The Office Key is already a macro for pressing every single modifier key at once. Who knows what stupid this will involve, but there's not much more they can do, short of adding stupid new scancodes.

Edit: Unless the placement in the article mockup is an indication they're planning to replace the context menu key's existing functionality.

It replaces the right control key, and isn't reprogrammable (at least so far on a Dell laptop)

I'm betting this will just be a reskin of Alt Gr. Likez pressing Alt Gr on its own does nothing right now. So why not """fix""" that?

both crypto and VR came and went without creating the gold rush tech was hoping for. this is the last chance for a lot of hucksters to get something going on

turns out spending $13 billion on something means you're going to try to force that to have been a good idea whether or not it was

it's easy to implement since it just calls out to a cloud service, and charging for it is pretty normalized so it's an easy way to squeeze subscriptions or microtransactions into software without pissing people off too bad

a lot of "we implemented AI in our software" features give users a certain amount of free usage and then charge people for more

Microsoft isn't going quite that far yet, but encouraging usage of the feature will act as an advertisement for Office 365's generative AI features, which will be a $30/mo subscription plan addon

also, business executives and investors in general are ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED with this stuff, so there's huge pressure on companies to push out something that they can claim is "AI" so the financial press doesn't accuse them of being backwards and falling behind competitors