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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

#151

Post by trollbridge »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #146
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…

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…

Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?

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

#153

Post by blitzar »

aabajian wrote: post #148

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."? Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App ( https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ ). Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For exampl…

> Copilot could watch my daily habits and offer automation for recurring things

Pretty sure the advertising department already watches you and helpfully suggests things that you need to buy.

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

#154

Post by trollbridge »

aabajian wrote: post #148

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."? Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App ( https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ ). Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For exampl…

I can’t find any use case for Copilot at all, and I frequently “sell” people Microsoft 365. (I don’t earn a commission; I just help them sign up for it.) I cannot come up with a reason anyone needs Copilot.

Meanwhile I spent 3-4 hours working with a client yesterday using Dreamhost’s free AI tools to get them up and running with a website quickly whilst I configured Microsoft 365, Cloudflare, email and so forth for them.

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

#155

Post by blitzar »

xnorswap wrote: post #99
derekcheng08 wrote: post #69

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.

It's because Copilot isn't (just) a model, it's a brand that's been slapped on any old rubbish. If Clippy were still around, that'd have been rebranded as Copilot by now.

If they resurected Clippy and made it the face of their Ai I would switch in a heartbeat.

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

#156

Post by zoeysmithe »

Arwill wrote: post #142
xnorswap wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

The problem with scrapping the web for teaching AI is that the web is full of 'little bobby tables' jokes.

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

#157

Post by jccooper »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #132
seanw444 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Why do people use this useless phrase template? Yeah, the point is that it's not selling, and it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.

> it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value. So why are the sales-peops being blamed?

I think the point of this headline is that they're not being blamed in this one instance.

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

#158

Post by stogot »

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…

The disappointing thing is I’d rather them spend the time improving security but it sounds like all cycles are shoved into making AI shovels. Last year, the CEO promised security would come first but it’s not the case

https://www.techspot.com/news/102873-microsoft-now-security-...

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

#159

Post by gibsonsmog »

aabajian wrote: post #148

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."? Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App ( https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ ). Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For exampl…

>improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me?

You could solve that issue (and probably lot's of similar issues) with something like Auto Hotkey. Seems like extreme overkill to have an autonomous agent watch everything you do, so it might possibly click a button.

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

#160

Post by mey »

aabajian wrote: post #148

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."? Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App ( https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ ). Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For exampl…

But do you (or MSFT) trust it to do that correctly, consistently, and handle failure modes (what happens when the meaning of that button/screen changes)?

I agree, an assistant would be fantastic in my life, but LLMs aren't AGI. They can not reason about my intentions, don't ask clarifing questions (bring back ELIZA), and handle state in an interesting way (are there designs out there that automatically prune/compress context?).

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