Is AI just a digital toolbox?

Is AI increasingly looking like a fancy toolbox? Barclays says it will provide Microsoft's Co-Pilot assistance licences to 100,000 employees to help them increase their productivity, after trialling the service with 15,000 workers.

Microsoft has been reducing its reliance on OpenAI and has added X's Grok AI and Anthropic's Claude Code into its services, aiming to become a gateway to AI tools.

"Microsoft 365Copilot will be integrated into the bank's own staff productivity tool, creating a single agent for employee self-service such as booking business travel, checking policy compliance, or finding answers to HR-related questions," reports Finextra.

"An agentic dashboard accessed by Microsoft Viva will be deployed to help staff with 'moments that matter', like booking desks or annual leave, as well as serving personalised news and announcements."

Somehow this reminds us of that Peter Thiel quote that 'We were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters'.

This fits with recent news including Mark Zuckerberg's new plan to build a 'superintelligence team', apparently born of frustration with Meta's progress in AI.

"Zuckerberg aims to hire around 50 people for the new team, including a new head of AI research, almost all of whom he's recruiting personally," reports Bloomberg.

"He's rearranged desks at the company's Menlo Park headquarters so the new staff will sit near him, the people said, asking to remain anonymous discussing private plans." 

Maybe they can use Co-Pilot to arrange the desks?