'Copilot' this, 'Copilot' that. A watchdog wants Microsoft to change its confusing AI advertising.
Microsoft has a long history of being criticized for coming up with clunky product names, and for changing them so often it's hard for customers to keep up.
The company's own employees once joked in a viral video that the iPod would have been called the "Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription" had it been created by Microsoft.
The latest gripe among some employees and customers: The company's tendency to slap " Copilot" on everything AI.
"There is a delusion on our marketing side where literally everything has been renamed to have Copilot it in," one employee told Business Insider late last year. "Everything is Copilot. Nothing else matters. They want a Copilot tie-in for everything."
Now, an advertising watchdog is weighing in. The Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division reviewed Microsoft's advertising for its Copilot AI tools.
NAD called out Microsoft's "universal use of the product description as 'Copilot'" and said that "consumers would not necessarily understand the difference," according to a recent report from the watchdog.
"Microsoft is using 'Copilot' across all Microsoft Office applications and Business Chat, despite differences in functionality and the manual steps that are required for Business Chat to produce the same results as Copilot in a specific Microsoft Office app," NAD further explained in an email to BI.
NAD did not mention any specific recommendations on product names. But it did say that Microsoft should modify claims that Copilot works "seamlessly across all your data" because all of the company's tools with the Copilot moniker don't work together continuously in a way consumers might expect.
"For Copilot in Business Chat to achieve the same functionality as Copilot in Word or PowerPoint, the text-based responses from Business Chat would have to be manually copied and pasted into the relevant application," NAD stated.
The watchdog also recommended that Microsoft discontinue or modify its advertising to disclose a clear basis for the claim that "Over the course of 6, 10, and more than 10 weeks, 67%, 70%, and 75% of users say they are more productive" because that survey doesn't necessarily account for actual productivity gains, just perceived gains.
"We take seriously our responsibility to provide clear, transparent, and accurate information to our customers," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's AI at Work chief marketing officer, said in a statement. "Companies choose Microsoft 365 Copilot because it delivers measurable value, securely and at scale."
Spataro also said a "record number of customers" returned to purchase additional Microsoft 365 Copilot seats last quarter, and that the company's deal sizes continue to grow.
"From Barclays rolling out Copilot to 100,000 employees, to Dow identifying millions in potential savings—the data speaks for itself," Spataro said.
A Microsoft spokesperson added that the company disagrees with NAD's conclusions about the phrasing of its advertising and whether it implied certain claims, but will follow NAD's recommendations.
Recently, the company developed a new plan to simplify its many AI offerings by streamlining how the products are pitched to customers, according to internal slides from a recent presentation.
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