Their logic is: Workplaces aren’t buying copilot licenses So make a good price on personal licenses
If price is the barrier, maybe bring down that $30 license fee for business (which is on top of the M365 license) to see if adoption grows.
This is not going to win any friends in the business world and will most likely result in blanket bans of AI tools in the workplace to counteract this.
The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.
Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.
I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.
This is already happening.
I work for very large IT company and they are upgrading to Windows 11 because they have to but AI tools like co-pilot are being blocked by default in the image we push to all users.
This is resulted in a very funny knowledge base article which basically tells the support staff to tell the users to go do one if they complain about it.
Any job openings for a sysadmin?
My company actually got their own internal use AI that supposedly is safe for client information and is firewalled and not scraped.
It is not very useful, constantly is out of service, and I don’t trust for a second that it is secure/not scraped.
I always suspect that even the “local” models somehow connect to some larger database out in the internet.
Why would a company want to do that for their own internal use? Models you can download are mostly just data. They don’t do anything on their own. You can even write your own interpreter for them, if you feel like it.
I doubt IT admins are surprised. Frustrated, yes.
I feel like this will not last long. It’s one thing to rape end users, but with the growing corporate backlash against AI, I think angry money will win the day, and Microsoft will back down.
Nah, as long as Microsoft dangles their bullshit stats about improved productivity in front of managers and as long as the competition is using AI then the bosses will keep trying to shoehorn it in to their companies that don’t need it.
Here’s to hoping! 🍻
🐙
More personal data!
Chef’s kiss!
Steph A Knee!
Disassemble Number 5!
NO! NO DISASSEMBLE NUMBER FIVE!
Someone should tell them that freemium doesn’t work well when there’s a linear increase in cost for every additional query, and when the business value for your exceptionally expensive product is nebulous at best.
That’s why they’re pushing so hard now. They can’t keep it free forever. They need you to become reliant upon it to perform even the simplest of tasks now so when they monetize usage it has already become a must have. That way they can count on your subscription no matter what.
Crack trap house strategy
That’s just Microsoft’s standard practice. That’s why we all know it’s coming.
The Nestle effect
Welcome to the AI bubble. It’s going to be a wild ride possibly taking other sectors if not a country or two with it when it falls from grace.
I don’t think these lemmings cheering for the bubble pop understand how bad this will be. Gotta happen sometime, better sooner than later, but fuck me it’s going to be disastrous. Reminds of of October, 1929.
Copilot is disabled by default in my company. And there’s literally a new policy/guideline about the use of AI/LLM in the workplace being released every month because of how rapid changes are happening. Not that employees aren’t allowed to use them at all, but are restricted in what they are allowed to use.
“Use this until you’re dependant on it, then we’ll jack the price up 400%! Oh, and we want to sell all of your work data, and use it to train our shitty LLM’s.”
Feels like a sign they aren’t selling anywhere near enough corporate licenses.
