Artificial Intelligence: More Than Just an Image Generator
It’s been way too long since I’ve written a blog post. In fact, I haven’t thought about it at all in over a year. So, what brings me back to it? As I’m looking at my career development path, trying to determine what’s next for me, I have been meeting with a mentor on a regular basis. By the way, if you don’t have AT LEAST one mentor, get one. We’ll save that for a different post. Anyway, he recently challenged me to create two pieces of content a week. I don’t fancy myself the best of writers, but the only way to get better is to do the thing. So, here we go!
I’m going to talk for a bit about Artificial Intelligence (aka AI). Everyone is talking AI, everywhere, all the time. There are tons of cool things that can be done with AI, some good, some bad (unfortunately). As the industry grows and AI utilization increases, the products will get better. More efficient models, less hallucinations, higher quality images and videos, etc. This is probably nothing you haven’t heard before. What I want to focus on is an area of AI that isn’t talked about enough: Accessibility.
When I say accessibility, I’m talking about the degree to which a product or service (AI) is available to people with disability, as well as how AI itself can be used to help improve user experience. The second half of this definition is where I’m going to home in on.
Today, there are over 1 billion people worldwide with disabilities which range from permanent to temporary, and both visible and non-visible. It’s a staggering number and increasing daily. When products, tools, and services are made accessible from the start, it’s a giant step in the right direction. When they are made usable for people, it creates a delightful experience. This in itself, can be lifechanging.
So how does AI help? To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Let me couth the ways.”
Take me, for example. I have a medical condition that causes me to have what is known as “brain fog” quite frequently. At times, I struggle with names, dates, and retention of things from meetings. And let me tell you, as a Program Manager at Microsoft, I have lots of meetings. Before Copilot in Teams, my standard process was to record all meetings, jot down key points with time stamps that I wanted to review, then either rewatching the recording or reviewing the transcript to make sure I captured what was important. Recordings with transcripts was a valuable tool, but not very efficient. Not delightful. Now at the end of meetings, I simply ask Copilot (aka prompt) to recap the meeting with key points and action items displayed in a table format including the person to take the action and any associated due dates. A few seconds later, I have a table I can copy and paste into my OneNote or create a set of ToDo tasks! Not only is this more efficient, but actually reduces stress of worrying if I’m going to miss something important and allows me to focus more on the conversation of the meeting and increases my participation.
I also use M365 Copilot for Work to help me find documents. Recently, one of my teammates and I were discussing a document she had recently created with some new processes. I want to leverage the work she has done to improve processes in my area of responsibility to help ensure we are aligned and help reduce confusion across our organization. It had been a couple of weeks since we chatted about it, and I couldn’t recall if it was a Teams chat, a meeting, or an email thread where we she had shared the document. Thanks, brain fog. M365 Copilot to the rescue! “Copilot, show me all the documents that Jane (name changed to protect the innocent), has edited in the last 3 weeks related to <redacted>. Provide the results in a table with file name, date last modified, and the URL if available.” Within a few seconds, I had a list of about 5 documents and was able to quickly locate the file I needed!
But wait a minute, these sound like productivity helpers. You are correct, but they are helping me be more productive, by easily removing the barriers of my brain fog condition. This is accessibility in action!
These are just my examples of how AI is helping to bridge the disability divide. Head on over to the MSFTEnable YouTube channel and listen to how Copilot is making the world more accessible for everyone!