat, but it's not that much savings in time. ⁶⁸

Dalton Anderson: I would also like to be able to custom format my notes. ⁶⁹ I don't like the default format from the AI agent. It sends my tasks at the bottom. ⁷⁰I feel like your tasks should be at the top, and then you should have key topics and an overview. ⁷¹ It doesn't do that. It kind of just rambles on and has a whole bunch of things like, "so and so talked about this and then Jamie replied." It has too much fluff, not enough action. ⁷²I would like a way to customize my notes. ⁷³Like, "Here's what I'm looking for. Here's how I want it formatted," and it just does it automatically for me every time I have a meeting. ⁷⁴⁷⁴⁷⁴That would be huge. ⁷⁵

What Teams AI Is Missing: Project-Based Context

Dalton Anderson: Another feature I think would be great in Teams is when I make a meeting, I would like to assign that team meeting to a project. ⁷⁶If I had a project about my Nana's home renovation, I would want to assign it to a project that has roles. ^77777777So then when this AI summarizes my meeting, it has the context of the other meetings in the project. ⁷⁸Within that meeting, it understands, "Hey, I had previously had a meeting about XYZ with the same stakeholders on the same project. ⁷⁹What's the project's progress?" ⁸⁰

Dalton Anderson: All of those things should be integrated into Teams. Teams is owned by a company with a market cap of over a trillion dollars and it's one of the most popular productivity apps in the workplace. 81And I think it's so bad. 82That one feature is not that complicated. 83Making a project and within a project having meetings. 84That's not that hard from a developer standpoint. 85But it would improve the app so much. 86Everyone on the project could click in and look at the transcript and all the notes from each different meeting all in one place. 87It'd be huge. 88

Why Are Microsoft and Apple Lagging in AI?

Dalton Anderson: Last thing I would say about this Copilot piece is my disappointment with Microsoft and Apple. ⁸⁹Microsoft and Apple have kind of been the people lagging in this AI adoption space. ⁹⁰My issue with them is, Microsoft is competing with Google and somewhat Slack. ⁹¹I don't know how long Slack has had their AI features, but the features that they launched are substantially better than the ones that Microsoft has currently in Teams. ⁹²Google has had Gemini integrated with their suite of products since December 2023. ⁹³We're almost at a full year of it being fully integrated. ⁹⁴It's crazy that with Teams premium, the only features they're talking about is recalling highlighted tasks and writing notes for your call. ⁹⁵

This is not good enough, not good enough. ⁹⁶

How AI is Transforming the Gaming Industry

Dalton Anderson: AI is transforming the gaming industry. I know a lot of people don't like EA, but EA is pretty big. ⁹⁷A good example of their issues would be Battlefield 2042, which was bug-ridden and just horrible. ⁹⁸It burned a lot of people. ⁹⁹A lot of folks just don't pre-order games anymore because of Battlefield 2042 and some other triple-A games from large publishers that just weren't ready for release. ¹⁰⁰

Dalton Anderson: Anyways, I'm acknowledging that people don't like EA, but EA does have some pretty cool announcements. ¹⁰¹ They're calling it "Imagine to Creation." It was a text-to-game generation that allowed users to have a text prompt and create a fully functional game from it. ¹⁰²It creates the tools, the maps, the gameplay rules, everything for you from scratch with a text prompt. ¹⁰³I think that's pretty cool because EA has such a large library of games with all the logic, coding, character creations, and maps. ¹⁰⁴All of those assets are within EA, so they're training an AI to learn how to create games. ¹⁰⁵

Dalton Anderson: "Asset discovery" is another feature they talked about, where game artists will use AI to create assets for games. ^106106106106

I would say that this AI or AI asset creation, it allows people to create these assets and then work on more important things like the main characters and all of the other stuff to where the actual meat of the game is very polished, hopefully more polished than you've ever seen before. ¹⁰⁷

Dalton Anderson: And then you could sprinkle in some AI generation assets to give additional substance to the game. ¹⁰⁸They also said that they expect around 60% of their code to be AI-generated at a certain point in the future. ¹⁰⁹

The Hidden Cost of AI: A Surge in Energy Demand

Dalton Anderson: The cost of innovation with AI and increased usage means we need more energy. ¹¹⁰This stuff isn't free. ¹¹¹It might be free for you, but it costs a lot of energy. ¹¹²

I've never been studying a technology that's improved at such a rate that AI has in the last two years or so. It's mind-boggling at the rate of improvement. ¹¹³

Dalton Anderson: With this increase of adoption, consumption, and complexity comes energy demand. ¹¹⁴Energy is potentially going to be an issue in the future for these AI companies. ¹¹⁵

Big Tech's Bet on Nuclear Power

Dalton Anderson: Google, in October, is in a deal with a startup called Creos to buy power to build small nuclear power plants. ¹¹⁶It's going to produce 500 megawatts and it is going to be completed by 2030. ¹¹⁷Microsoft is helping restart the dormant Three Mile Island, hoping to kick that off by 2028, and it will provide 835 megawatts of power for its data centers. ¹¹⁸Amazon has signed three agreements to support nuclear energy development and will be moving forward with a nuclear power plant that's already in existence in Pennsylvania. ¹¹⁹For people that aren't familiar, 500 megawatts can power 86,500 homes. ¹²⁰

AI-Powered Efficiency at Warner Bros.

Dalton Anderson: Warner Bros. partnered with Google's Vertex AI to generate captions for their Max streaming platform. ^121121121121Apparently, there's a whole team of people that, for a 30-minute episode, would take four hours or so to create all the captions for. ¹²²It is a 50% reduction in caption costs and it's 80% faster than manual captioning. ¹²³So what does that mean for you? ¹²⁴Well, you get to watch more shows. ¹²⁵

Slack AI: A Smarter Approach to Workplace Communication

Dalton Anderson: Slack joins the AI race. ¹²⁶They released Slack AI, which comes with Einstein, an AI assistant that's integrated with other Salesforce apps. ¹²⁷One of the big things was that since Slack is built by channels, you can get actual details. ^128128128You can ask Einstein to summarize the action items from three Slack channels, or monitor channels for you. ¹²⁹

Dalton Anderson: All this stuff that I was talking about that Teams needs to do, Slack is doing, except you can't assign roles. ¹³⁰I like that they're summarizing channels and threads to catch you up on everything and take notes while you're in a call. ¹³¹You can schedule daily recaps of all your threads so you don't have to monitor them anymore. ¹³²They also mentioned that 33% of your day is spent tracking down information. ¹³³

Hopefully these AI apps when they get fully integrated and mature... we could spend more time focusing on the important things and worrying less about the minutia. ^134134134134

A Call for Real-World User Feedback

Dalton Anderson: Recapping, Copilot is coming to Microsoft Office products. ¹³⁵Slack is adding AI-powered features. ¹³⁶EA is using AI to create games. ¹³⁷Warner Bros. Discovery is using AI for captioning. ¹³⁸And with all these AI features coming out, there is going to be an energy demand, and these large companies are planning to have their nuclear power plants up by at least 2030. ¹³⁹

Dalton Anderson: Last thing, a call to action to everyone who has tried out these different features, especially the ones in Copilot and Slack. ¹⁴⁰I would love to hear from someone in the comments who has used Slack and these AI features and how much time it's really saved them. ¹⁴¹Also, if you have admin privileges and your administrator allows for Copilot to integrate with Outlook and other Microsoft suite products, please let me know what you think about them. ¹⁴²I'm curious about Outlook more than any of the others because Outlook would save the most time potentially. ¹⁴³

Dalton Anderson: Thank you for tuning into VentureStep. I'll see you next week. 144About a year ago, I committed to doing one podcast a month, at least 10 minutes long. 145And here I am almost a year later doing a podcast a week, and they're all over 10 minutes. 146

If you have something that you want to pursue, just commit to it and change your schedule, change your priorities and make it happen. ¹⁴⁷

Dalton Anderson: Well, that's it for today. ¹⁴⁸And of course, wherever you are in this world, good evening, good afternoon, good morning. ¹⁴⁹ Have a great day. Thank you for tuning in and I hope that you tune in next week. ¹⁵⁰Goodbye. ¹⁵¹

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Microsoft (Teams, Copilot, Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint)
• Slack (Slack AI, Einstein)
• Google (Gemini, Google Sheets, Gmail, Vertex AI)
• EA (Electronic Arts)
• Warner Bros. Discovery
• Max (Streaming Service)
• Amazon
• OpenAI
• Salesforce
• Adobe
• HubSpot
• MindStream (Newsletter)
• Creos (Nuclear Startup)
• Three Mile Island
• Battlefield 2042

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Copilot, Slack AI, Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium, EA, Electronic Arts, Imagine to Creation, Asset Discovery, Gaming Industry, AI Energy Consumption, Nuclear Power, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery, Vertex AI, Max Streaming, Salesforce, Einstein AI, HubSpot, MindStream, Creos, Three Mile Island, OpenAI, Adobe, Productivity Tools, Dalton Anderson, Venture Step