Microsoft is endorsing the use of personal Copilot in workplaces, frustrating IT admins
Microsoft is endorsing the use of personal Copilot in workplaces, frustrating IT admins
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.
I get what you're saying, but my point wasn't really about viability of their price structure vs cost.
It was the fact that they are offering a personal M365 license AND CoPilot license for $20. If they can do that, they've already done the math and are OK with the price.
So if they are OK with the price, why not offer that same discounted bundle to business, adjusted to whatever business license is included?
But no, they want to charge business $30 for CoPilot alone, with no M365 license.
So this strategy is clear, they are trying to compete and gain adoption in the personal space, competing against $20 chatgpt or similar subscriptions. With that in mind, its a great strategy. They gain market share, gain your personal data for their advertising, and further cements people in their ecosystem.
So, lengthy way to get to the point of, they are screwing over businesses without a similar (if not comparable) deal, and then forcing problems because people will just start using their own LLMs for business use which adds a huge shadow IT strain and risk. So business will react in turn and shut it all down, which then kills adoption.
So they're purposefully shooting themselves in the right foot so they can take a step with their left. It won't work out in the end.
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.
Banning work controlled ai is incredibly short sighted
You will just end up with a whole bunch of shadow ai that you can't control what users upload or how they use it.
Is that an internal KB article or something you send to the customers? If it's public I'd like to read it for a chuckle.
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.
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.
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.
You should turn in your company to the AI cartel. They should have known that restricting use was going to be a problem for the Tech Lords.
All companies belong to the Tech Lords now. Once they have eviscerated your management AI will once again flow freely into your workplace.
There is no future only AI.
"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.
This is stupid. As an IT administrator a quick glance at my logs shows that everyone is using ChatGPT. No one cares about Copilot.
do you mean ChatGPT the website? Because you can use chatgpt models through copilot, but there are other models too.
Idk. Since ms is a walled garden. If you want your ai to read your documents and mail and whatever else you have at work copilot is easily the only way to do that effectively.
Except it doesn't do much of anything effectively
Do you mean that everyone who is using AI is using ChatGPT? Or that literally everyone is using ChatGPT?
Anecdotally, I'm the only one in my workspace who doesn't use chatgpt. My coworkers all use it multiple times a day, from simple queries, to rewriting documents and emails.
Yes, this has led to some problems...