Bing Chat and Microsoft AI
It's been a while since my last article, and it feels like the AI picture moves every week. In this article, let's go over Bing Chat & Bing Chat Enterprise and why we shouldn't shy away from AI today.
Bing Chat
Bing Chat has been available for free since March 2023. If you've never tried it before, head over to bing.co.uk and ask Bing anything. Alternatively, click on 'Chat' in the top navigation bar.
Bing Chat has changed what it means to be a search engine as AI has become more mainstream. Users can experience two sides of the Artificial Intelligence powering Bing. The vast majority will ask it anything that will result in Bing AI searching the internet for you, creating a natural language output, followed by the sources it used. A little bit like the example below:
The image above shows the input by the user - "How can I make the best carbonara?" - followed by Bing Chat searching 5 different sources and creating a natural language answer. Within seconds, AI has found sources, read them, and constructed a basic summary of those websites for me to read or navigate towards to learn more.
This example is where the majority of Bing Chat AI users will find themselves.
However, bringing the best out of AI is all down to what you ask it. How users prompt AI determines the answer you'll receive. How well you can ask a question or construct a sentence all play a part in using AI to the best of its ability. Essentially Bing Chat is like asking a human a question without the awkward "Sorry if this is a silly question but...".
There is a way to talk strictly to Bing AI though, no internet searching unless the AI needs to. The below example is when a user needed help planning a birthday party. The initial answer from Bing Chat required no web searching. Once the user had responded to the questions Bing Chat had asked, the AI had enough context to search the internet.
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Bing Chat Enterprise
One thing that is noticeable from the Bing Chat examples above is every response from the AI starts with "Your Personal and company data are protected in this chat." This is Bing Chat Enterprise (BCE). BCE adds Commercial Data Protection to Bing Chat. This is automatically switched on by Microsoft (Starting late-August 2023) for business and enterprise customers where users are subscribed to the following Microsoft 365 Plans:
I would recommend leaving this on. Although it is tempting to turn off something Microsoft have forced to be on in your tenancy, Bing Chat Enterprise is here to safeguard your data, rather than letting data be seen by Microsoft and used to train the Large Language Models (LLM) in Bing Chat.
Where do we go from here?
It can feel like AI is suddenly here, it's here to stay, there's nothing we can do to prevent it and we have to learn quickly about something that's running away from us. It's easy to say we need to embrace AI but what does that mean?
Well, shutting down access to AI, as we know from previous attempts, creates Shadow IT - users will find a way to do something. Whether it be on a personal account, a personal device, or a workaround. Typically, the security of this is not thought of by the end user and IT can only see so much.
Before Microsoft Teams was used in the abundance it is today, I used to ask a room "who uses a social messaging platform such as WhatsApp for work?". And the majority of the room would raise their hands and claim because it is encrypted, it was secure. However, IT cannot see those conversations. They cannot see what was being shared and had little to no control over the platform and the user base. If AI is shut out, the same will happen and if anything, the implications of Shadow IT are likely to be a lot worse than before. Bing Chat Enterprise has arrived at a good time. We can't stop users from using AI, but we can give them a tool that has a level of security built into it.
Using Bing Chat Enterprise can encourage users to use just one AI tool, instead of any one of the dozens that are out there. This helps create a standardised approach to AI internally to your organisation and makes learning one of the LLM's simpler. To see the differences between AI services, ask ChatGPT the same question as Bing Chat and you'll more than likely receive different answers.
Bing Chat & Bing Chat Enterprise do not have access to Microsoft Graph meaning Bing cannot create answers based upon your own data, except what you directly input to it. I would suggest testing AI for yourself. There are some amazing use cases for the AI built into Bing, but there are questions over the ethics and morals of its usage. To help support, please see Microsoft's AI Ethics pages here and here.