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

arstechnica.com

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

#111

Post by theflyinghorse »

h2zizzle wrote: post #18
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 part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…

Problem with "it will hurt" is that it will actually hurt middle class by completely wiping it out, and maybe slightly inconvenience the rich. More like annoy the rich, really.

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

#112

Post by rizzom5000 »

empath75 wrote: post #12
zdragnar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell ap…

Two things can be true: 1) We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do with existing AI technology. 2) Almost all of the money we are spending on AI now is ineffectual and wasted. --- If you go back to the late 1990s, that is the state that most companies were at with _computers_. Huge, wasteful projects that didn't improve productivity at all. It took 10 years of false starts sometimes to really g…

It's interesting to think Microsoft was around back then too, taking approximately 14 years to regain the loss of approximately 58% of their valuation.

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

#113

Post by solumunus »

treis wrote: post #109
zdragnar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell ap…

I don't see how people don't see it. LLMs are a revolutionary technology and are for the first time since the iPhone are changing how we interact with computers. This isn't block chains. This is something we're going to use until something better replaces it.

I agree to some extent, but we’re also in a bubble. It seems completely obvious that huge revenue numbers aren’t around the corner, not enough to justify the spend.

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

#114

Post by mrob »

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.

There is no scenario where AI is a net benefit. There are three possibilities:

1. AI does things we can already do but cheaper and worse.

This is the current state of affairs. Things are mostly the same except for the flood of slop driving out quality. My life is moderately worse.

2. Total victory of capital over labor.

This is what the proponents are aiming for. It's disastrous for the >99% of the population who will become economically useless. I can't imagine any kind of universal basic income when the masses can instead be conveniently disposed of with automated killer drones or whatever else the victors come up with.

3. Extinction of all biological life.

This is what happens if the proponents succeed better than they anticipated. If recursively self-improving ASI pans out then nobody stands a chance. There are very few goals an ASI can have that aren't better accomplished with everybody dead.

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

#115

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> 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

Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd?

I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually would do something to distinguish themselves. They all want to be Steve Jobs but none of them have the guts to even try to be visionary. It is honestly pathetic

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

#117

Post by bluefirebrand »

bwfan123 wrote: post #102
stingraycharles wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - Keynes. Convention here is that AI is the next sliced bread. And big-tech managers care about their reputation.

It's pretty pathetic that they can build a brand based on "doing the exact same thing everyone else is doing" though

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

#118

Post by greenavocado »

jfarmer wrote: post #107
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful.

Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

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

#119

Post by solumunus »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #65
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.

> 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.

That’s not my experience at all, I’m getting it done much faster and the quality is on par. It’s hard to measure, but as a small business owner it’s clear to me that I now require fewer new developers.

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

#120

Post by bluefirebrand »

h2zizzle wrote: post #18
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 part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…

> you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.

I'm not hoping for a market correction personally, I'm hoping that mobs reinvent the guillotine

They deserve nothing less by now. If they get away with nothing worse than "a correction" then they have still made out like bandits

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