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.
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.