Plus: Instructure's Canvas ransomware debacle comes to a close, an alleged dark net market kingpin gets arrested, OpenAI workers fall victim to a supply chain attack, and more. The worst part of your iPhone getting stolen may not be the theft itself. Instead, it's the phishing attacks waged against people in your contacts. New research this week shows that there's a thriving ecosystem for tools that let criminals unlock iPhones and target the phone numbers they find inside. Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant known for its role in building iPhones, revealed this week that it recently "suffered a cyberattack."

Workers were randomly selected to access a generative AI tool integrated into applications they already used at work for email, meetings, and writing. In the second half of the 6-month experiment, the 80% of treated workers who used this tool spent two fewer hours on email each week and reduced their time working outside of regular hours. Apart from these individual time savings, we do not detect shifts in the quantity or composition of workers' tasks resulting from individual-level AI provision. Generative AI has opened new possibilities for technology to assist with or automate a variety of tasks. Early studies have already shown that generative AI increases worker productivity in targeted tasks (e.g.

Running late to a Microsoft Teams meeting can land you seriously out of sync with your colleagues and the latest updates from work. A coworker is resigning, you're about to get a promotion, the company is being liquidated -- these are just some of the real-life bombshells that could have been dropped while you were waiting for your morning coffee order to arrive. You could spend the whole rest of the meeting interrupting your colleagues to find out what juicy tidbits you missed, but doing that isn't going to win you any fans. A better option is to just use Copilot to recap what happened in your absence. For Copilot recap to work in Teams you'll need to have a current license for Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

Microsoft wants to make its AI service for work, Microsoft 365 Copilot, basically ubiquitous within its ecosystem. And at its Ignite conference, Microsoft is well on its way to launch Copilot services early next year. For consumers, Copilot means adding additional AI capabilities to Microsoft 365 Office apps like Outlook and Teams. Microsoft is planning to remove the "Bing Chat" brand that has marked its early forays into AI and just replace it with "Copilot," for both consumers and enterprises. Copilot is also moving out of preview, and will become generally available starting December 1. If you've used Windows Copilot -- especially while working with the Copilot sidebar open -- you may have noticed Copilot react to what you're doing elsewhere on the screen.

In the ever-evolving digital world, the metaverse is no longer science fiction but a tangible reality with numerous potentials for organizations. For business it is crucial to understand the significance of this technology and its impact on the future of your organization and work. In this article we are exploring possibilities, opportunities and challenges of the Microsoft metaverse for business. Let's begin with a short description what the metaverse is, in our context. The metaverse connects our physical world to the digital one and vice versa.

At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced updates heading to Teams, its ever-evolving videoconferencing and workplace collaboration app. New avatars are available, and more details were announced around Teams Premium, a paid set of Teams features including AI-generated tasks and meeting guides, which is set to arrive in December in preview. Teams Premium is an effort to simplify Teams pricing, which before was disparate across several tiers. Microsoft says it expects it to cost $10 per user per month, with official pricing to come once Teams Premium is generally available. That's higher than the lowest-cost Google Workspace plan, which costs $6 per user per month, but less expensive than Zoom Pro ($15 per user per month).

Global teams frequently consist of language-based subgroups who put together complementary information to achieve common goals. Previous research outlines a two-step work communication flow in these teams. There are team meetings using a required common language (i.e., English); in preparation for those meetings, people have subgroup conversations in their native languages. Work communication at team meetings is often less effective than in subgroup conversations. In the current study, we investigate the idea of leveraging machine translation (MT) to facilitate global team meetings. We hypothesize that exchanging subgroup conversation logs before a team meeting offers contextual information that benefits teamwork at the meeting. MT can translate these logs, which enables comprehension at a low cost. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a between-subjects experiment where twenty quartets of participants performed a personnel selection task. Each quartet included two English native speakers (NS) and two non-native speakers (NNS) whose native language was Mandarin. All participants began the task with subgroup conversations in their native languages, then proceeded to team meetings in English. We manipulated the exchange of subgroup conversation logs prior to team meetings: with MT-mediated exchanges versus without. Analysis of participants' subjective experience, task performance, and depth of discussions as reflected through their conversational moves jointly indicates that team meeting quality improved when there were MT-mediated exchanges of subgroup conversation logs as opposed to no exchanges. We conclude with reflections on when and how MT could be applied to enhance global teamwork across a language barrier.

Let's say there was a person who experienced every online meeting cliche. Even before the pandemic, I wondered if AI assistants could fundamentally change how we do meetings. When the world entered the era of remote work, it was a much needed switch. It can't be that easy to replace a human, right? The median estimate among leading computer scientists reported a 50% chance that high-level machine intelligence systems technology would arrive within 45 years.

Microsoft is introducing the ability to integrate popular workplace apps like Asana into meetings on its Teams collaboration platform. Teams meetings were previously limited to chats and channel communications, but now users can integrate 20 new apps into their meetings. For instance, you can discuss and modify a project built in Asana with others directly within a Teams meeting. The new apps for meetings join the more than 700 already available in the Teams App Store, Microsoft said. The company is also making its Power Platform -- which provides low-code tools to build and deploy apps, chatbots, and workflows -- available right within Teams. The Power Apps app for Teams is a maker studio where users can manage app data and connections, and build and modify app interfaces.

We've reached an inflection point. As the global response to COVID-19 evolves, communities around the world have moved from an era of "remote everything" into a more hybrid model of work, learning, and life. And as we all scramble to keep up, the future of work and education is being shaped before our eyes. At Microsoft, we've spent the last few months learning from our customers and studying how they use our tools. We've also worked with experts across virtual reality, AI, and productivity research to help understand the future of work.