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AI Businesses Microsoft Technology

Microsoft Touts $500 Million in AI Savings While Slashing Jobs (yahoo.com) 22

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.

Microsoft Touts $500 Million in AI Savings While Slashing Jobs

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @04:09PM (#65508260)
    Replacing nearly useless, $/hr with completely useless, 0/hr is just cutting service and pocketing the savings.
    There is no value provided on the "AI" side of the equation.
  • At least the investors will be impressed!!!
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Saw this one coming!

    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
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @04:15PM (#65508274)
    Microsoft is a publicly traded company and they couldn't tout numbers of this size without them being real. I mean they could but the SEC would probably have issues with that and although they will let Elon Musk off the hook for basically anything that reality distortion field doesn't apply to much of anyone else.

    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:4, Funny)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @04:20PM (#65508286)
    Give me humans, you can reason with most humans.
  • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @04:25PM (#65508292) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • 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]

  • by gabrieltss ( 64078 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @05:13PM (#65508364)
    Their request for more H1-B's [newsweek.com] should be FLAT OUT DENIED! And they should be stripped of as many H1-B visas they have for each person they layed off.
    • 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.

  • we consumers are entirely too willing to put up with service that is absolute shit.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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'

    • Most of the people at my workplace who rave about CoPilot have the same general characteristics:

      • They're slow readers, so they get CoPilot to summarize stuff for them.
      • They cannot spell, so they get CoPilot to write their emails for them.
      • They're lazy, so they get CoPilot to write policies, reports, etc. for them.
      • They don't know how to use traditional search engines effectively, so they get CoPilot to look stuff up for them.

      That's its value. It makes largely unproductive people appear productive. They can ope

  • I cannot help but think that this is likely a clever yet dystopian ploy to spin cutting struggling projects and saying it is savings due to efficiencies gained with AI. Yes, I believe that Microsoft and other tech companies are that dystopian.

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