You can’t have a robot in a meeting!

You can’t have a robot in a meeting!

Seems you can and it will probably become common.

Microsoft’s robot (Artificial Intelligence) will listen in on your Microsoft Team meetings, take minutes and suggest follow-up action. It can also scan inboxes, documents and spreadsheets to draft emails and presentations.

You can (for example), ask it to produce a cost-cutting or marketing plan and even choose a style (like that of the chief- executive). It will be done in seconds.

This is the result of their $14 billion investment into Open AI which underlines ChatGPT, the new robot taking the world by storm. They have also developed a new chatbot called Business Chat that can execute tasks across multiple apps.

Some organisations saw this coming. Finchat for example has a financial adviser assistant that can collect client details, do calculations, display product information and print advice documents on demand. Just say “test salary sacrifice contributions” and you see how they will affect after tax income and retirement sufficiency. Add the strategy as a recommendation and it appears in the advice document. All without keyboard or mouse.

General Motors CEO Mary Barra says we should get used having artificial intelligence bots as our co-pilots.

The big four clearly see this as the future.

• Google has its own AI chatbot called Bard and has invested a further $300 million in artificial intelligence firm Anthropic.
• Amazon has long championed “voice first” via its Alexa skills offering.
• Apple’s vision for the future is powerful handheld devices that are capable of running their own machine learning on datasets gathered via their own array of sensors. 
• Chinese search giant Baidu has just released its ChatGPT competitor called Ernie Bot that can do math, write poems, generate images and video.

A brave new world.