Yes, if it works (and that's a big if).

For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.

Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%

or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"

Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.

It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.

That actually sounds very cool and exciting. If Microsoft is reading this—we should talk! My email address is in my bio.

Hey computer, what files did i work on last thursday afternoon? and it'd show me a collage of word, excel emails and cad files I was using. this would be fantastic. If it worked. and didn't require i sell what's left of myself to the computer.

I click Windows 11 "Start" button and under Recommended it has the last 6 files I opened. Click "More", and there's a list of files for the last two weeks with dates, and timestamps for the last week. So they've already got this idea covered.

We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.

Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.

That sounds like a useful feature. Thanks.

alas my new work laptop is still on win 10.

WinFS and Longhorn are back on the wishlist, apparently. But this time you're getting a really fat thin client OS and non-deterministic execution.

I'm as big a skeptic as anyone, but having it integrated into the OS could be very helpful to a lot of people. I myself will of course run for the hills due to the considerable trade-offs of that decision (always-online, tracking, surveillance, huge attack surface, etc), but I can't dismiss the fact that a lot of people will take the usefulness of the features without considering the cost.

Yes it will be helpful when you are an office worker staring at an excel sheet 9 to 5. I've been there and I don't care if it scans my entire PC or whatever, if I can prompt it to click around on my screen to do the thing.

Vast majority of HN does not seem to understand just how powerful the modern Microsoft stack is for office workers.

Integrated AI solves so many real problems, not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.

> not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.

This is the big thing that Microsoft understands. For a non-tech company, it's going to be pretty hard to get buy in to pay for ChatGPT enterprise, and then pay for/spend dev or IT resources to integrate it (and develop those integrations) with their already existing Microsoft/SharePoint/Teams stack to make it useful. And then you still don't get the convenient Office app add-ins.

Microsoft bundles this all, integrates it for you, and provides a GUI for governance controls. It's very click-ops focused, which enterprise IT likes, and the bundling means you don't have to sell those with the wallets on buying extra third party tools. Nobody every got fired for buying s/IBM/Microsoft