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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

#51

Post by layer8 »

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…

US technocapitalism is built on the premise of technological innovation driving exponential growth. This is why they are fixated on whatever provides an outlook for that. The risk that it might not work out is downplayed, because (a) they don’t want to hazard not being at the forefront in the event that it does work out, and (b) if it doesn’t work out, nobody will really hold them accountable for it, not the least because everybody does it.

After the mobile and cloud revolution having run out of steam, AI is what promises most growth by far, even if it is a dubious promise.

It’s a gamble, a bet on “the next big thing”. Because they would never be satisfied with there not being another “big thing”, or not being prominently part of it.

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

#52

Post by N19PEDL2 »

type0 wrote: post #42

But is it sold enough to regular Windows Home users? If MS brings an ultimatum: "you need to buy AI services to use Windows", they might get a bunch more clueless subscribers. In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account they could make it mandatory to subscribe to Copilot.

I think Microsoft's long-term plan is exactly that: to make Windows itself a subscription product. Windows 12 Home for $4.99 a month, Copilot included. It will be called OSaaS.

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

#53

Post by xnorswap »

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…

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.

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

#54

Post by saubeidl »

foobarchu wrote: post #27
stingraycharles wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to…

> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.

And if it does deliver, everyone's gonna be out of a job and the US economy is also going to crash.

Nice cul-de-sac our techbro leaders have navigated us into.

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

#56

Post by apercu »

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, and now it's AI.

I wonder if we will ever return to rationalization? The bellwether might be Tesla stock price (at a rational valuation).

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

#57

Post by binary132 »

Gormo wrote: post #7
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…

> In other words --- pure greed. Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. These attempts to try to steer demand despite clear indicators that it doesn't want to go in that direction aren't just driven by greed, they're driven by abject incompetence. This isn't pure greed, it's stupid greed.

you seem to be committing the error of believing that the problem here is just that they’re not selling what people want to buy, instead of identifying the clear intention to _create_ the market.

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

#58

Post by Teever »

stingraycharles wrote: post #19
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…

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to…

Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.

The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.

We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.

It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.

It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.

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

#59

Post by SoftTalker »

dbspin wrote: post #26
empath75 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "fundamentally flawed". It is brilliant at what it does. What is flawed is how people are applying it to solve specific problems. It isn't a "do anything" button that you can just push. Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

I'd consider hallucinations to be a fundamental flaw that currently sets hard limits on the current utility of LLMs in any context.

I thought this for a while, but I've also been thinking about all the stupid, false stuff that actual humans believe. I'm not sure AI won't get to a point where even if it's not perfect it's no worse than people are about selectively observing policies, having wrong beliefs about things, or just making something up when they don't know.
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