How Microsoft could supplant Apple as the world’s most valuable firm

For years Microsoft has been trying to coax office workers to write reports, populate spreadsheets and create slide shows using its office software. No longer: now it wants to do the writing and populating for them. At its headquarters in Redmond, a leafy suburb of Seattle, the firm demonstrates its latest wizardry. Beyond the plate-glass windows, snow-capped mountains glisten and pine trees sway. Inside, a small grey rectangle sits at the top of a blank Word document. With a few words of instruction, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—or “Copilot”, as Microsoft calls it—finds a vast file in a computer folder and summarises its contents. Later, it edits its own work and succinctly answers questions about the material. It can perform plenty of other tricks, too: digging out emails on certain topics, drawing up a to-do list based on a meeting and even whipping up a passable PowerPoint presentation about your correspondent.

This is a glimpse into the future of work. The mind-boggling capabilities of “generative” AI look set to transform many desk jobs. It is also a glimpse into the future of Microsoft, which was once the world’s most valuable public company and hopes to reclaim the title by selling the technology that will power the transformation. Through the firm’s investment in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, a popular AI chatbot, it is able to inject cutting-edge AI into its products.