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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

#271

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

As much as I love JetBrains (IntelliJ and friends), I have the same feeling this year. The ratio that I undo an accidental tab/whatever far exceeds the accepted ones. I'm not anti-LLM -- they are great for many things, but I am tired of undoing shitting suggestions. Literally, many of them produce a syntax error. Please don't read this post as dumping on JetBrains. I still love their products.

    > It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.
No trolling: This is genius-level sarcasm. You do realise that most "business" emails are essentially this, right? Oh, right, you knew that already!

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

#272

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

This is a great post. Next time that you see it, grab a screenshot, put on GitHub pages and post it here on HN. It will generated lots of interesting discussion about rubbish suggestions from poor LLM models.

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

#273

Post by cyberax »

mrguyorama wrote: post #226
cyberax wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no setting to revert back to the very reliable and high quality "AI" autocomplete that reliably did not recommend class methods that do not exist and reliably figured out the pattern I was writing 20 lines of without randomly suggesting 100 lines of new code that only disrupts my view of the code I am trying to work on. I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so abs…

Try disabling the "Enable the next edit suggestions" in the AI settings.

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

#274

Post by kentm »

gdulli wrote: post #95
avidiax wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed, but 99% is being very generous.

A big task my team did had measured accuracy in the mid 80% FWIW.

I think the line of thought in this thread is broadly correct. The most value I’ve seen in AI is problems where the cost of being wrong is low and it’s easy to verify the output.

I wonder if anyone is taking good measurements on how frequently an LLM is able to do things like route calls in a call center. My personal experience is not good and I would be surprised if they had 90% accuracy.

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

#275

Post by RevEng »

niceworkbuddy wrote: post #167

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?

Having worked with this stuff a lot, privacy isn't the biggest problem (though it is a problem). This shit just doesn't work. Wide-eyed investors might be willing to overlook the 20% failure rates, but ordinary people won't, especially when a single mistake can cost you millions of dollars. In most places I've seen AI shoved - especially Copilot - it takes more time to read and dismiss its crappy suggestions than it does to just do the work without it. But the really insidious case is when you don't realize it is making shit up and then you act on it. If you are lucky you embarrass yourself in front of a customer. If you are unlucky you unintentionally wipe out the production database. That's much more of an overt and immediate concern than leaking some PII.

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

#276

Post by mark_l_watson »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #271
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…

As much as I love JetBrains (IntelliJ and friends), I have the same feeling this year. The ratio that I undo an accidental tab/whatever far exceeds the accepted ones. I'm not anti-LLM -- they are great for many things, but I am tired of undoing shitting suggestions. Literally, many of them produce a syntax error. Please don't read this post as dumping on JetBrains. I still love their products. > It is wasting time an…

I agree. I am happiest just using plain Emacs for coding and every once in a while separately using an LLM or once or twice a day use gemini-cli or codex for a single task.

My comment is for coding, but same opinion for writing emails - once in a blue moon, then I will use a LLM manually.

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

#277

Post by bombcar »

gyomu wrote: post #267
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…

As an old school interface/interaction designer, I see this as a direct consequence of how the discipline of software design has evolved in the last decade or two. We’ve went from conceiving of software as tools - constructs that enhance and amplify their user’s skills and capabilities - to magic boxes that should aim to do everything with just one button (and maybe even that is one action too many). This shift in th…

Watching this tractor boot is infuriating

https://youtu.be/pWWC2a7Bj-U

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

#278

Post by bombcar »

stogot wrote: post #158
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-...

Security does come first.

Job security.

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

#279

Post by mark_l_watson »

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…

I have thought about stopping the use of all tech leaders: only use LLM access by running locally and Huggingface, only use a small 3rd party email provider, just use open source, and only social media use is via Mastodon.

What would be the effect? Ironically, more productive?

I am pissed at Microsoft now because my family plan for Office365 is set to renew and they are tagging on a surcharge of $30 for AI services I don’t want. What assholes: that should be a voluntary add on.

EDIT: I tried to cancel my Office365 plan, and they let me switch to a non-AI plan for the old price. I don’t hate them anymore.

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

#280

Post by bdangubic »

ethbr1 wrote: post #263
bdangubic wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…

Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing. ... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them. Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.

exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)
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