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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

#181

Post by wubrr »

a_t48 wrote: post #161
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.

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.

Gemini weirdly messes things up, even though it seems to have the right information - something I started noticing more often recently. I'd ask it to generate a curl command to call some API, and it would describe (correctly) how to do it, and then generate the code/command, but the command would have obvious things missing like the 'https://' prefix in some case, sometimes the API path, sometimes the auth header/token - even though it mentioned all of those things correctly in the text summary it gave above the code.

I feel like this problem was far less prevalent a few months/weeks ago (before gemini-3?).

Using it for research/learning purposes has been pretty amazing though, while claude code is still best for coding based on my experience.

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

#182

Post by aabajian »

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…

Auto Hotkey doesn't work well for Epic manipulation because Epic runs inside of a Citrix Virtual Machine. You can't just read Window information and navigate that way. You'd have to have some sort of on-screen OCR to detect whether Epic is open, has focus, and is showing the tab that I want to close. Also, the tab itself can't be closed...I'm just clicking on the tab next to it.

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

#183

Post by h2zizzle »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #84
h2zizzle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic: "How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines. If those are the cause…

I disagree. Those place the problem at the corporate level, when it's clearly extended through to being a monetary issue. The first thing I would like to see is the various Fed and banking liquidity and credit facilities go away. They don't facilitate stability, but a fiscal shell game that has allowed numerous zombie companies to live far past their solvency. This in turn encourages widespread fiscal recklessness.

We're headed for a crunch anyway. My observation is that a controlled demolition has been attempted several times over the past few years, but in every instance, someone has stepped up to cry about the disaster that would occur if incumbents weren't shored up. Of course, that just makes the next occurrence all the more dire.

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

#184

Post by eastbound »

apercu wrote: post #56
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 just AI mania, it's been this way for over a decade. When I first started consulting, organizations were afraid enough of lack of ROI in tech implementations that projects needed an economic justification in order to be approved. Starting with cloud, leadership seemed so become rare, and everything was "us too!". After cloud it was data/data visualization, then it was over-hiring during Covid, the it was RTO…

If rationalization comes back, everyone will talk like in Michael Moore’s documentary about GM and Detroit. A manager’s salary after half a career will be around $120k, like in an average bank, and that would be succeeding. I don’t think we even imagine how much of a tsunami we’ve been surfing since 2000.

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

#185

Post by dustingetz »

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…

Dear MS please use AI to autocomplete my billing address correctly when I fill out web forms, thanks

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

#186

Post by somat »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #84
h2zizzle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic: "How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines. If those are the cause…

What is wrong with stock buybacks?

Genuine question, I don't understand the economics of the stock market and as such I participate very little (probably to my detriment) I sort of figure the original theory went like this.

"We have an idea to run a for profit endeavor but do not have money to set it up. If you buy from us a portion of our future profit we will have the immediate funds to set up the business and you will get a payout for the indefinite future."

And the stock market is for third party buying and selling of these "shares of profit"

Under these conditions are not all stocks a sort of millstone of perpetual debt for the company and it would behoove them to remove that debt, that is, buyback the stock. Naively I assume this is a good thing.

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

#187

Post by cosmicgadget »

parliament32 wrote: post #124
cosmicgadget wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol "Microsoft can't make something work ergo the technology is not feasible".

"The technology is not useful", at least in enterprise contexts, is what this comes out to. Which is really where the money is, because some vibecoder paying $20/mo for Claude really doesn't matter (especially when it costs $100/mo to run inference for his queries in the first place). Enterprise is the only place this could possibly make money. Think about it: MS has a giant advantage over every other AI vendor, that…

MS has a giant advantage over every other vendor for all kinds of products (including defunct ones). Sometimes they function well, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they make money, sometimes they do not. MS isn't the tech (or even enterprise tech) bellcow.

Considering enterprise typically is characterized by perfunctory tasks, information silos, and bit rot, they're a perfect application of LLMs. It's just Microsoft kind of sucks at a lot of things.

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

#188

Post by downrightmike »

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.

They made Copilot the term for AI and smeared it everywhere to the point that it has no meaning and therefore no usage when talking about AI.

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

#189

Post by breve »

Why wasn't AI able to help them meet their sales targets?

Can't Microsoft supercharge its workflow with these five weird prompts that bring a new layer of intelligence to its productivity:

https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/billionaire-microsoft-ceo-sat...

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

#190

Post by MengerSponge »

fainpul wrote: post #165
gibsonsmog wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

But why would Epic spend money improving or fixing their software? If they spend money developing their product then they can't spend that money on their adult playground of a campus!
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