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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

If you're not yet following Ben’s research, I highly recommend checking it out!

#AIInnovators #AppliedResearch #NewFutureOfWork #LeadingLikeAScientist

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

Ben and his co-authors call these constraints and preferences “standing instructions” (arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09796), enabling AI models to remember details like your preferred cuisine or budget whenever you ask for restaurant recommendations.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

Personalization is another critical area of Ben’s research. By allowing users to explicitly state their general preferences and building models around them, AI can provide personalized responses and recommendations.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

Ben’s effort to apply logical reasoning to a particularly complex field – identifying loopholes in the US federal tax code – promises to help people navigate and interpret complex documents in a wide range of domains (www.taxnotes.com/featured-ana...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

In the workplace, addressing complex intents and reasoning often requires making sense of vast amounts of documents and business practices grounded in human interactions, individual artifacts, and evolving knowledge that changes over time.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

Additionally, his research on decomposing complex intents into smaller steps allows AI systems to handle multi-step tasks while keeping humans in the loop for reasonability checks at every decision point (arxiv.org/abs/2305.08677).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

One AI challenge is enabling systems to understand and process complex utterances expressed in NL. Ben’s work involves converting NL into machine-readable formats, which is essential for accurate automated interactions with databases, APIs, and chatbots (aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m...).

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

Ben is a researcher at Microsoft, where he leads work on conversational AI for professionals, and is also on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Jan 6

How can AI move beyond simple responses and reliably address complex tasks? Meet Benjamin Van Durme (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...), who is pushing the boundaries of natural language tools so they can handle multi-step processes with contextual understanding.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

With Microsoft celebrating its 50th anniversary, here’s to the next 50 years of turning emails into insights and documents into dialogs!

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

As we move into 2025, AI is set to transform all aspects of work, but only if we are able to build on what we already know about productivity while being open to learning. This past year taught us that there are new ways AI can drive purpose, sustain persistence, and foster collaboration.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

By leveraging AI’s strengths in planning and synthesis, this kind of uncoordinated large-scale collaboration will make it possible to harness collective intelligence, enabling groups to solve problems and create knowledge more effectively than ever before (teevan.org/publications...).

teevan.org

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

But AI’s ability to process input from multiple people at scale will also disrupt collaboration in more profound ways. We already see people using Excel to extract themes from columns of text, where each row represents an idea from a different person.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

Microsoft’s decades of experience supporting collaboration, managing permissions, and facilitating sharing are proving invaluable as we integrate AI into these spaces.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

Given the importance of conversations, we're embedding AI into collaborative spaces. One of the best Copilot experiences is in Teams meetings, because AI enhances collaboration by summarizing discussion, suggesting action items, even prompting attendees to engage in more meaningful conversations.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

3) Collaborative: From working alone to thinking together.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

But the nature of knowledge artifacts is evolving. Much of the knowledge people return to is now generated through conversation (w/ people or AI) and reused not only by people but also by AI for grounding. Microsoft was a document company, but now must become a dialog company (vimeo.com/927715632).

Jaime Teevan - From Documents to Dialogues: How LLMs are Shaping the Future of Work

The future of work is changing rapidly, with knowledge increasingly embedded in conversations rather than documents. In this talk, Jaime Teevan will explore how…

vimeo.com

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

Currently, most conversations with AI are ephemeral. People must reestablish context every time they return to an AI system. This is at odds with the fact that work takes place over time. Fifty years ago, Microsoft began its journey by helping people create documents to digitally persist knowledge.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

2) Persistent: From storing documents to sustaining dialogs.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

But we are learning that AI can go even further by prompting people to fully articulate their goals and explore new directions. Right now, AI simply obeys commands. Looking forward, it will also challenge people to think differently (cacm.acm.org/opinion/ai-s...).

AI Should Challenge, Not Obey – Communications of the ACM

cacm.acm.org

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

People can now directly express their purpose, rather than having to translate it into computer-understandable actions. But expressing purpose is still hard to do. Decades of research show that recognition is easier than recall, and prompt support strategies are proving to be powerful tools here.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

1) Purposeful: From executing tasks to unlocking potential.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

Work has always been 1) purposeful, 2) persistent, and 3) collaborative, but AI is fundamentally redefining how computing supports these essential aspects. Let’s look at how.

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

But the early glimpses we got this year of how people are starting to use Copilot suggests AI will teach us new ways to think about productivity as well. If 2024 was the year of taking what we know and applying it to how we use AI at work, 2025 can be the year of taking a fresh look at work given AI

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Jaime Teevan @teevan.bsky.social · Dec 31

In 2025, Microsoft will turn 50, and the wealth of knowledge the company has built over half a century of pioneering productivity solutions will supercharge how AI helps people summarize email and write documents.

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