To Work Well with GenAI, You Need to Learn How to Talk to It

Remember: Your computer isn’t a person.

December 15, 2023

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Natural language conversations are at the foundation of how people work — historically that’s been true for how we work together, and now that’s also true for how we work with our computers. These conversations contain a lot of knowledge that LLMs will unlock — your conversation with PowerPoint, for example, can now become an amazing presentation. But conversations aren’t just about facts and data, the grounding and structure are important as well — that is what prompt engineering is. And as we start to discover the new ways of work that LLMs unlock, this structure is going to evolve as well.

As Chief Scientist at Microsoft, my job is to conduct research that makes work better. And it’s an incredibly exciting time to have that job. Study after study show that recent AI advances will enable people to work in substantially new and more productive ways, and we’ve just started to scratch the surface of what is possible with AI. In the 17 years I’ve spent at Microsoft, I’ve never been more optimistic about the opportunity for computing to change work for the better.

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Jaime Teevan is chief scientist at Microsoft, where she is responsible for driving research-backed innovation in Microsoft products. Her early work at Microsoft focused on using AI to help people accomplish their goals, developing the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introducing microproductivity into Microsoft Office. Jaime has served as technical advisor to Microsoft’s CEO and currently leads Microsoft’s effort to understand post-Covid work practices.