The number of paying subscribers for Copilot has leaked, and it is a disaster. Now even reshaping Satya Nadella’s CEO role into tech leadership rather than delivering commercial results.
The number of paying subscribers for Copilot has leaked, and it is a disaster. Now even reshaping Satya Nadella’s CEO role into tech leadership rather than delivering commercial results.
Companies and workers are both scared of these systems, trying to figure them out, and yet completely uneducated on how to use them.
If you want to sell it at $30 a seat, you need to teach every single seat how to make $30 or more in gains a month by using it.
And a 1 hour lunch and learn isn’t going to fix that.
These systems shouldn’t be priced per seat, and regular users shouldn’t be doing almost anything with them until they get trained.
That lunch hour is with the CEO, who thinks he can cut 30% of the workforce for this “cheap” AI.
If ANYONE had reproducible guidance on how to get positive value out of these systems… they’d be booming like NVIDIA. It’s another “during the gold rush, sell shovels” model.
Raises an eyebrow that we’re not seeing it.
I think these companies are sitting, waiting, and praying for an emergent use-case to reveal itself. They’re spending money to be prepared to corner a market that as-of-yet doesn’t exist.
I mean, the same could have been said for computers when they first came out. Most people had no idea how to improve their workflow by using one, and only as training and new software was developed did it manage to get reproducible results across the population.
The AI companies are definitely a bit ahead of where they should be right now, these last couple of years have happened too quickly for people to adapt their thinking.
There are specialists (myself included) that are implementing some absolutely transformational automations using these things. That being said, my job for the last 15 years has been automating and streamlining business processes, so this is just an extra tool in my kit to boost those automations to new levels.
I built a simple one the other day using a basic prompt integrated into an existing longer work automation process that’s probably going to eliminate an entire FTE worth of admin work for that task, and it only took about 3 hours to implement.
The question then becomes, are the remaining staff on this task “using” co-pilot because the process they support has it integrated? They’re not typing or pasting things into co-pilot themselves, they’re not developing prompts, but if you removed it, the workload would go up.
I think that’s fair comparison.
The difference was that investment followed realizable value for PCs. Or cell phones. Or iPods. Or “the cloud”. The horse and carriage were in a sane order.
The internet itself might be an even better comparison, with VC dumping money into anything without an understanding of how to get a return.
My work indicated that they would start expecting people to make use of Copilot. There’s been small errors in every answer Copilot has given me, but it has surfaced information and been able to accurately answer a few questions that would have taken me hours with Microsoft docs to find without knowing it in advance (I always confirm the data).
I can see the value in a natural language search engine. In being able to ask questions about documentation and software/system capabilities in natural language and get natural language answers.
But it makes too many errors to be reliable because it tries to be generalist instead of organizing concepts and tokens properly for the specific domain. It costs way too damn much for the not super impressive thing it actually does, and it only does that at a barely passable level.
I hate that me needing to use it for work for the sake of appearances only serves to normalize it to me and others, while adding to the inflated count of users.
I found it often gives garbage results, so you have to know the subject well enough to weed through the nonsense. So it can be helpful if you already know what you are trying to do and just need a bump.