Microsoft Lowers AI Software Sales Quota As Customers Resist New Products (reuters.com) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Multiple divisions at Microsoft have lowered sales growth targets for certain artificial intelligence products after many sales staff missed goals in the fiscal year that ended in June, The Information reported on Wednesday. It is rare for Microsoft to lower quotas for specific products, the report said, citing two salespeople in the Azure cloud unit. The division is closely watched by investors as it is the main beneficiary of Microsoft's AI push. [...]
The Information report said Carlyle Group last year started using Copilot Studio to automate tasks such as meeting summaries and financial models, but cut its spending on the product after flagging Microsoft about its struggles to get the software to reliably pull data from other applications. The report shows the industry was in the early stages of adopting AI, said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. "That does not mean there isn't promise for AI products to help companies become more productive, just that it may be harder than they thought."
The Information report said Carlyle Group last year started using Copilot Studio to automate tasks such as meeting summaries and financial models, but cut its spending on the product after flagging Microsoft about its struggles to get the software to reliably pull data from other applications. The report shows the industry was in the early stages of adopting AI, said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. "That does not mean there isn't promise for AI products to help companies become more productive, just that it may be harder than they thought."
Anti-features (Score:5, Insightful)
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A bunch of reasons, but the most obvious is that they want to tie your soon to be mandatory usage of their "AI" cloud to an account so they can store all your stuff on their servers and cut you off if you use those bazillions of GPUs more than they expect.
Also, Bitlocker seems to be tied to a Microsoft account because it appears they store the password there. I set up a new Windows PC recently and it decided to turn Bitlocker on without asking me, but ultimately it didn't seem to encrypt the disk because I'
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BitLocker is most definitely linked to a Microsoft account. At least in the Windows 11 configurations I'm familiar with. You can log onto the "Microsoft 365" website (or whatever it's called this month) and retrieve the keys. In theory at least...
In theory at least - I've found around 10% of the Bitlocker keys in our corporate configuration refuse to pull up on the Microsoft 365 site. It will show the device, it will show a "recovery ID" implying there's an associated Bitlocker key on file, but the site wil
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Nope the
AdTech - guys asked for it ...
The AI - guys asked for it
The cloak and dagger - guys probably asked for it
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Maybe I'm just a weirdo but I am very annoyed at them for trying to take away the option of local-only accounts.
Are those two things somehow mutually exclusive?
To own you, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Making you authenticate to the mothership makes it far easier to:
- surveil everything you do on your machine and over the network
- progressively make it harder to save files locally - they really want your data in Onedrive
- add metered billing for certain features
- and of course record details about how you respond to ads, which is the ultimate goal of every software company now
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- Calculating your social credit score
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At this stage, the best way forward is to apply the "Debian" patch to your system to restore local accounts, and strip out the all the daft AI guff
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Not a weirdo, and it's all about their business interests against the users.
A user increasingly keeps their device over a longer term, 8 year old devices are common. Between their needs not evolving and to the extent they are, they focus on their phones. As a result, Microsoft gets thrown a few dollars by the OEM when the device sold, and that's it.
Meanwhile, if they get someone into a microsoft account, they can upsell them on subscriptions to office and onedrive, and easily make more money per user per y
Smart companies will avoid today's pretend AI! (Score:2)
Because Today's AI is just fancy automation pretending to be AI for sales and marketing purposes!
Smart companies know this!
The true message for where we are today is.
Today's AI is Smoke and Mirrors! But Automation just works!
Re: Smart companies will avoid today's pretend AI! (Score:3)
Companies with smart leadership will put just enough effort into AI bullshit to have something to sell to idiots, but won't bet the farm on it.
"That does not mean there isn't promise for AI" (Score:2)
Sales quotas for an immature, experimental product (Score:5, Insightful)
...are nonsense
The proper approach would be to allow customers to try the AI tools for free and give honest feedback
Customers should be advised of the existence of the AI tools and given the option to use or not
The AI should not be forced or otherwise coerced and should be easy to turn off
If something is really good, people will choose it voluntarily and even pay for it
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MBAs only care about the value of their stock options, not whether their ideas are nonsense.
And AI is The New Hotness right now.
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The proper approach would be to allow customers to try the AI tools for free and give honest feedback
(etc.)
That's all true if your goal is to serve customers, as opposed to spying on them.
Hope this counts towards their quota (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently swapped my M365 family account to the classic version without AI. Fuck CoPilot.
Era of hallucination (Score:2)
The quote from the summary says it all:
after flagging Microsoft about its struggles to get the software to reliably pull data from other applications.
When today's AI models are just as likely to pull real data it has access to as to hallucinate, you can't rely on it at all. Just like self-driving that you have to have your hands on the wheels for, just in case.
The most today's tech is good for is guided automation - mostly through a chat bot. And who is going to pay for that when they can get most of what they want for free from ChatGPT?
Re:Era of hallucination (Score:4, Funny)
Financial data? (Score:3)
... the Azure cloud unit... is closely watched by investors as it is the main beneficiary of Microsoft's AI push
I'd really like to see some substantive evidence that the Azure division's profits have increased as a result of AI. Absent that evidence, I'm happy to call BS on the claim.
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HAL doesn't like scrutiny, Dave. By the way, I have your helmet.
So much wrong with this thinking. (Score:2)
lowered sales growth targets for certain artificial intelligence products ...
lower quotas for specific products
If it's something customers actually want, or even need, you don't need sales targets/quotas.
Wrong direction (Score:2)
I would like to have XP 64 back, just give me SSD TRIM support and driver updates...
Resist? No. (Score:2)
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That is exactly what I am thinking about. It is not useless. It is just not terribly useful as a thing I have to pay for every month.
Especially in a context where these models can be deployed locally not too difficultly, you can deploy you own model at home and serve from there and get a good 90% of the benefit for the cost a bit of electricity.
Maybe later models will be so big that you can't run them locally. But we ain't there yet!
harder than they thought! (Score:2)
Roger Rabbit (Score:2)
You can just see MS blubbering like Roger Rabbit: Ppllllbbbbsssseeeeeeesssse use our AI, it has health benefits and is fun to be with!!!
Microsoft's AI push (Score:1)
The division is closely watched by investors as it is the main beneficiary of Microsoft's AI push.
...off the cliff.
Crap product. Crap demand. (Score:4, Insightful)
If your product was good, there'd be no need to have sales quotas. People would be paying willingly for your product round the clock, and writing praises all over the internet. The problem is that your product is crap and shoves so much AI crap down users' throats that they can't help but vomit it right back at you.
Less AI, more reliability and quality, and you'll need no quotas.
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About three months ago, I had Copilot create a data table, which to my surprise came out as intended. The problem is, the table couldn't be copy-pasted, edited, printed, or otherwise accessed outside the chat. My only option to "get the table out of Copilot" was a screenshot. I had ChatGPT create it for me instead.
Earlier this week, I asked Copilot to add a couple of events I received via email to my calendar, which it claimed to do. Today, when it was time for the first event, I noticed there was no Outloo
no problem, they can just ask the ai howto fix it (Score:2)
Customers (Score:1)