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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

#161

Post by a_t48 »

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 last time I asked Gemini to assist me with some SQL I got (inside my postgres query form):

  This task cannot be accomplished
  USING
    standard SQL queries against the provided database schema. Replication slots
    managed through PostgreSQL system views AND functions,
    NOT through user-defined tables. Therefore,
    I must return
It's feels almost haiku-like.

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

#163

Post by abrichr »

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…

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

We're working on it at https://github.com/openadaptai/openadapt.

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

#164

Post by cyberax »

xnorswap wrote: post #150
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…

The regular JetBrains IDEs have a setting to disable the AI-based inline completion, you can then just assign it to a hotkey and call it when needed.

I found that it makes the AI experience so much better.

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

#165

Post by fainpul »

gibsonsmog wrote: post #159
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…

And in an ideal world, one could report this as a bug or improvement and get it fixed for every single user without them needing to do anything at all.

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

#166

Post by blackadder »

xnorswap wrote: post #150
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…

This is my biggest frustration. Why not check with the compiler to generate code that would actually compile? I've had this with Go and .Net in the Jetbrains IDE. Had to turn ML auto-completion off. It was getting in the way.

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

#167

Post by niceworkbuddy »

I wonder what part of these failed sales is due to GDRP requirements in the IT enterprise industry. I have my own european view, and it seems our governments are treating the matter very seriously. How do you ensure an AI agent won't leak anything? It just so happened that it wiped entire database or cleared a disk and later being very "sorry" about it. Is the risk worth it?

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

#168

Post by harvey9 »

xnorswap wrote: post #150
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…

Loosely related: voice control on Android with Gemini is complete rubbish compared to the old assistant. I used to be able to have texts read out and dictate replies whilst driving. Now it's all nondeterministic which adds cognitive load on me and is unsafe in the same way touch screens in cars are worse than tactile controls.

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

#169

Post by 12_throw_away »

Balinares wrote: post #80
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…

> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? Probably individual actors have different motivations, but let's spitball for a second: - LLMs are genuinely a revolution in natural language processing. We can do things now in that space that were unthinkable single-digit years ago. This opens new opportunity spaces to colonize, and some might turn out quite profitable. Ergo, land rush. - Even if the n…

> There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI

Bullshit

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