8 ms·
Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThey’re so desperate to make it work. > “A source that has seen materials related to sales has confirmed that, as of August 2025, Microsoft has around eight million active licensed users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, amounting to a 1.81% conversion rate across the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers.” Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476045 - October 2025
- u5wbxrc3 1y agoAt this point its a sunk cost fallacy
- rhetocj23 1y agoYeah Im just waiting for this to finally play out. If you understand product design, economics, corporate finance and various other disciplines well - its obvious what is going on. MSFT wants to juice their numbers for the next earnings call to keep the mania going. Zzzzzzzzzzz Ive spoken to people who work in the finance sector - portfolio management and tax audit - they laugh hysterically at how bad the tools are (copilot in particular) and resent how much they are being pushed down on them.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoI think it's more nuanced than that. Microsoft is desperate for growth in a growth challenged macro, and Nadella has guided valuations and stock targets that are simply unobtainable without this growth. That's one part of the AI slop shovel. The second part is institutions that are desperate to cut labor costs or find other efficiency gains to maintain historical financial performance targets during ZIRP that are simply no longer obtainable. They are willing to push their workers through the sausage machine of "AI" to try to make it happen. And so the performance art must continue, at least until the AI investment music stops. Your options are get rich if in a position to (due to irrational exuberance and unsophisticated capital investment), or play along until the facade falls to keep your job. "It is what it is."
- rhetocj23 1y agoYes but the sunk cost is also driving that - the investment has to show growth in cashflows, to the extent it is beating the hurdle rate to add value.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoAhh, Microsoft's AI capital investment sunk cost fallacy, certainly, I agree with that. The stock will be punished when the investment does not show cashflow returns for sure. MSFT: Microsoft CEO Offloads $75 Million in Stock Amid AI Boom - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/msft-microsoft-ceo-offloads-75-125857099.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/msft-microsoft-ceo-offloads-7... - September 5th, 2025
- blibble 1y ago> Nadella has guided valuations and stock targets that are simply unobtainable without this growth I read a couple of articles and he seems to have been completely suckered in by the damn thing from https://archive.is/oWbZB#selection-2387.572-2401.668 https://archive.is/oWbZB#selection-2387.572-2401.668 > 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. this is no different to ending up in an alternate reality populated by your AI "girlfriends" and will produce similar results
- lukan 1y agoBut if real, indicates, that he does take it serious. Eat your own dogfood and all that. I do not see it as AI girlfriend. I see it as pushing the limits of the technology for productivity. " Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages" But .. I would never do that, without also having a human check what important bits don't get through.
- rasz 1y agoMicrosoft really wants that AI company valuation.
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- dfxm12 1y agoOur org has legal/security requirements around AI. MS is not making themselves available to address these concerns or giving our admins the information that is being asked for. There are also ever changing, inscrutable licensing schemes, and too many similarly named products. It's impossible to know what to buy or how much it is going to cost. This is even before you get to the quality of the product itself. I mean, part of the reason people aren't using it because it is hard to buy and use.
- pixl97 1y ago>inscrutable licensing schemes, and too many similarly named products. This has always been Microsoft's MO. They used to have a team you could call to figure out which product you actually needed.
- stagger87 1y agoI seem to remember a similar arc with Cortana. Didn't it briefly appear everywhere in MS365?
- rawgabbit 1y agoMy company has both enterprise ChatGPT and Copilot. We originally had CoPilot; we learned it can search for files on OneDrive and Emails and that is the extent of its usefulness. Because everyone was doing work on their personal ChatGPT, the company had to buy the enterprise version of ChatGPT due to risk/compliance issues. Although CoPilot supposedly runs using the same engine, it feels severely limited compared to ChatGPT.
- 1718627440 1y ago8 million sold licenses doesn't sound like a failure to me. Why do people assume that the market for Office programs and LLM tools is the same or even comparable?
- hulitu 1y ago> Why do people assume that the market for Office programs and LLM tools is the same or even comparable? People ? No, Microsoft
- dude250711 1y agoI guess teams that are clever enough to avoid Copilot are also clever enough to write a script to call it on repeat in the background, while they are doing something more useful. Autonomous agents are all the rage anyway, isn't it?
- Qem 1y ago> guess teams that are clever enough to avoid Copilot are also clever enough to write a script to call it on repeat in the background Perhaps this and also filling onedrive free space with random noise, to waste MS some storage in addition to CPU/GPU cycles.
- Phelinofist 1y agoWhile I totally get the sentiment that is quite the environmental pollution, if (more) useless GPU/CPU power is wasted
- RiverCrochet 1y agoDidn't Excel just gain a COPILOT() function? You don't even have to be particularly clever to do this.
- shmerl 1y agoThey can make AI use AI for them, and koolaid bosses should be happy.
- elzbardico 1y agoMake copilot write it for you. Bonus points for asking it to be a self-replicating worm that runs on kernel level
- ntoskrnl_exe 1y agoA couple days ago there was a post here about how most LLMs enter an endless replying loop if you ask them to show you the non-existing seahorse emoji. Asking it to show you one and minimizing the window might be enough.
- bravetraveler 1y agoI would tell them if only they'd ask, absolutely no issue here being the control group. Push the issue, well: Copilot can enjoy /dev/urandom
- paxys 1y agoLeadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.
- avgDev 1y agoMaybe I could create a grift company that tells other companies why they are using AI wrong. After working for a few weeks at high hourly rate, produce a report. Then grift the next suites.
- slater 1y ago> After working for a few weeks at high hourly rate, produce a report. Then grift the next suites. Bonus points if you just have ChatGPT spit out the report :D
- paxys 1y agoConsulting companies are wayy ahead of you
- Yoric 1y agoIsn't it what McKinsley has been doing for the last few years?
- whiplash451 1y agoHonestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way, you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.
- Lionga 1y agoIf you are submitting AI Slop code or overuse AI then you are a liability. If you don't use AI at all you might be 5 or 10% slower, but quality might well even make up for it.
- nxobject 1y agoFor context, this is the whole list of metrics measured by their Eye of Sauron tool, Viva Insights – it seems to be split between Outlook, Teams, Office, and Copilot data. The Outlook and Teams stuff seems to relate to time spent on their individual platforms, but the Copilot-by-app stuff is hilarious. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/reference/metrics https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/ref... I look forward to the equivalent of a mouse jiggler.
- Phelinofist 1y agoThat tool is quite frankly insane and not allowed in the EU I hope?
- mindcrash 1y agoIt absolutely can be used within the EU. This is the marketing page targeted at companies in the Netherlands: https://www.microsoft.com/nl-nl/microsoft-viva/insights?market=nl https://www.microsoft.com/nl-nl/microsoft-viva/insights?mark...
- blibble 1y agothose metrics are almost certainly a disproportionate invasion of employee privacy, not justified by any legitimate interest of the employer
- warkdarrior 1y agoIt's a good time to be a lawyer.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoOr a union member.
- rawgabbit 1y agoWell Peter Thiel did refer to Bill Gates as the anti-christ.
- mindcrash 1y agoViva shows aggregate numbers and does not give any details sooo... ...ask Copilot to play a nice game of clue, checkers, tic tac toe, chess or whatever. Adoption metric accomplished! :) (That's what you get when you force people who don't want to use AI to use AI.)
- DeepYogurt 1y agoMalicious compliance
- daviddever23box 1y agoClaude is better. End of.
- dboreham 1y agoLLMs are on a very steep improvement curve, in general. Claude is good today. Something else from some group that figures out the next useful optimization will be better tomorrow. Repeat/rinse for at least 10 years..
- leptons 1y agoA lot has been written about LLMs having reached a plateau with regards to improvements. They still all produce garbage way too often. LLMs have fundamental limitations that can't really be fixed. Garbage in / garbage out also applies, and that is only getting worse with LLMs being trained on ever growing volumes of "AI" slop that is permeating everything lately.
- transcriptase 1y agoThat group will never be Microsoft, and if it is, that model won’t be the one they’re shoehorning into every enterprise product for free.
- elzbardico 1y agoYeah. Like fusion power
- nitwit005 1y ago> It will also be possible to compare an organization's percentage of active Copilot users with other companies. The numbers are calculated using randomized mathematical models, according to Microsoft, so no one company's data is used, and it isn't possible to work out who is in the benchmark against which your own company's Copilot adoption is being measured. Somehow, I'm confident the result will almost always be that other companies are using it more.
- dfxm12 1y agoImagine going to Ignite and talking to your counterparts in a bunch of other companies. Then you realize that you've all got the same percentage of utilization. :)
- TrainedMonkey 1y agoThere are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Let's say you define top 10% of copilot using companies as excellent. By definition 90% of companies are below that benchmark and can use that to justify more AI investment. The subtle part of this is that it is dynamic. As companies use AI more top 10% is going to keep shifting up creating an AI race.
- throwawa14223 1y agoYou wouldn't have to do this with a tool that was beneficial.
- evandrofisico 1y agoImagine such a amazing productivity tool, so amazing that you have to force your users into using it. As a person that was just born yesterday, I'm quite sure that the other technologies that are constantly compared to LLMs, like the internet and smartphones certainly must have endured the same adoption barriers, right?
- qzw 1y agoDoing a mindless chore in the background to satisfy a meaningless metric sounds like the perfect task to give to an AI agent…
- chollida1 1y agoMicrosoft adds features to its products that customers ask for. If these metrics are being included in Viva, its because companies are asking for these metrics.
- Starman_Jones 1y agoThe company asking for this was Microsoft. This was originally developed internally because Microsoft wanted to make Copilot usage a key performance metric - they needed a tool to measure that. I've been told as much by people at Microsoft pretty close to this tool. Now I'm speculating, but it seems like someone saw an opportunity to take that internal tool and offer it as an add-on, and pad their bonus by doing it. I suspect this release was driven strictly by supply, not by demand.
- kylec 1y agoThis could backfire on Microsoft - if a company's leadership sees low Copilot by their employees, cancelling the subscription is an easy way for the company to save money.
- secondcoming 1y agoCopilot got added to our Github repos. For out C++ one, I'd give it a solid 6/10
- ryandrake 1y agoNothing says "This tool is useful" quite like monitoring and forcing people to use it and then investigating people evading that monitoring.
- bgwalter 1y agoWhat are the rumors about the new second CEO of MSFT? https://technologymagazine.com/news/why-is-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-shifting-his-focus-to-ai https://technologymagazine.com/news/why-is-microsoft-ceo-sat... The official narrative is that Nadella wants to focus completely on his misguided "AI" obsession. Could it be that the board forced Nadella to install this second CEO as a backup if Nadella's fantasies fail?
- lawlessone 1y agoCouldn't people just give the AI pointless promts/busywork to look like they're using it?
- greatgib 1y agoThe good news is that a lot of organization will be able to realize how much their expensive subscription to Microsoft Copilot is useless and so that they can easily cut costs without affecting the productivity.