"Will this be another half-arsed Microsoft initiative that putters out after a few years?"

Why Microsoft's attempts to create an agentic OS may be doomed, plus Jon's first impressions of the iPhone Air after yet another shopping accident

- JON HONEYBALL

It was one of those discussions on the PC Pro Discord channel (pcpro.link/discord) that spilled into the pub with the requisite beer. Given that Microsoft has announced, to a not entirely enthusiastic response, that it is going to move Windows to being an agentic OS, what would that mean to you and me? Well, the idea is that Al can be used to automate a lot of common functions and to slowly take over the way we work with our devices.

Critics pointed out that this will inevitably mean some of your data will be sent to the Microsoft cloud for processing, and what will be the privacy issues with that? Also, such a service is going to consume a lot of CPU power, and that will inevitably come at a price. Local Al processing can be done on my battery and ensure the sovereignty of my data would be protected, but it’s likely that complex questions would be beyond the capability of both my local hardware and the models that run on it.

So there was no surprise that Microsoft's head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, tweeted, “Jeez there so many cynics!” (sic).

After another beer, I was pondering what I would like from a super-intelligent “copilot” assistant. It would need to know everything about me, so data security would have to be guaranteed. It would need to have access to all of the tasks that I do on a daily basis, so it could learn how to take those tasks and process them for me on my behalf.