If you’ve been using Microsoft Office for a long time, you may remember Clippit (often misremembered as Clippy), a cartoon paperclip with googly eyes that would pop up with supposedly helpful comments when using Office 97.
Type ‘Dear’ into a document and Clippit would appear with a speech bubble saying ‘It looks like you’re writing a letter, Would you like help?’ The intention was to offer assistance in a friendly fashion – but many users found Clippit deeply irritating, forcing Microsoft to withdraw it after Office 2003.
Current software developers are often obsessed with incorporating AI into their systems, with similar good intentions. As I type this, Word is displaying a little symbol that looks like a folded strip of paper to the side of the text which, when clicked gives me options to use Copilot to write or edit this text. (I didn’t take up the offer.) If I select some text and right-click it, I’m again presented with Copilot but also Apple’s Writing Tools hoping to bring AI to my assistance.
The offer of AI help also turns up in unexpected places.
The messaging software WhatsApp now carries a circle icon that offers assistance from Meta’s Llama 4 AI, a seemingly pointless addition to a short text communication service. When going to the Microsoft 365 webpage, the user arrives at a ‘Copilot chat’ screen – potentially useful, but a little obtrusive if all you want to do is use email or edit a file. Just as with Clippit, good intentions get in the way of someone who knows what they want to do, causing unwanted frustration.
Whether your organisation has bespoke customer-facing software or uses off-the-shelf packages, give some thought to how AI should be incorporated. It’s not that it should be avoided – it can be extremely helpful – but rather it is beneficial to follow two steps to ensure your AI provision does not alienate customers: provide it in a way that is not obtrusive, and put it where users are likely to want it, rather than forcing it on them in all circumstances.
Clippit’s problem was being repetitious and getting in the way (literally, as it was a large image that popped up over your document).
In this respect, the Apple approach in a Word document is arguably better than Copilot, as it only makes its presence felt when the user is asking the software to do something, rather than hovering menacingly at all times like a miniature Death Star.
The jump straight to Copilot when trying to look at emails online, for example, is more a case of the second error: not restricting the AI to where it can provide genuine help. The same is true of the accounting software I use. For no obvious reason, it now offers me AI when all I want to do is record that an invoice has been paid. Unless I want to indulge in creative accounting, I see no reason for this – it’s not adding a benefit, it is an unnecessary complication that has no value to me.
What’s a shame is that AI has so much to offer – but we need to take the lesson of Clippit to do it well.
For example, at the moment the automated part of customer support messaging on websites is often extremely limited. There is a real opportunity to use AI to make the automated part of this a lot better than it used to be before, if necessary, switching to a human agent. But the support box should be kept to a subtle icon waiting for the customer to click, not be constantly popping up to offer help.
Similarly, AI can assist with form filling and many other tasks that customers or wider users of a business system would benefit from help with – but we shouldn’t be treating users as if they were children, or allowing the AI to get in the way of fulfilling tasks that don’t benefit from AI assistance. Get AI in your systems right and it can make all the difference. Get it wrong and, like Microsoft with Clippit, your system can end up as the butt of jokes, rather than a place where customers get the help they need.