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Comment on Microsoft is endorsing the use of personal Copilot in workplaces, frustrating IT admins

Broken@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Any job openings for a sysadmin?
  
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- Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - echodot@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Well co-pilot sends all it’s data to Microsoft as is.
    
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- Broken@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - echodot@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Customers in this case being other businesses, so no it’s not public.
    
    Basically it just boils down to telling them that corporate policy is not to make use of AI because of data collection concerns and to emphatically remind them that attempting to circumvent these policies is against corporate procedures.
    
    Technically it’s no different than just taking internal documents and dumping them online.
    
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SaraTonin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- Broken@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - SaraTonin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.
    
    As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.
    
    I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.
    
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    Broken@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    All that aside, I just wanted to say I really like your name.
    
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- BrowseMan@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Copilot is being pushed so hard by management on the users in my pharma company…
  
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echo@lemmy.tf ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
$30/mo is still too much for what it can do

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Toribor@corndog.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Businesses are happy to have their employees be more productive without having to pay for expensive new licenses… But eventually they’re going to find out that letting all your employees share swaths of private data with random websites is not a great idea.

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