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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

#311

Post by Zardoz84 »

BeetleB wrote: post #239
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 actually would like it to improve my writing. Problem is LLMs aren't particularly good for this (yet).

If you use a LLM for writing, then you aren't writing anything.

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

#314

Post by flohofwoe »

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…

Sure, as a search engine replacement it's totally fine and works reasonably well, but this is also because Google as search engine has regressed dramatically since it's aggressively pushing products at the top of the search results instead of answering questions.

But "a slightly better search engine" sounds much less interesting to investors than "will completely transform human civilization" ;)

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

treis wrote: post #109
zdragnar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell ap…

I don't see how people don't see it. LLMs are a revolutionary technology and are for the first time since the iPhone are changing how we interact with computers. This isn't block chains. This is something we're going to use until something better replaces it.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by sensanaty »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #224
trollbridge wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are…

> 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo

Or better yet, you just need 100 people paying 400 million each to get the same amount!

> "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price"

That only works if the product is actually good. The average person isn't going to be paying EIGHTY dollars a month to generate recipes or whatever, that's just delusional

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

#317

Post by mathgeek »

I was playing with copilot in excel the other day, and (not surprisingly) it quickly got into a loop of “that’s not possible… oh yea here is how you do that… oh you are right that didn’t work because it’s not possible” starting from the very first prompt. You can tell it’s being given instructions to always find an answer.

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

#318

Post by conartist6 »

ilteris wrote: post #294
mk89 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks. The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget. 100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe). This means for a year or more, a lot o…

Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.

You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care.

Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least

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

#319

Post by conartist6 »

conartist6 wrote: post #318
ilteris wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.

You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care. Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least

(unless of course the user is an impostor, a scammer, or a grifter! Then the level is service becomes almost unimaginably high)

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

#320

Post by tim333 »

gwerbret wrote: post #201

A bit tangential and pedantic, but: > At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual. "Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".

The Wikipedia version of confabulate:

>production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories

doesn't fit. LLMs don't produce distorted memories, they guess random stuff and then forget it shortly after.

I think 'guess' may be more accurate.

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