It was generally believed about a year ago that ads would only show up in free products
It definitely was not lol. Ads have been in paid products for literal decades by this point.
You're not going to be seeing an ad for plane tickets on the map - if you search for "burgers" you might get an ad for Burger King show up as a sponsored result at the top. That's it, it's just ads for companies that are relevant to what you searched for in the app.
Because in teams you could type (or say) "how many customers are still awaiting their refunds for their services that were cancelled last week?" and it will go and do its little AI magic and respond with the answer.
But they can never find it on their own - it's in a database, they have to use some tool to get it. Why can't that tool be AI?
They're not! That's the point. This way it gives them access to information that they would usually have to put in a support ticket, or run multiple reports and then try and compile them together, for example, to get. Now they can just ask a bot in teams a question and they get the answer.
Because their job isn't to access the production database.