Microsoft's AI Windows Tool: Targeting Gen Z's Digital Lifestyle

0:00Today may feel like Microsoft's AI day. there is a couple really interesting news stories I wanted to cover around Microsoft specifically and AI. And the reason why it feels like it's Microsoft's AI day, I've already recorded a podcast today about some interesting things coming out of Microsoft, is because they're currently in, you know, in the heat of things with this big FTC lawsuit where the FTC essentially is trying to block their acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which is a gaming studio, and Microsoft's trying to pay$70 billion for this, but the FTC is blocking it. Now, as they're trying to block it, they're able to, you know, call on a lot of different memos from within Microsoft and they have to publish them as part of the lawsuit.

0:40And consequently, because of that, we're finding out a lot of really interesting information from within Microsoft based off of this lawsuit. But it's teaching us a lot of really interesting things about their strategy and about AI and what they're doing there. So we have a really interesting story regarding that. We have a big announcement out of Windows about some new features and AI features that they're going to be adding to Windows. And then also some really interesting new tech. So we'll dive into it without any further ado on the podcast. The first thing I want to say is that there was recently a memo released that essentially Microsoft is saying that it knows it's out of touch with Gen Z.

1:16And their plan to lure them back to Microsoft is AI. So apparently there is a quote unquote relatively low share of Gen Z users compared to competitors and that Microsoft essentially saying that this could be a quote unquote long term risk. So the memo was obviously released with this whole lawsuit, but essentially Microsoft is saying they know that, well, essentially the CEO said our relatively low share in these segments presents a long-term risk to our overall modern workplace business. And he was saying this June 7th to last year to their board of directors. And I think what's really interesting here is the fact that they know they're losing market share and they know exactly where they're losing it to.

2:04They said, when referring to Gen Z users, what they prefer to use, they said they prefer to use, quote unquote, simple, lightweight and collaboration first applications who scale through freemium business models and bottom up adoption within companies. Now, this is absolutely nothing shocking, right? Gen Z is going to be using Google Docs, Google Sheets. Why would they be using Microsoft Office when all of Microsoft Office is typically like a lot of people are using that within their company and their company is paying for it. Or even, you know, I remember back when I was in university, we had a deal to use, you know, Excel and, you know, PowerPoint and that kind of stuff through through like the school would pay for it.

2:42But as soon as I left school and it was no longer free, I preferred the Google alternatives for free. And so I think this is what they're seeing with a lot of Gen Z companies or a lot of Gen Z consumers. Why would they be paying for a lot of Microsoft's expensive software? Now, when I say expensive software, obviously Microsoft makes an insane amount of money from this, and they've made a lot of money by making sure that corporations are using it. But it's true. A lot of this specific audience is focused on kind of these freemium areas, and they scale up from there. So I do think, you know, it's interesting that for them it's like, oh, like, here's the thing.

3:20Microsoft can't just say we're going to make Microsoft Word free because it's such a big source of revenue for them. so it's just kind of interesting that they like have to come up with another solution to you know quote unquote lure um these new gen z these new gen z users because they you know like they're competing with free which is incredibly hard to do so it's going to be interesting and they believe the ai is a way to do this so right on you know a year later since that memo was released it looks like they really are obviously um you know putting their money where their mouth is they've released a lot of incredible tools with open ai in this space and integrated ai into every single uh tool they have and specifically they are announcing a windows 11 um new tool which essentially is a windows copilot and they're they have this preview that they're allowing some of their um that they're sharing out to their dev channel right now but essentially what it is is the fact so back in may at the build conference they introduced this like windows copilot for windows 11.

4:21And so they're actually allowing people to test that out. Now they're offering an early look at it and it does look really interesting. I'm looking at a picture of it right now. And essentially what it is, is you can pull up this like little side panel on the side of your windows computer and you can ask it any questions you might need. It does actually look really useful because you can just say in plain text, like, Hey, switch my computer over to dark mode and, you know, like mute my microphone or like anything you want your computer to do, instead of having to dig through the settings, which I know some people are like, oh, I'm super fast at digging through my settings.

4:54Like, congratulations. But like, dude, I swear for some things, especially on my phone. So I'll sound like a, I know I'll sound tech illiterate for this, but on my phone, sometimes I cannot figure out how to change something very simple in the settings. It's frustrating. You know, I'm not sure exactly what area it's in. And so I sit there searching and like clicking on, you know, different going down different branches on my phone settings till I'd try to finally find the right thing and change it. Maybe I'm the only one in the world. I doubt it. Maybe it's me and a lot of older people. Who knows?

5:24But in any case, this seems like a feature that would be very useful where you could just put in plain text what you want to set up, you know, say something like, hey, turn on dark mode from the hours of 6, 6, you know, p.m. till 6 a.m. Or, you know, for me, I like to turn my phone into black and white mode sometimes to make it less distracting or less bright so there's a lot of different things you can do and I think this is going to be a really cool a cool feature I did see something very interesting so of course you're going to ask it different questions it essentially is also the Bing like the Bing AI browser so you can ask it things like you are searching on a search engine as well and get those kind of responses but you can also do things specifically for your computer which I think are useful but this is what's very interesting that I saw in this kind of side panel they have going on is you can choose a conversation style.

6:17You have three options. You have more creative, more balanced, or more precise, right? I think this is a good play by Microsoft because I think it defaults to more balanced, so it's just kind of in the middle. But sometimes you want, like, if you're using this to write, for example, like creative literature, and you're trying to make a creative story, and you want this thing to be more creative, like you don't want this to be fact-based. You just want this to be fun and exciting and whatever. and there's a lot of use cases where you might use that um so that's what you'd want but in other cases you absolutely need this thing to be dead on exact specific and precise right you don't want it hallucinating or saying something crazy and so in that case you would be able to toggle that up so i do think this is an interesting um feature if nothing else that they're integrating into this copilot that we're not seeing in a lot of tools like chat gpt where i do think this is actually like you know when a lot of people are like oh like what are the what are the next tools chat chatgbt needs to add and they got like i'm sure a laundry list that they're they're thinking of this is one that i legitimately think should be put to the forefront of this because this kind of gets at the root cause of what we use chatgbt and these generative ai text um tools for it's interesting because a lot of people are saying like hey we are the ai to the ai um you know model that does x y and z we specifically focus on fact checking or we specifically focus on this or that and it's like if if something like chatgbt wants to compete with all these different AIs that are kind of like leaning towards these different areas, they don't have to change their entire model to be like something very specific like that.

7:48They can just use some sort of toggle like this. And maybe that does mean that they actually have three different models they've trained. It probably does. I'm not 100 % sure. It may mean that they need three different models. And depending on the toggle you have, it's like GPT-4, but it's more creative or GPT-4, but it's more precise. And then to change like the weights or something in the backend. In any case, very cool use case. So something interesting about this whole Windows Copilot thing though, specifically, is that it's going to appear as a sidebar on the right, but it's not going to overlap with your screen, which I actually think that's really important.

8:20Meaning if you're working on a document and you open it up, it's not going to like cover up the side of your document. It will resize the screen so that everything is pushed to the side. I think that's a very useful thing that they'll be doing. So in the first preview, you can ask it a bunch of different questions and you can ask it you know to change it change your computer to dark mode turn on do not disturb take a screenshot you know summarize a website write a story about a dog who lives on the moon make a picture of a you know a fish pond with lily pads so they're they're integrating more than just the chat they got the images in there as well and i think this is going to be a very interesting tool they have a specific icon on the top right that is going to you know summarize feedback on any issues that you run into um and it's gonna be i think this is gonna be a really interesting tool i think it's gonna get a lot of adoption um they did say they in their little release they said please note that not everyone they're not everything shown at um build for windows copilot is included in the first early preview for example windows copilot has a basic set of windows settings plugins but no third-party plugin support yet over time features will be added as we refine the Windows Copilot experience with Windows Insiders.

9:33So I think that this is, you know, obviously a really big step for them and a really big feature, but they're slow rolling this. They're not going to release it too fast because they want to make sure the quality is really good. And what they actually produce is something that people want. So I think Microsoft is making some big plays. I'm, you know, I'm not a hundred percent sure if this is going to completely capture the Gen Z market that they're so desperately looking to So grab one last piece of news out of Microsoft I wanted to cover today. Then I promise I'll be done talking about Microsoft maybe for the week.

10:03Who knows if they really something crazy, I'll have to bring it to you. But the one last piece of news out of Microsoft that I did think was quite interesting is the fact that their new AI, they're creating essentially some new AI that's going to help you shop on Bing and Edge, right? They're trying to push people back to Microsoft Edge. And the idea is that it's going to create buying guides. It's going to help you with reviews and help you with price matching. And they're integrating AI into all of this. So essentially, Bing Shopping is getting an overhaul and they're adding a bunch of new interesting AI features to it.

10:34So I think this is, you know, following Microsoft in February, they unveiled Bing Search, which is powered by ChatGPT. And they essentially called this an AI-powered copilot for the web. That's their slogan for it. and essentially you can do things like making shopping lists you can summarize pdfs you can generate linkedin posts and write everything you can do with chad chupiti and maybe more you can do on bing it kind of goes back and forth sometimes bing can do a little bit more sometimes they front run some features and sometimes opening eye catches up but in any case these i want to talk about three specific areas where ai is now going to be included for online shopping and this is I think particularly important as we're about to see a bunch of different you know sales events coming up we have Amazon Prime Day we have Walmart Plus Week we have Target Circle Week we have Best Buys Black Friday in July which I think is essentially Amazon Prime Day became a big thing and now Walmart Target and Best Buy are all trying to like kind of piggyback off of that and then now it looks like Bing is trying to get in with their own thing soon but this is what they're doing so So the first thing they're doing in e-commerce is buying guides.

11:46So Bing is going to use AI to generate buying guides, which are tailored on your shopping related searches. So those guides are going to take search terms like college supplies, and they'll offer categories, product suggestions, and tables comparing items. And the buying guides can actually be accessed in Bing chat or in the Edge sidebar. And the Bing guides are available in the US right now, and they're coming soon to other markets. and the edge buying guides are starting to roll out worldwide so i think this is really interesting they're kind of building these like quote-unquote buying guides which sounds to me really i don't know like really corporate-y like um i don't know really corporate-y really consumery like they're just trying to like create more stuff to make you buy things but i actually do think that they're going to offer some information some interesting information and some relevant stuff that might actually be useful they're also going to do review summaries so you know we love to dive into all of the reviews of the latest products and they're going to help summarize those reviews and they're essentially they'll use ai um to suggest specific aspects about a purchase that you might be interested in the third thing they're doing is price match so once you picked out a product microsoft shopping tool um is going to price match with well essentially the company they partner with a bunch of different US retailers who have existing price match policies.

13:07So even after a purchase, the feature will monitor the prices item and help you request a match if the price on your item drops. This is really, really interesting. And to be 100 % honest, I would use Bing shopping or whatever over Amazon or anything else for this feature. Like, come on, like, how many times have you purchased something on Amazon, and then you go back like two weeks later, and there's like a sale or it's cheaper, and there's kind of like this like bad taste in your mouth because you wish you had bought it sooner so apparently they'll be using ai to help monitor price drops in a bunch of different areas on a bunch of different platforms and they are going to actually lower the price or give you a refund if the price drops so i think that is a very interesting tool obviously microsoft is absolutely all in on ai right now they're making big plays in every area of their company and so these are some very interesting features and tools they're launching that will be interested to continue following into the future