Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban because tired users may be too lazy to check its mistakes - The Register

[justaprogressive]

Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested banning use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI on Friday afternoons, because he fears at that time of week users may be too lazy to properly check its possibly offensive output.

Xu, a Gartner research vice-president, offered the advice at the end of a talk titled “Mitigating the Top 5 Microsoft 365 Copilot Security Risks” at the firm’s Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney on Tuesday.

He raised the possibility of a Friday afternoon AI ban when advising on the fifth risk he has identified: Copilot producing output that is toxic because while it may be factually correct it is culturally unacceptable either in the workplace or among customers. Xu recommended mitigating Copilot’s tendency to produce toxic content by enabling the filters Microsoft supplies, and by training users to always validate the tool’s output.

The analyst reminded the audience that all Copilot output isn’t fit for sharing without review, making validation necessary for all users at all times. He suggested Friday afternoons are a time when workers might just want to get the job done and won’t bother to check for errors that Microsoft’s chatbot produces, perhaps making that slice of the working week a fine time to ban use of Copilot.

Xu’s talk ran for 30 minutes, and he spent the first 20 discussing the risk of Copilot exposing content whose creators didn’t set appropriate sharing permissions.

“Copilot makes over-shared documents more accessible,” he warned. “This is not a net new risk, but a known risk amplified by AI.” Xu explained why with the example of a worker who uses Copilot to search for information about organizational changes receiving a response that includes a confidential document about an imminent re-org.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/gartner_copilot_security_mitigations/?td=rt-3a]

[LearnedHand]

1. "Lazy" is such an insulting and inaccurate word

Most people work their hearts out for the company, especially those in a STEM field. So much so that they have nothing left to give by Friday. Jeezus such anti-worker sentiment. The Gartner guy can eat a WHOLE bag of dicks.

[justaprogressive]

2. Please note: It is NOT a quote of Gartner

[LearnedHand]

4. Ah thanks

Well then The Register writer can…. well, you know. I get that their writing is snarky and ironic though.

[highplainsdem]

3. Love the comments on that article at The Register.

A few of them:

If it's all that bad ...
... why on earth would any company allow it in the door in the first place?


The sales pitch must have been legendary.


"why on earth would any company allow it in the door in the first place?"
Buzzword bullshit bingo.
It's perhaps more nefarious than it would seem, too - and that's a high bar. Since the last Teams update, any files opened through Teams default to opening in Edge regardless of your settings. Edge, of course, reports back to MS, so you have to assume that anything you open in this way is being fed into the slop machine.


Where's the time saving?
All this seems to be is a change in where time is being spent. The overall time needed for a task is remaining the same.
If a task took 30 minutes before, it's now taking 5 minutes to prompt the AI and then 25 minutes to correct its output.
The only differences are that everyone can now tell you've used an AI tool based on the language used, and that it's cost you money to use it.
Not convinced that's progress.