What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #90

Author

Jason Staats
July 06, 2023

💡 Windows AI Copilot Now Live

The holy grail of chat assistants, a desktop-based assistant that can see & manipulate the programs on your screen just went live. Kind of.

Microsoft’s Copilot is now available in the latest preview build of Windows 11, meaning you could take it for a spin if you’re willing to roll the dice on an early build of Windows. But most importantly, what does it do, and what does it not do?

It adds a button to your task bar that pulls up a panel on the right. The panel lives on top of other windows, and actually shrinks the horizontal space of your desktop.

What it does:

  • Everything the Bing chat assistant does

  • Configure local settings on your machine - ie turn off notifications, enable power saving mode etc

  • Discuss anything you have open in the MS Edge browser

What it doesn’t do:

  • See other apps you have open

  • Pointing or clicking

This video shows it in action, and it’s a reasonable version 1, but what we ultimately want is the marriage of MS Copilot and MS Power Automate Desktop.

In the near future we’ll have ChatGPT-like experiences for our desktop, hustling the apps we use. Imagine swiping a megaprompt to instruct the assistant to reconcile a QBO file, file an extension, or key something into your tax software.

Desktop agents will be the most immediately disruptive (in the best way) tech that impacts what we do. We’ve explored this from a few angles on my daily pod:

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