Copilot isn't the new Metaverse, but its value will sit more on huge companies than your average Joe

The term Metaverse was coined back in 1992, in the Snow Crash S.F. novel and it was defined as virtual worlds where real people are represented by their virtual avatars. The most prominent iteration of this concept is Second Life.

Much later, Facebook was rebranded as Meta to cash in on second wave of this concept by including the VR and AR goggles and enhance the immersion. They even rebranded Oculus Quest to Meta Quest, but let’s face it, it didn’t catch on.

Now, a user on Reddit is asking if Copilot could be the next Metaverse after watching the Microsoft Business Application Summit, and it really got me thinking.

It is hard to compare Copilot with Metaverse

The person obviously didn’t take the real meaning of the Metaverse term, but I see where this is going. Copilot is getting so much hype and attention these days that we’re all wondering how long this overexcitement will last.

We’ve all played with Copilot on our PCs or smartphones, but except for some laughs and giggles, most of us didn’t get much of the the advertised benefits. And it’s easy to see why: Copilot and other AI bots had such a steep evolution that we didn’t even get to know how to use it. Recently, Microsoft announced the launch of what they call a Copilot Adoption Community to teach employees on how to use it.

That’s where we get to the root of this matter. Microsoft didn’t created Copilot for the average Joe, but for organizations. They are now training (or already did) specialized bots for finance, collaboration, security, taxes, automation, etc. This post is too short to take into consideration all the applications of Copilot and its base LLM, GPT.

For the rest of us and our PCs, Copilot will turn into an AI personal assistant that is just a few steps up than the good ol’ Siri (that frankly, was useless from the beginning).

Copilot is useful where the money is

So, no, Copilot is not Metaverse, and I don’t think it could become one. Of course, there’s the Matrix saga plot where the AI takes control of all of us and creates a virtual simulation for our minds to live in. All jokes aside, Copilot’s real value is not from its presence on our PCs. That’s just the marketing awareness side. The real money is in the companies and employees who are now learning how to use it.

The Metaverse, or at least the way it was implemented, was and is a market, a meeting place. Copilot is a tool. While you can sell almost anything in a place where people are gathering, a tool can be used to do almost any task in the digital world. They are only comparable in the hype that they received during their evolution.

I am almost certain that the Metaverse will soon coexist with LLMs and if someone manages to join them in a clever way, we will have another huge spark for it. In the meantime, Microsoft is cashing in on their AI bot because they implemented in all the cloud, office and security solutions. And they jumped in because Copilot shortly started to reduce their costs, improve productivity and ultimately, grow their businesses.

Other LLM developers moved slowly and implemented their solutions locally. Google is slowly getting Gemini AI into all their products such as Gmail. The latest feature is one that will help you formulate email replies. That’s great, but it’s free, and you probably wouldn’t pay for something like that unless you have to reply to hundreds of emails a day. Again, the answer is into company productivity, not your personal comfort.

However, if everybody is talking about Copilot, that means Microsoft did their job, and that translates into more business contracts for them.

By the way, are you working with Copilot at work? How is it for you? Let’s talk about this in the comments below.