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 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.
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.
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.
Any job openings for a sysadmin?