Name: Microsoft Is Betting Big On AI. Company Insiders Have Serious Doubts. | Business Insider
Uploaded: 2024-11-19T14:11:06.000Z
Duration: 3 min 24 s
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Microsoft is betting big on AI and spending billions to create generative AI tools like Copilot.

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The people who are working on the tools, though, told me there's a big gap right now between what the company envisions and what customers are actually experiencing.

I'm Ashley Stewart, and I cover Tech for Business Insider from Seattle.

So for this story, we reviewed internal emails and documents.

We got a payroll spreadsheet where employees were sharing their salaries.

We interviewed 15 Microsoft insiders plus their customers and competitors.

Customers like some of the features, like summarizing meetings and email threads, some of the features they're not as excited about.

In July, we heard about a CIO of a pharmaceuticals company saying that the company was no longer going to use Copilot.

Basically, he compared the tool's ability to generate PowerPoints to basically creating middle school presentations.

We've also heard about sort of a security issue, and that issue is more with how customers have set up permissions for their internal systems.

Copilot can scan basically all of your organization's information and then pull up insights for you, answer questions.

But what that means for companies with lax permissions is sometimes Copilot was surfacing things like salary data or the CEO's emails, things that companies really don't want the average employee to be able to access.

So we're hearing of some customers pausing their deployments for them to fix this issue.

The problem is the issue can take years to fix because of how these things work.

The price, I would say, is the biggest complaint because people just in general are wondering if it's worth the money, and Microsoft is racing to add value to those tools as it tries to recoup its own significant investments in building them.

So Microsoft has made a big pivot internally toward AI, of course.

We heard about events during the initial excitement about Copilot, like cooking for Copilot, where everybody got together and made a recipe that was made by the AI tool.

But one employee I talked to said it felt like there's a group delusion at Microsoft that these AI tools are basically going to solve every problem.

And that's created some frustration among employees who say that, you know, the bread and butter businesses of Microsoft aren't getting as many resources, as much attention.

One person told me it felt like Microsoft could only look at one shiny object at a time.

The hype over generative AI has catapulted Microsoft to a $3 trillion valuation.

We're seeing significant spending from companies like Amazon and Microsoft, Google, Meta.

They are all projected by Morgan Stanley to spend $300 billion in capital expenditures in the next year alone.

And I think in general, we're just seeing a lot of questions from investors about whether all of this spending will actually pay off.

Microsoft has no doubt heard about the complaints.

But the sense I got is that at the top of the company, the plan is just to stay the course.

They see AI in general as as big as the invention of the Internet.

And as one executive told me, you know, no matter what's happening, they want to stay focused and execute.

 And basically, hopefully their bet will pay off.