I have to admit that I never really used Outlook as my main email driver. While I do have an Outlook account and used it sporadically, mostly for testing purposes, I stuck to the likes of Eudora and Thunderbird.
Recently, Microsoft has given Outlook an overhaul that was not received too well by many of its users. Basically, Microsoft turned Outlook from a classic desktop app into a web-based version that is pretty much just a wrapper. In some years, Microsoft plans to replace the Office-included version of Outlook with that new version.
According to Tom Warren at The Verge, Microsoft has shuffled leadership around and Outlook’s team appears to be under new leadership now to lead it into the AI era.
The new leader is Gaurav Sareen, corporate vice president of global experiences and platform at Microsoft. In a memo to the team, Sareen shared his vision for the future of Outlook. It should not come as a surprise that AI is at the forefront of everything.
Think of Outlook as your body double, there for you, so work feels less overwhelming and more doable because you are not facing it alone. With Copilot, this body double becomes even more powerful. Copilot turns Outlook from a set of tools into a partner that acts.
In other words, Outlook will introduce AI that reads your emails, helps you organize them, writes email drafts for you, and, Microsoft hopes, will help users spend less time doing tasks that they dislike or think are a waste of time.
The big question is, does the majority of Outlook users want this? Will they use the AI features in Outlook? It probably depends to a large degree on how well they are integrated and how useful they are. Privacy is another topic, which Microsoft fails to address regularly to a degree that answers all the main questions sufficiently:
- What data may the AI access.
- How and where does it process the data?
- Who can access the data?
- Is the data used for anything other than the user’s personal AI tasks?
- Can the AI report data to Microsoft?
Microsoft won’t convince most privacy-conscious users to give it a try even, but most probably do not use Outlook to begin with unless required to.
Now you: would you start using AI features in your email client, if it supported them? Which would you like to see, if any?
I use simple, solid, free, open-source T’bird. I used Outlook, years ago, and found it to be a buggy POS. Not sure what software sadist came up with those .pst files.
An e-mail app needs AI like a fish needs a bicycle. In a few years people will look back on the AI bubble era and laugh at this nonsense.
“Outlook will introduce AI that reads your emails, helps you organize them,”
On PC browser, I have extension for text to speech. My email service already capability to sort emails without AI and done it for years. But my guess it will be more useful for mobiles.
“Microsoft won’t convince most privacy-conscious users to give it a try even, but most probably do not use Outlook to begin with unless required to.”
Bingo. This is not for personal communication. This is only for work when somebody gets hundreds of mostly similar emails every day. However, I see the huge problem though. If all people are using AI for office work, what those people will be needed for? You might as well install an automated system and maybe one person to moderate and maintain it.