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Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

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296 points mohi-kalantari | 2 comments | 08 Dec 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.392s | source
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ZeroConcerns ◴[08 Dec 25 17:40 UTC] No.46195233[source]▶
Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them.

Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.

I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button actually do something, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...

Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.

So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??

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jsheard ◴[08 Dec 25 18:13 UTC] No.46195673[source]▶
> So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling?

Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader.

> Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...

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1. rynn ◴[08 Dec 25 18:21 UTC] No.46195747[source]▶
Nadella has to have his own custom agents. It isn't even possible for an enterprise like MSFT to not have custom agents that are still remotely useful.

So, his experience with Copilot agents != Average Customer's experience

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2. danudey ◴[08 Dec 25 19:48 UTC] No.46196729[source]▶
Look, if the CEO of a five trillion dollar company investing hundreds of billions into AI can come up with some custom agents to handle every aspect of the CEO's work, surely your average Microsoft 365-subscribing corporation can do the same.

It's just another example of the rich being wildly out of touch. Yes, Beyonce has the same 24 hours in a day that the rest of us have, but she also has enough money to pay people to do every aspect of her life that isn't bringing her joy or wealth. Yes, AI can be used to streamline workflows or help you find signal in the noise so you can focus on the important things better, but if every company has to build that themselves then no company is going to see the value of spending a bunch of extra money on something that they can only get benefit from if they spend even more money.

If the 'AI agents' that Nadella is talking about were part of Copilot then sure, okay, I could see a benefit, but when people in this thread are saying that Outlook can't even tell you who is in a meeting then it certainly explains why Nadella doesn't understand the lack of value.