Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 348 posts

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#61

Post by somenameforme »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #9
jollyllama wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

They think we're all stupid. As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong. And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.

Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics.

In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself with government and then imposing itself on everybody and everything.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#62

Post by binary132 »

didibus wrote: post #46
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…

Thing is, it's hard to predict what can be done and what breakthrough or minor tweak can suddenly open up an avenue for a profitable use-case. The cost of missing that opportunity is why they're heavily investing in AI, they don't want to miss the boat if there's going to be one. And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?

this idea that AI is the only thing anyone could possibly do that might be useful has absolutely got to go

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#63

Post by binary132 »

layer8 wrote: post #51
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…

US technocapitalism is built on the premise of technological innovation driving exponential growth. This is why they are fixated on whatever provides an outlook for that. The risk that it might not work out is downplayed, because (a) they don’t want to hazard not being at the forefront in the event that it does work out, and (b) if it doesn’t work out, nobody will really hold them accountable for it, not the least be…

Riding hype waves forever is the most polar opposite thing to “sustainable” that I can imagine

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#64

Post by tech_ken »

h2zizzle wrote: post #40
tech_ken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.

I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are g…

> A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy.

Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground.

> Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch

I disagree, I think they're artifacts of the rehab environment (the ZIRP policy sphere). I think in a world where we fully ate the loss of '08 and started in a new direction you might get Tesla, but definitely not TSLA, and the version we got is really (Tesla+TSLA) IMO. Bitcoin to me is even less of a break with the pre-08 world; blockchain is cool tech but Bitcoin looks very much "Financial Derivatives, Online". I think an honest correction to '08 would have been far more of a focus on "hard tech and value finance", rather than inventing new financial instruments even further distanced from the value-generation chain.

> Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.

Hard agree here

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#65

Post by bigstrat2003 »

empath75 wrote: post #10
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…

It's not "fundamentally flawed". It is brilliant at what it does. What is flawed is how people are applying it to solve specific problems. It isn't a "do anything" button that you can just push. Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

> Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

Ok, but that isn't useful to me. If I have to hold the bot's hand to get stuff done, I'll just do it myself, which will be both faster and higher quality.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#67

Post by kryogen1c »

I went to Ignite a few weeks ago, and the theme of the event and most talks was "look at how we're leveraging AI in this product to add value".

Separately, the theme from talking to Every. Single. Person on the buy-side was gigantic eye roll yes I cant wait for AI to solve all my problems.

Companies I support are being directed from their presidents to use ai, literally a solution in search of a problem.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#68

Post by bigstrat2003 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #25
empath75 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "fundamentally flawed". It is brilliant at what it does. What is flawed is how people are applying it to solve specific problems. It isn't a "do anything" button that you can just push. Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.

> for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment

It's because I've used it and it doesn't come even close to delivering the value that its advocates claim it does. Nothing mysterious about it.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#69

Post by derekcheng08 »

Super interesting how this arc has played out for Microsoft. They went from having this massive advantage in being an early OpenAI partner with early access to their models to largely losing the consumer AI space: Copilot is almost never mentioned in the same breath as Claude and ChatGPT. Though I guess their huge stake in OpenAI will still pay out massively from a valuation perspective.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#70

Post by avidiax »

stingraycharles wrote: post #19
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to…

I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed.

If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop".

When you go to deploy it, 99% is just not good enough. The actual users will be much more noisy than the demo executives and internal testers.

When you have a call center with 100 people taking 100 calls per day, replacing those 10,000 calls with 99% accurate AI means you have to clean up after 100 bad calls per day. Some percentage of those are going to be really terrible, like the AI did reputational damage or made expensive legally binding promises. Humans will make mistakes, but they aren't going to give away the farm or say that InsuranceCo believes it's cheaper if you die. And your 99% accurate-in-a-lab AI isn't 99% accurate in the field with someone with a heavy accent on a bad connection.

So I think that the parties all "want to believe", and to an untrained eye, AI seems "good enough" or especially "good enough for the first tier".

Post reply on HN