Microsoft is betting big on AI and spending billions to create tools like its flagship Copilot assistant. But now some of the people working on the tools are wondering if it's worth the hype.
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00:00Microsoft is betting big on AI and spending billions to create generative AI tools like CoPilot.
00:06The 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.
00:14I'm Ashley Stewart, and I cover tech for Business Insider from Seattle.
00:18So for this story, we reviewed internal emails and documents.
00:22We got a payroll spreadsheet where employees were sharing their salaries.
00:26We interviewed 15 Microsoft insiders plus their customers and competitors.
00:32Here's what we found.
00:33Customers like some of the features, like summarizing meetings and email threads.
00:38Some of the features they're not as excited about.
00:40In July, we heard about a CIO of a pharmaceuticals company saying that the company was no longer going to use CoPilot.
00:47Basically, he compared the tool's ability to generate PowerPoints to basically creating middle school presentations.
00:55We'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.
01:04CoPilot can scan basically all of your organization's information and then pull up insights for you, answer questions.
01:12But what that means for companies with lax permissions is sometimes CoPilot was surfacing things like salary data or the CEO's emails,
01:22things that companies really don't want the average employee to be able to access.
01:26So we're hearing of some customers pausing their deployments for them to fix this issue.
01:32The problem is the issue can take years to fix because of how these things work.
01:36The price, I would say, is the biggest complaint because people just in general are wondering if it's worth the money.
01:42And Microsoft is racing to add value to those tools as it tries to recoup its own significant investments in building them.
01:49So Microsoft has made a big pivot internally toward AI, of course.
01:53We heard about events during the initial excitement about CoPilot, like cooking for CoPilot,
01:58where everybody got together and made a recipe that was made by the AI tool.
02:02You may have heard this word CoPilot.
02:04But 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.
02:12And that's created some frustration among employees who say that, you know,
02:17the bread and butter businesses of Microsoft aren't getting as many resources, as much attention.
02:22One person told me it felt like Microsoft could only look at one shiny object at a time.
02:27The hype over generative AI has catapulted Microsoft to a $3 trillion valuation.
02:32We're seeing significant spending from companies like Amazon and Microsoft, Google, Meta.
02:38They are all projected by Morgan Stanley to spend $300 billion in capital expenditures in the next year alone.
02:45And I think in general, we're just seeing a lot of questions from investors about whether all of this spending will actually pay off.
02:52Microsoft has no doubt heard about the complaints.
02:55They've heard the customer complaints.
02:57They see Wall Street losing faith a bit.
02:59But the sense I got is that at the top of the company, the plan is just to stay the course.
03:03They see AI in general as as big as the invention of the Internet.
03:08And as one executive told me, you know, no matter what's happening, they want to stay focused and execute.
03:14And basically, hopefully their bet will pay off.