Microsoft’s holiday Copilot ad is wrapped in empty promises

Microsoft is at it again with another round of ads showing people talking to Copilot AI on their computers. This time it’s holiday-themed, including a cameo from the big man in red. The 30-second TV spot asks if you’re “ready for the holidays” and features actors in various festive home settings asking Copilot for some ho-ho-ho-help with everything from holiday lighting and cooking to oversized outdoor decorations.

Just like the last time I tested Copilot Vision and Voice Mode, I made a list of all the prompts in Microsoft’s ad and I’m checking them twice. Or as many times as I can stomach before hitting the nog.

In the new ad, Copilot offers to help a homeowner make their smart home more festive when they prompt it, “Show me how to sync my holiday lights to my music.” The user clicks through their cloud-connected smart lighting controls on a website called Relecloud as Copilot says, “Let’s walk through it together.” The ad jump-cuts to the home lights pulsing to that classic Christmas song “A-Punk” by Vampire Weekend.

Relecloud is not a well-known smart home company like Philips Hue or Govee. In fact, it’s not a real business at all. It’s one of the fictional companies Microsoft uses in published case studies (see also: Contoso). I’m inclined to think its use here points to all these advertised Copilot actions being simulated, but a Microsoft rep insists that’s not the case. Nicci Trovinger, general manager of Windows marketing, tells The Verge, “All Copilot responses are actual responses Copilot gave to the scenarios shown and questions asked at a point in time. Responses were shortened for brevity to fit the length of the creative spot, in line with standard advertising practices.”

I tried this test with Copilot in two ways: one using a still image of the lighting interface from the ad, and another with the Philips Hue Sync app. Copilot made its best guess as to where I should click in the image from the ad, highlighting a “Sync Mode” drop-down menu with its own onscreen cursor, but it struggled to take me much further. It often told me it highlighted something when it didn’t, and it hallucinated a green “Apply” button that was actually just the color preset for green lighting.

Copilot’s answers were about as confusing when I presented a fully configured app for my Philips Hue lights. It identified the Hue Sync app, and at first told me, correctly, to click on the Music tab and the “Start light sync” button. But then it hallucinated buttons that weren’t there, pointed me to the Entertainment Zones I had already set up, and kept telling me it had highlighted things on my screen when it hadn’t. Copilot’s cursor highlight feature is useful, but it usually only does it when you ask — and it’s painfully slow to react. It often lingers on your screen well after Copilot’s moved on to other advice.

A couple other prompts go unanswered in the ad, including “Help me figure out these instructions” and “Convert this recipe on my screen so it feeds 12.”

“14!” another actor, presumably their partner, interjects.

We don’t see what’s on screen in these cases, so for the instructions, I took a shot at showing Copilot Ikea’s 2×4 Kallax shelf — a classic with assembly manuals available online. Copilot kept identifying dowels as screws or nails. And it would often detect page numbers as step numbers, making any attempts to follow along even more chaotic.

Scaling up a recipe for a massive gathering is a common holiday practice in my Italian American family. I tried showing Copilot a recipe for stuffed mushrooms from Sip and Feast. It acknowledged that to go from a serving size of six to 14 would require multiplying each ingredient by about 2.3 times, but it usually only did a couple calculations before expecting me to do the rest or trying to move on to another topic by asking me a question. When it noticed the site had options for scaling up the recipe, it mistook the “2x” and “3x” buttons for plus and minus ones that would let me dial in exactly 14 servings, and kept insisting that’s what those buttons are for. They aren’t. Then, as a last-ditch effort, I asked it to just calculate each ingredient and spell it out for me in a document. Copilot told me it would, and then did nothing.

The last example in the ad has the homeowner with the smart lights asking, “Can you read the HOA guidelines and make sure I’m not breaking any rules?” On screen is a made-up-looking document titled “HOA Guidelines” and a picture of a giant inflatable reindeer in front of a house, encroaching on the neighboring property. The image also looks AI-generated; Microsoft’s Trovinger confirmed that “Both the reindeer yard decoration photo and the HOA guidelines document were created for the purpose of the ad and modeled after references.”

Copilot tells the actor in the ad to “adjust the inflatable reindeer so it’s not crossing into the neighbor’s yard.” When I showed Copilot the screenshot of the doc and image from the ad, it could detect the line that “large inflatables cannot cross your property line.” But Copilot only gave me wishy-washy answers about the reindeer being too far over or not. It seemed to speculate that the reindeer might be pushing the boundaries, but often deferred to my judgment.

There is one more prompt in the ad. It’s jolly old St. Nick himself, asking Copilot why toy production is falling behind. In the ad, Copilot says it’s because the elves have been consuming too much hot cocoa. But maybe it’s because management insists on shoehorning AI into their workflows.

I have to hand it to Microsoft’s marketing team for including this one, which feels like an admission that the whole ad campaign is selling a fantasy. Believing that Copilot can do what Microsoft says it can — or that any of these AI assistants can — is like believing in Santa Claus.