From the Editor’s Desk: Putting AI to Work (Premium)

Last week, I observed that the real benefit we get from AI is a time savings that lets us focus on the work that’s most important to us. And that was mostly an observation. Whether this is hypocritical or ironic, or both, I don’t know, but I have struggled to use AI in my daily work. And that needs to change.

With that in mind, here are a few anecdotal experiences that may be of interest. A few baby steps, if you will, into a more AI-centric future.

?️ Summarize

Yesterday, I took the afternoon off to travel via train to Toluca, a city to the west of Mexico City, with my wife and two friends. Getting there is time-consuming and tedious, though that will get better when the high-speed rail line is completed, connecting central Mexico City to the Santa Fe neighborhood and Toluca. I specifically didn’t bring my laptop, but had so much downtime I wish I had.

In any event, when we got back to our apartment much later in the day than expected, we grabbed a quick dinner and then Stephanie and I got caught up on work. In my case, there were several potentially interesting news stories that I pulled aside in browser tabs, and last night I ended up belatedly writing up the .NET 10 Preview 1 and Framework announcements. And that was all the energy I could muster. It had been a long day out in the sun, and at 10,000 feet of elevation, and I was beat. So I went to bed, figuring I could scan through the remaining items I had put aside in the morning.

Among them was a curious and pretty unique posting from Xbox called Xbox Game Studios Update With Craig Duncan. Unique because it was a video with no accompanying text-based announcements. And that meant I’d have to watch the video, and actually pay attention, to learn what that was all about. I knew that Xbox had delayed the Fable reboot to 2026 because Laurent pinged me about it just as I was leaving on Tuesday, before he wrote it up. And so I figured that was the meat of the video content. But perhaps there was more.

The video is only 19 and a half minutes long, but it’s fair to say I was dragging ass this morning, and I wasn’t particularly in the mood to sit through the video interview. So I did what I’ve done so often with such things, I copied and pasted the transcript of it into a document so I could just read it. This is useful when I want to quote from some event, though I have to step through the transcription in these cases and fix mistakes. But it’s a nice time saver regardless.

But what if I could save even more time?

Inspired by the story my wife told me about her first meaningful use of AI, as relayed in a recent Ask Paul, I pasted the transcript into Word, which I normally don’t use. And then I opened the Copilot pane and typed:

This is a video podcast transcript. Can you summarize it for me?

This was the response.

Sure, I’d be happy to help with that! ?

The podcast features Tina Amini and Craig Duncan, the new Head of Xbox Game Studios. They discuss Craig’s extensive career in the gaming industry, including his time at Rare and his involvement with games like “Sea of Thieves” and “Rare Replay.” Craig emphasizes the importance of creating a supportive culture for game development teams and the challenges of making games in today’s competitive environment.

They also talk about the recent release of Obsidian’s game “Avowed,” which both Tina and Craig have been playing and enjoying. The conversation highlights the game’s depth, storytelling, and the passion of the development team.

The podcast covers several other games showcased in the Developer Direct event, including “South of Midnight” by Compulsion Games, “Ninja Gaiden 4” by Team Ninja and Platinum Games, and “Expedition 33” by Sandfall Interactive. Each game is discussed in terms of its unique features, development process, and the excitement surrounding their releases.

Additionally, they mention the upcoming release of “DOOM: The Dark Ages” and the decision to bring more Xbox games to other platforms, which Craig believes is beneficial for both gamers and developers.

Finally, they touch on the highly anticipated game “Fable,” which has been delayed to 2026 to ensure the best possible experience for players. Craig expresses confidence in the Playground Games team and their vision for the game.

Is there anything specific you would like to know more about? ?

Aside from the oddly passive-aggressive bit at the end–which I know ChatGPT does, too, because the friends I mentioned above were using it while we were in Toluca–that’s pretty useful. So I asked it a follow-up question tied to my real concerns.

do they discuss anything you would consider to be news?

The response to this was:

Yes, the podcast does cover several topics that could be considered newsworthy. Here are some highlights:

1. Craig Duncan’s New Role: The podcast features Craig Duncan, the new Head of Xbox Game Studios, discussing his extensive career in the gaming industry and his vision for the future.
2. Game Releases and Updates: They talk about the recent release of Obsidian’s game “Avowed,” which has been well-received for its depth and storytelling. They also discuss other games showcased in the Developer Direct event, including “South of Midnight” by Compulsion Games, “Ninja Gaiden 4” by Team Ninja and Platinum Games, and “Expedition 33” by Sandfall Interactive.
3. Upcoming Releases: The podcast mentions the upcoming release of “DOOM: The Dark Ages” and the decision to bring more Xbox games to other platforms, which is a significant move for the gaming community.
4. Fable Delay: They touch on the highly anticipated game “Fable,” which has been delayed to 2026 to ensure the best possible experience for players. Craig expresses confidence in the Playground Games team and their vision for the game.

Is there anything specific you would like to know more about? ?

Also useful. Less useful were the follow-ups it suggested, like “Can you provide more details on Craig’s vision?” which is vaguely hilarious. But that bit about bringing Xbox games to other platforms is, of course, interesting. So I asked another follow-up, instead of just going to find that information in the transcript as I normally would.

what does this podcast say about xbox bringing games to other platforms?

The response:

In the podcast, Craig Duncan discusses the decision to bring more Xbox games to other platforms. He believes that this move is beneficial for both gamers and developers. By making Xbox games available on multiple platforms, they can reach a broader audience and remove barriers that prevent players from enjoying these games together1.

Craig mentions that this approach allows their studios to share their amazing games with as many players as possible. He highlights the example of “Sea of Thieves,” which reached multiple platforms and enabled players to play together1. Additionally, he talks about the announcement of “Forza Horizon 5” coming to other platforms, emphasizing that it’s one of the best racing games ever made1.

Overall, Craig Duncan’s vision is to ensure that Xbox games can be enjoyed by a wider audience, which he believes is good for gamers and the studios creating these games1.

Is there anything specific you would like to know more about? ?

Useful, but also revealing in that there is no new “news” there. This is just someone from Xbox reiterating the theme, with two obvious examples. Which is fine. This told me that I could move on. I had found out what I needed, and there was nothing else to write.

Well, aside from telling you this story.

? Conversational

As you may know, I brought my Surface Laptop 7 to Mexico City for all the right reasons–battery life, performance, general excellence–but also because I had put it in the Windows Insider Program Dev channel so I could test/use new Windows 11 and Copilot+ PC features early. This would let me add content to the Windows 11 Field Guide, though I’m still working through how/where that will fit in, and also record new episodes of Hands-On Windows. The latest published episode as I write this is about Recall and Click to Do, but I then recorded episodes about new AI features in Paint and Photos, AI credits and Windows 11 features, and AI credits and Microsoft 365 features (and more) that required this setup and will appear in coming episodes.

The thing is, I don’t really use AI all that much beyond generating images for articles on Thurrott.com. And so that last episode, about AI credits and Microsoft 365, required a bit of thought. Originally, I considered coasting a bit by just covering Word, the Microsoft 365 app I’m most familiar with. But in stepping through the AI features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, I realized I could do something more meaningful, even given how unfamiliar I am with those latter two apps. (I also cover the new Outlook in that episode, though its AI features are curiously lacking, at least for now. And I cover the Designer stuff in the Windows 11 episode.)

There is some UI stuff to get through: Copilot appears throughout each app, but generally via a ribbon button (that opens a sidebar with chat interface), a Rewrite icon that appears when you select content, and as a new component of the Paste Options pop-up that appears when you paste in content from elsewhere. But that’s mostly seamless and obvious, and works pretty well, as are all the rewriting and summarize features in Word. What was more interesting to me was how I fell into conversing with Copilot while using the less familiar (to me) Excel and PowerPoint.

For Excel, I recreated the story I’d told before about the one time I use this app each year, to create a colorful chart for my annual PC sales write-up. Each time I do this, it’s like I’m using Excel for the first time. And though my goal is a colored chart like the version I succeeded at making last month, I often fail at that and end up going with a single color because I can’t figure it out. (As I did in 2024 and 2023.)

In any event, I selected the columns of data, the first being years and the second being unit sales in millions, and prompted Copilot to make a chart, with thick vertical bars, each representing a year of PC sales, and each being a different color. I expected that to just happen, but that is not how Copilot works in this regard. Instead, it told me how to do this, using step-by-step instructions. That’s OK, and it actually helped me learn the correct steps to get this done each year. But when I tried this with ChatGPT and Gemini, those AIs both just made the chart. And in both cases got something wrong. (ChatGPT’s chart had thin bars, not thick, and Gemini’s had too few colors.)

And that’s when something interesting happened.

I found myself conversing with the AIs in a way that was curiously natural. If you think back to personal digital assistants–Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa–you may know that each at some point added the ability to continue discussing whatever topic, and that these “conversations” often felt/feel stilted and weird. You know you’re not really talking to anyone. But with AI chatbots, this seems to work better. I don’t know why.

“That’s pretty good,” I found myself telling ChatGPT, like it was a small child who had tried its darnedest but fallen short of the mark. “But could you make the bars thicker?” Of course it could. And did, instantly. (As did Gemini with a nearly identical follow-up).

This conversational interaction played out when I did a PowerPoint demo (which, again, you can view for yourself sometime in the coming weeks). In this case, I asked Copilot to create a presentation about 10 cool dinosaurs, with photos and information, using one slide per dinosaur. And each time I did this–I did some practice runs before the recording, of course–it did not follow my instructions to the letter. Instead, it created fairly incredible and long presentations in which each dinosaur was covered over 3 or 4 slides. And so I found myself discussing this with Copilot, trying to whittle it down.

(Unrelated to this, the dinosaur presentations I created with Copilot all contained errors, most often with the pictures not being correct for the dinosaurs. The version I recorded was notably bad in this regard, but I’m not sure why.)

Tied to this, you may have seen that a reader recently recommended a video that explains how LLMs work. I saved this video to my Watch Later queue on YouTube and then watched in over a couple of sessions soon thereafter. This led me to watching a few other related videos, among them an 18-minute video called Generative AI in a Nutshell – how to survive and thrive in the age of AI that seems a bit dry at first but is in fact incredibly insightful. It was interesting enough that I recommended that my wife watch it, specifically the bit about how the presenter interacts with ChatGPT (in this case) on walks. I found this fascinating.

“When I have things to figure out, I like to take walks using ChatGPT as a sounding board,” he says. “I start by saying, ‘always respond with the word OK unless I ask you for something.’ That way, it will just listen and not interrupt. After I finish dumping my thoughts, I ask for feedback. We have some discussion. And then I ask it to summarize in text afterwards. I really recommend trying this. It’s a really useful way to use tools like this.”

I have not tried this. But I will. And I recommend checking out that video.

? Custom GPT

Speaking of YouTube, my side trip into AI content lead me to rewatch two recent Dave Plummer videos, Set up a Local AI like ChatGPT on your own machine and Feed Your OWN Documents to a Local Large Language Model. Like many of you, I am a big fan of Dave’s YouTube channel, and I find myself rewatching many of his videos. (Some of the best, perhaps, are his incredible interviews with NT architect Dave Cutler and legend Raymond Chen.) But he’s been hitting AI hard lately, which is great. And the latter of the two videos I linked above is a topic that is of great interest to me. Since the dawn of this AI era, I’ve been looking forward to pointing some AI at my work archives so I could then prompt it for information I’ve written about in the past.

That will happen, of course. And while I suppose there’s some public version of such a thing that could happen in the future, I see that mostly as a personal research tool. I often find it hard or time-consuming to find specific things I’ve written about.

But in rewatching that video recently, a thought occurred. Perhaps there are other, more targeted uses of my content that would make sense for a publicly accessible AI tool of some kind. The most obvious being a custom GPT that was fed the contents of one of my books. The two most ideal being the Windows 11 Field Guide and, as it gets more complete, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City.

Let’s focus on the former. Right now, the Windows 11 Field Guide is available in PDF and ePUB forms via Leanpub and, for Thurrott Premium subscribers, in web form as well. These are each searchable to whatever degree. But I think it would be incredibly useful if one could simply ask whatever AI specific questions about Windows 11 and just get the answer, using what I feel is a reliable source.

I don’t have something to show you here, mostly because I have to sort through what this would entail from legal and cost perspectives. I know, for example, that I’d have to pay for ChatGPT to even make a custom GPT with that technology, but I don’t know as I write this if that would be something I could offer to others. Ideally, this would be a Thurrott Premium feature, something I could host on the site. But it’s an interesting idea, right? And there are other AIs, perhaps some free or low cost, that could handle this. Not to mention “local” AIs in the form of small language models (SLMs) one might run on a Copilot+ PC or GPU-based PC.

To test this theory, I went old-school and Googled to see whether there were any AIs that would do this for free. I found something called Pmfm.ai that lets you experiment for free, and it even offers a way to host the GPTs–or “apps”–it creates on your website, at a cost. I ran into an issue with the size of the book PDF, which exceeds its 50 MB/file size limit, but used an online tool to split it into multiple PDFs. Which it accepted. But I can’t seem to get it to create the app, it only vaguely suggests filling out all the required information without telling me what’s missing.

I will keep trying. This seems like a really interesting idea to me, and a good use of AI. And yes, it’s just a few first steps into this world. But that’s how it starts.