Return on investment for Copilot? Microsoft has work to do

A Microsoft exec claims Copilot is boosting productivity among the customers that adopted it yet sustained efforts to convince many them of the returns on investment remains a work in progress.

Jared Spataro, corporate veep of the Modern Work and Business Applications division at Microsoft, made the admission at the recent Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference.

Asked about the productivity benefits by Kasthuri Rangan in the research division at the investment bank, the Microsoft exec said:

“For the most part, we feel pretty great about what we can do. We think, in many tasks, we can improve efficiency by 20 to 30 percent. And if you do control and treatment type group experiments, you can show that.

“The most difficult thing about that is it's tough to drive ROI on saying Kash is 30 percent more productive… unless he's a salesperson and carries a quota, quite frankly, because ...