Among the big players in artificial intelligence, Microsoft is among the most important to have attacked the professional sector. Copilot's aggressive marketing push within Microsoft 365, its software suite for businesses, has not gone unnoticed. Each of its office software, whether Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, now has several AI-boosted tools. An integration that is also available to the general public, such as AI search on the Edge browser or the Copilot application available on the Microsoft Store – which is even entitled to its dedicated button on all new laptops sold commercially, labeled “Copilot+” for the occasion.
But in this great march towards AI, certain parts of the business are being left behind. As reported in a long article published by the Business Insider site, Microsoft's sudden expansion into the AI market caused the group's capital expenditures to explode to $20 billion during the last quarter – more than the total payroll expenses, says one of the employees. As a result, some cuts are being felt in teams affiliated with other products of the brand, such as Teams or even Azure, its Cloud solution popular with businesses. Cuts which result in layoffs and a deprioritization of one of Microsoft's sure economic values.
Some detractors of the product logically come from direct competitors, such as Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who markets his own suite of AI tools for businesses, and did not hesitate to nickname Copilot as “Clippy 2.0” in reference to the small Microsoft Word wizard paperclip. But other criticisms, even more virulent, are internal to Microsoft. In addition to certain voices which point out the poor technical state of certain Copilot functionalities at the launch last November in the Microsoft 365 software suite, the direction taken by Satya Nadella and his teams, launched towards all-AI at all costs, does not unanimity. “I feel like I'm experiencing a mass illusion here.“, explains an employee to Business Insider, before adding “that there is no infrastructure for AI to achieve 75% of the promises announced by Microsoft“.
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From the point of view of employees' daily lives too, the big push towards AI is being felt. In a long post in his newsletter Where's your Ed At?, journalist Ed Zitron paints an edifying portrait of the Microsoft machine in the age of Copilot. Teams are encouraged as much as possible to leverage Copilot tools in their software suites. So far, nothing surprising – an integration that sounds logical, and which becomes a primary source of QA to exploit for improvement. However, some of these applications go beyond certain questionable limits.
Several employees within Microsoft United States said they were encouraged by internal guidelines to use Copilot to write their “Connects”, the name given to the semi-annual written interviews with their managers. A practice also implemented within certain teams in the French branch, according to one of our internal sources at Microsoft.
What applies to one also applies to the other: Microsoft USA managers, too, are encouraged to use Copilot tools to summarize these same skills assessments, thus creating a regurgitative loop of an AI judging the work of 'another AI An absurd logic which reflects one of the problems ahead for the giants of the sector in the years to come: training the next generation of AI models will be expensive, very expensive, even though the quantity of usable data is increasing. reduced to nothing. How far can the ambition of Satya Nadella and his colleagues among the tech giants go?
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