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Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

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31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#31

This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI. Their bing chat is a bloated mess and while I haven't personally tried AI Office 365, I suspect it follows the same theme. Anecdotally, I've heard demand for OpenAI's enterprise tier is ridiculous from someone working within their GMT function. I guess you can say Microsoft did a great job of hedging their bets.

> This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI.

This says pretty clearly that what Microsoft is peddling isn't even remotely an AI. They used AI purely as marketing term and ignored the obvious market consequences that would arise from that.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#32
post #11

They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot. I have been using Copilot for over half a year or something, and I haven't found it to be useful in Word, and it is rarely useful in Outlook. I don't use Excel a lot, so I get a lot of value out of the formulae generation stuff when I have to use Excel. There are several meetings that…

Idk. I've read through those summaries after meetings and they can often be misleading of miss important context. I still think you need to have a human to read through the meeting summaries to confirm they are accurate.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#33
post #15

I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck." Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on? But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's p…

The problem is that’s requires them to do actual product discovery work.

Right now, they can chuck out a terribly implemented LLM.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#34
post #21

Office features haven't increased in value since Office 2000. It's been 99% bugfixes, 1% feature evolution since then.

30% devolution they even broke the Save dialog in an attempt to push their onedrive garbage what used to take 1 click now takes 3-4

Teams used to be one button to attach a file to a chat.

Now I have to hit the '+', at the bottom of the window, wait for the dialog to fully load, then click 'Attach file', at the top of the window, wait for the dialog to load again, then click 'Upload from this device', again at the bottom of the window.

I sincerely HATE my coworkers for asking for attachments now.

No one at Microsoft is paying attention to the product as a whole. It seems like teams of middle managers all vying to get their dumb feature included in the product. It's an incomprehensible mess of poorly thought out misfeatures.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% devolution they even broke the Save dialog in an attempt to push their onedrive garbage what used to take 1 click now takes 3-4

I still haven’t figured out how to export a copy of an excel sheet to csv without that csv becoming the document I have open afterward, and having to close it and reopen the xlsx file. (note: desktop Excel 2016) There's an "Export" section in the awkward full-window UI that they replaced the File menu with, but instead of exporting it's just another way around to add extra clicks (File -> Export -> Change File Type -…

[deleted]

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#37

First the inital, irrational exuberance. Along with out of control spending on anything AI. Then the lack of financial return on investment from the initial exploratory (try everything) stages. Leading to a sizable pullback in spending across the entire ecosystem. Then the doom & gloom (talking heads on TV; smarter-than-thou industry pundits); death of garbage start-ups (the great thinning); painful layoffs; stocks d…

Still waiting for that substantial, tangible value realised by the users who went all in on Clippy.

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#39
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% devolution they even broke the Save dialog in an attempt to push their onedrive garbage what used to take 1 click now takes 3-4

I still haven’t figured out how to export a copy of an excel sheet to csv without that csv becoming the document I have open afterward, and having to close it and reopen the xlsx file. (note: desktop Excel 2016) There's an "Export" section in the awkward full-window UI that they replaced the File menu with, but instead of exporting it's just another way around to add extra clicks (File -> Export -> Change File Type -…

Dumb as it is, the quickest way to get a CSV export is probably to make a new document and copy/paste the contents of the sheet into it, then save as CSV and close

Re: Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

#40

Whattttttt? Impossible. Surely the AI must have been adding value. A big company wouldn't just look to shove AI into something because it's trendy and fool themselves into thinking that customers would pay them for it, would they? Also, why are we linking to some forum and not the articles?

My boss, the VP of Product, went on a spree about GenAI these past few months. We've been working on regular prediction and optimization things, but when ChatGPT went nuts, everything was GenAI. He was reading generative AI into RFPs and proposals that didn't even mention generative AI.

I tried talking to him that it's still garbage in and garbage out. If the solution was never there to train on, LLMs aren't going to make them out of thin air. There's also the "language" part of LLMs, that he didn't get.

We get pulled into a workshop with Amazon, who also wouldn't give us free resources unless it had a GenAI angle. After all this effort, you know what we made?

A fucking chat bot.

A fucking chat bot, that's also near useless, because our customers are highly driven and only interested in mathematical predictions. Turns out, you have to actually solve the hard math problems first with many examples, before GenAI can even take a terrible attempt at it.

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