I was getting a lot of mixed messaging at my job for 6-12 months.

On the one hand, we got an email from high up saying not to use Copilot, or other such tools, as they were trying to figure out the licensing. But at the same time, we had the CIO getting up in front of the company every other month talking about nothing but GenAI, and how if we weren’t using it we were stupid (not in those exact words, but that was the general vibe, uncontrolled AI hype).

We were left sitting there saying, “what do you want from us? Do as you say or do as you do?”

Eventually they signed the deal with MS and we got Copilot, which then seemed forced on us. There is even a dashboard out there for it, listing all people using it, their manager, rolling all the way up to the CEO. It tells the percentage of reports from each manager using it, and how often suggestions are accepted. It seems like the kind of dashboard someone would make if they were planning to give out bonuses based on Copilot adoption.

I’ve gotten regular surveys about it as well, to ask how I was using it. I mostly don’t, due to the implementation in VS Code. I might use it a few times per month at best.

Maybe that would be different if the rollout wasn’t so awkward, or the VS Code extension was more configurable.

You absolutely do not need to be getting Microsoft copilot licenses:

Open weight and open source models can be hosted on your own hardware nowadays, and its incredibly easy.

https://dublog.net/blog/open-weight-copilots/

You can even use something like RayServe + VLLM to host on a big chonky machine for a small team if you're concerned about data exfiltration.

I think most people outside of tech have barely even touched it.

Obviously there are some savy users across all age groups and occupations. But from what Ive see its just not part of most people’s workflow.

I've seen this too and it's so weird. The vast majority are totally clueless on it.

Go back ten+ years, replace AI with cloud and it was the same. I saw ‘no cloud’ policies everywhere. But most of the anti-cloud people have since retired, so even the most hidebound of organisations are adopting it. It will probably take another round of retirements for AI to adopted in the more conservative environments.