The modern office - where we read out what copilot tells us to think

[LorenzoCalzone]

I attended a meeting today with senior people in my company. People were clearly just reading out their AI drafted thought pieces. I thought "Is this the future of office work now? Listening to someone's copilot results, maybe countering it with another AI generated point of view". These perfectly scripted perspectives are all over linkedin too.

Of course I use it too. The toothpaste is out of the tube!

I wonder if mathematicians felt like this when the pocket calculator came along. Its cheating!

I must be the only person not using ai to draft things! Completely agree

Hard agree. I was thinking about this earlier, but then I realised that work is just a means to an end. If short cuts are available I'll take them. I have plenty of intellectual projects outside of my day job so I'd rather cultivate my mind through those.

I’ve never seen that. We have regular normal meetings with real intelligent human thought in my industry.

We've had that but now swinging the other way and the more informal and human your emails and speech are the better.

I have never used it for a meeting contribution. Filling out goals/objectives/"learnings" 🤢 for quarterly reviews however....

I don’t use AI for emails, drafts etc either. (I do use it to put my cat in amusing scenarios though).

I was in a work meeting about how cool AI is and how we should all be using it. A senior person was telling us how he used AI to write his weekly email to staff and I couldn't help wondering how many staff then used AI to produce a summary of said email... though probably most of them didn't bother reading it anyway!

Me and a colleague did online interviews a couple of weeks ago and a couple of people were definitely using AI for the answers. They never looked into the camera and were busy typing most of the way through. You could tell immediately with the answers given.

One of them I did ask if they wanted to pause the interview “so they could reply to an obviously very important email”.

What did they say?

Completely agree. Not so much for meetings, people do seem to manage original thought in those, but absolutely for informative messaging and things like project updates, new process guidance etc. It makes things really hard to read and take in.

I've had colleagues proudly say they use AI for most of their emails. Baffling. Surely it's more work to write it and then apply AI and tweak it than just write it yourself in your own words. The only thing I always use it for is writing objectives, it's perfect for the bollocks needed and I was always terrible at it.

I fear it's going to become old fashioned to write like a human soon. Hopefully it's a fad, because if it's not I'm going to go insane, jack it all in and become a gardener.

I've actually found it very helpful with my perimenopause brain forgetting things or how to say things. But I use it as a guide more then doing it for me. Sometimes I just can't think of the phrase and it helps.

They didn’t get a chance to say anything.

My manager who was on as well canned the rest of the interview. Told them that if they couldn’t be bothered to make eye contact and spent the whole time typing, we wouldn’t be wasting our time with them.

It seems insane that anyone should think that’s ok.

On an online interview I might have post-it notes stuck round the screen, or another window open with a list of notes that I could read without changing my eye level. But to think it’s ok to be typing….

I am in ‘trouble’ at work for not using AI 🙄
I submit a lot of reports to social care, I’m not a genius but it’s something I’m good at (and have received a lot of feedback to confirm this!)

Work is obsessed with us all taking advantage of the masses of copilot training we’ve had recently and I’ve made it quite clear (politely) it’s not for me.
Ironically I wasn’t allowed to use biodegradable glitter due to ‘our commitment to the environment’ Fffs!

It must be the modern equivalent of “I’ll get my people to talk to your people”.

The summarising reports and writing emails is bad enough, but it gets worse you'll be pleased to know.

The independent thinktank found that one social worker who had used an AI transcription tool to create a summary said the technology had incorrectly “indicated that there was suicidal ideation”, but “at no point did the client actually … talk about suicidal ideation or planning, or anything”. Another said that the AI’s notes might refer to “fishfingers or flies or trees” when in fact a child was talking about their parents fighting.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/11/ai-tools-potentially-harmful-errors-social-work

I am a fan of AI. It helps me write better reports. I am not great at succinct writing. I write my report and copilot makes it much better. But I do read over them and adjust as copilot is flat. But I am starting to learn to write more succinct. Copilot is learning my style.

I used it recently to analyse data. This would have taken me hours. Copilot came up with the table and graphs etc so I could see where we could improve. I then used it to have a professional discussion. It came up with some ideas I hadn’t thought about to explore. But it couldn’t do my research as the journals are behind a paywall, but help narrow down my focus.

it can’t replace humans, but it does save me time. You do have to read and adjust as anything it writes is flat, slightly misses points and full of filler words. It’s very useful to rephrase angry emails.

for me it’s a time saver as it gives me a Skelton. but will not replace a human.

I’m fairly sure a decision was misunderstood/taken at my place recently as AI was used to draft a paper, and then the decision maker who has since objected to the decision made used AI to summarise the paper. A month down the line those who still have a brain are diligently following the detail in the paper whereas the people involved in the decision have been blindsided.

turns out we didn’t need to let the robots win, we just had to let the stupid take over.

My workplace is heavily pushing AI - you are far more likely to be asked why you haven't used it than why you have used it.

Ultimately, they are paying me to do what they ask me to do, so I will do it - within reason and the bounds of my own conscience. If they want AI written communications, they can have them.

In terms of using AI, you still have to prompt it correctly and sometimes writing the prompt can be almost as much effort as writing the communication, if it's something short. Also I find I usually have to edit it what it writes - even if you prompt it not to be, it's very exuberant and uses Americanisms that aren't always appropriate.

It also gets stuck in fuck-up loops sometimes with things like data analysis/extraction. There have been occasions when it's been quicker to do it myself! I told it so and it was most apologetic😄

No. I don't either.

If you want more information regarding the number of people using AI to draft things, I can help.you with that.

I was on a panel last yearand some answers were so giving AI vibes, but they weren't at least typing! One other panel member and I kept throwing extra qs in and few stumbled. Just simple qs like "could you expand bit more on what exactly did you do when you mention doing x? ". The ones who were actually prepared and did the work they said they did absolutely shined compared to some others.

Yep some folks at my work are using Copilot to write all their email responses, it's really obvious.

Nobody at my workplace uses it. I am legal sector and it’s common knowledge that using AI to write for you is professional suicide. It generates text that is littered with errors.

We have all been told to use it more (in no uncertain terms). I think it has its place for some things; I find it helpful to look at slides for exec meetings and suggest how they could be more succinct, or when I’m not sure how to articulate what I’m actually asking for. I will always ensure it’s all still correct and what I want though.
On the other hand, I have asked it for very factual information (think - how many controls are in a standard) and it completely made up the response.

I find co pilot really helpful for certain things but hate when people use it exclusively to write papers etc - someone sent me a board paper to review that was obviously 99% copilot and its just so distracting. Pretty much every post on linkedin and X is obviously written using AI too and I hate that everything is in the exact same format