Microsoft Touts $500 Million in AI Savings While Slashing Jobs (yahoo.com) 28
Microsoft is keen to show employees how much AI is transforming its own workplace, even as the company terminates thousands of personnel. From a report: During a presentation this week, Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff said artificial intelligence tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
Althoff said AI saved Microsoft more than $500 million last year in its call centers alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of dollars, he said.
Althoff said AI saved Microsoft more than $500 million last year in its call centers alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of dollars, he said.
from my experience with customer support chatbots (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no value provided on the "AI" side of the equation.
Was that a brain fart from an AI chatbot? (Score:1)
'Nuff said. Actually too much said.
Re:from my experience with customer support chatbo (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not replacing it with $0/hour AI, that shit is expensive. I doubt they're saving nearly as much in salary as they're claiming, and I'd be willing to bet they're getting far less value for that money than they were with actual humans. This is almost certainly an executive making some pretty wild claims so they can get a bonus and move on to another company before the investors figure it out.
Re: (Score:2)
Victory! (Score:2)
Re:Victory! (Score:5, Insightful)
AI Everything (Score:1)
After trying over and over to sell that AI was going to make companies earn billions at the press of a button we move to "claiming" substantial savings from "AI-productivity" with no validated proof or scientific study.
Something tells me the savings are the realisation of the constant layoffs in the fiscal reports masked as productivity for the investors and shareholders.
Can't wait for the next "AI-announcement", neither the narrative of layoffs doesn't cut it anymore nor the produc
Keep in mind this is real (Score:4, Interesting)
That half billion a year of savings is almost certainly because of layoffs.
Now a lot of it is call centers and I don't think Microsoft has any call centers left in America. But we live in a global economy whether we want to or not. And that's going to put increased pressure on us one way or another.
One thing is certain no one reading this is going to see a dime of those savings. Your 401k will continue to barely grow and periodic economic collapses will make sure that any attempt to seriously invest for profit fails miserably.
The new American dream is to die peacefully before the investor class comes for you and your property. Not exactly what I expected when I was a kid but here we are.
Yeah Nah (Score:5, Funny)
Evil is as Microsoft does (Score:3, Insightful)
Your joke here.
But it doesn't matter. Check your EULA and MS ain't liable.
Just finished another book on cyber-crime and totally unable to conceive of trusting valuable data to any machine running any flavor of Windows.
I have data accessible via Windows machines. Therefore my data must have zero value! Problem solved.
Re: (Score:2)
I was going for Funny and trying to encourage Funny. *sigh*
"increased satisfaction" Bulls*COUGH*hit (Score:2)
I do not believe this even a little. In my experience call center workers do not like AI and customers hate it so much that they are now asking support workers to prove they are human, like some real-time voice captcha puzzle, because they refuse to deal with it.
See also: https://www.techspot.com/news/... [techspot.com]
As they ask for more H1-B's! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Lutnick, Trump & Co. don't want the number of expensive, skilled American workers to go up... they just want to create lots of cheap American labor, spending long tedious workdays doing stuff like screwing tiny screws into iPhones. With no health insurance.
I'm not sure who they think will be able to buy those iPhones, though.
Re: As they ask for more H1-B's! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It Turns Out That... (Score:2)
we consumers are entirely too willing to put up with service that is absolute shit.
That's the debate (Score:4, Insightful)
MS is claiming to have seen customer satisfaction improved with the addition of AI support. If that's true, then this is a genuine achievement. Only if it's not is your point valid.
$500M saved (Score:2)
Of how much invested? Published numbers show plans for $80B ai splash. Anybody got to-date numbers? I see $14B on OpenAI and $20B for Nuance Communications. That's $34B sunk.
Also, is this crowing about as reliable as any other marketing babble? They mean to sell this service.
Are they using their own Copilot products? (Score:2)
If so, I don't believe Microsoft.
GitHub Copilot is rarely successful generating working code (or even compliable code) for changes that are longer than a few lines.
Copilot for Office is nothing more than a fancy help tool. You can't tell Office Copilot, for example, to "highlight all cells with negative numbers in red"--it will just provide you with steps to do it yourself.
Copilot for Windows, likewise, is just a glorified link to the Copilot Web site that you can click by pressing the Copilot key. You can'
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the people at my workplace who rave about CoPilot have the same general characteristics:
That's its value. It makes largely unproductive people appear productive. They can ope
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, I'm not one of those people who think AI is useless. It is. It's just not as productivity-boosting as the apologists say it is. This is partly because it plays fast and loose, it spits out mistakes that have to be corrected, and those "lazy" people are likely missing those mistakes.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't know how to use traditional search engines effectively, so they get CoPilot to look stuff up for them.
Considering the state of search engines these days, that one is the least surprising, but also the one that's potentially most harmful.
Dystopian way to boost protect stock price (Score:2)
I just want a call center speaking good English ! (Score:2)
unfortunate choice of words (Score:2)
There was going to be a website called Slashjobs.org but it sounded way too similar to another tech website that the latter might be mistaken for a parent company