Insights from Head of Coaching

23.01.2025 Today’s Insights from Harvard Business Review: An interview with Microsoft’s AI at Work Chief Marketing Officer, Jared Spataro

• The joys and challenges of AI Assistants
• Using AI to combat corporate “overcommunicating,” in order to streamline communication and coordination
• How AI can increase productivity, especially among less experienced workers
• RAG (retrieval-augmented generation); using LLMs (large language models) for reasoning purposes, especially to perform a “deep-dive” into data within a specific business function
• Ways that AI can help to improve work quality generally
• How AI is impacting in-meeting and post-meeting productivity and collaboration
• AI’s in-meeting skill in interpreting and drawing conclusions from both verbal and non-verbal communication
• How Spataro differentiates between what he calls technical and adaptive business problems
• Spataro’s perspectives on the evolution of “3 generations” of AI agents (and the role of human input within each)
• The multi-step nature of the process of learning to use AI assistants, and supporting individuals in getting comfortable “having a conversation” with them
• Leveraging AI as a powerful tool for summarizing emails and streamlining the ensuing workflows
• The value of users’ iterating through actual, real-life experience, to become more comfortable with such technologies
• Spataro’s concept of “waves” of learning (vs. implementing a company-wide mandate) through trial and error
• Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI
• How Microsoft is thinking about “responsible AI” and the “orchestration level” role played by actual humans
• The value of “engagement” with company employees in best-deploying such tools
• Acclimating hesitant professionals to the use of prompt engineering
• The disruption of traditional educational systems and the new role of micro-credentials in what he calls “the industrial revolution for information work.”