Microsoft owns enough of OpenAI that their endgame goal of putting GPT like features into Azure and Office365 for enterprise customers is what we’re likely to see happen.
OpenAI will likely target private consumers while Microsoft focuses on enterprise. I can use my own organisation as an example. We’re an investment bank that does green energy within the EU. We would absolutely use GPT if it was legal, but it isn’t, and it likely never will be considering their finance model is partly to steal as much data as they can. Even if it’s not so polite to say that. This is where Microsoft comes into the picture. In non-tech enterprise you’re buying Microsoft products because everyone wants windows, outlook and office. We can wish it wasn’t like that, but where is the realistic alternative? I’m not anti Microsoft by the way, in all my decades in the enterprise business they’ve easily been the best and most consistent business partner for any IT. When Amazon saw how much money there was on the operations side of EU enterprise they quickly caught up, but Amazon doesn’t sell a Office365 product. So anyway, once you have Office365, you’re also likely to use Teams as your communications platform (which is why there is an anti-trust case against it), Sharepoint as your document platform, and, well, Azure as your cloud platform. Except you might use AWS because Amazon is also great. In some ways they are even more compliant with EU legislation than Microsoft.
But if Microsoft can throw GPT products into Azure the same way they put Teams and Sharepoint into Office365… well, then where is their competition? And having GPT features within Office365 will only further their advantage on the office platform. I mean, there are companies which won’t use Outlook, but there won’t be when ChatGPT writes your e-mails.
So this isn’t necessarily for you. It’s just part of Microsoft’s over all strategy for total IT domination in Enterprise. I mean, we’re going into RPA (robot process automation) a journey I went through in another Enterprise organisation a few years back. Back then you had to consider what go buy, would it be BluePrism, UIPath, automation anywhere, something else? Today there is no competition to Microsoft’s PowerAutomate if you’re already a Microsoft customer. It’s literally $500 a month vs $50k a month… I mean… that’s the future for GPT on Azure.
It’s probably necessary too. Their prices have made a lot of organisations look outside of Azure. Toward places like Hetzner or even self-hosting, but if Azure comes with GPT… well then.