07/14/2025
Great article here from MS showcasing 700 UI use cases where businesses gained an edge using AI
The most interesting thing about Microsoft’s customer stories is how similar they are. A city government uses Copilot to summarize meetings. A developer uses GitHub Copilot to generate code faster. A consulting firm builds an internal agent to speed up onboarding. They’re all different, but the pattern is the same: some process that used to take hours now takes minutes.
This seems boring, but I don't think it is. It may not be intellectually fancy, but it's what real progress usually looks like: better tools that save time.
If you look closely, you’ll see something else. Underneath all these stories is the same trick: find a place where work still depends on humans doing boring, repeatable tasks, and teach a computer to help. Not perfectly. Just enough to save a little time each day.
Which turns out to be a lot. When 10,000 employees each save an hour a week, that's almost 500,000 hours a year. That’s the sort of math these companies are doing. It’s also why these tools spread so fast. You don’t need to believe in the myth of AI. You just have to believe you’re wasting time.
The excitement isn’t in what these tools can do, but in what they let people stop doing. The gain isn't that Copilot writes the email for you; it's that you don't have to.
Most new technologies follow this pattern. They don’t do something new. They let you skip something old.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/04/22/https-blogs-microsoft-com-blog-2024-11-12-how-real-world-businesses-are-transforming-with-ai/
