This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I am doing to something I don't want or didn't intend.

It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.

It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this.

So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?

I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made selling the fantasy is simply too good to ignore.

In other words --- pure greed. Over the longer term, this is a weakness, not a strength.

Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App (https://m365.cloud.microsoft/).

Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me? Like, Copilot could watch my daily habits and offer automation for recurring things.

> Microsoft denies report of lowering targets for AI software sales growth

This Ars Technica article cites the same reporting as that Reuters piece but doesn't (yet) include anything about MSFT's rebuttal.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46135388

"AI everywhere" is worse than "AI nowhere". What we need is "AI somewhere".

No wonder there is this exhaustion.

Meanwhile, they believed the market was already theirs—so their logic became: fire the engineers, buy more GPUs.

I have mixed feelings about this. I've interviewed several people who were affected by these layoffs, and honestly, many of them were mediocre engineers by most measures. But that still doesn't make this a path to success.

> At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual.

"Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".

There’s definitely something there with AI but a giant chasm between reality and the sales expectations on what’s needed to make the current financial engineering on AI make any sense.

Well.. that's certainly one way to view it. The other is:

"because the company set unrealistic expectations."

I'm sure this will slow down the growth of "AI datacenters." I'm sure of this.

Is it just for chatting? Is it a glorified RAG?

Can you tell copilot co to create a presentation? Make a visualisation in a spreadsheet?

And MS spends on buying AI hardware. That's a full circle.

Can't Microsoft supercharge its workflow with these five weird prompts that bring a new layer of intelligence to its productivity:

https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/billionaire-microsoft-ceo-sat...

Apple's having a similar issue, unlimited wealth that's outsourcing to external SOTA model providers.

My point is, outside of co-pilot, very few consider Microsoft when they are looking for AI solutions, and if you're not already using Azure, why would you even bother check what they offer. At this point, their biggest ticket is their OpenAI stake.

With that being said, I should give them some credit. They do some interesting research and have some useful open source libraries they release and maintain in the AI space. But that's very different than building AI products and solutions for customers.

Separately, the theme from talking to Every. Single. Person on the buy-side was gigantic eye roll yes I cant wait for AI to solve all my problems.

Companies I support are being directed from their presidents to use ai, literally a solution in search of a problem.

Not only that but the headline and story changed by the time Ars went to print:

Microsoft denies report of lowering targets for AI software sales growth

But the one thing they're really good at is marketing.

That's why it's all over linkedin etc, marketing people see how great it is and think it must be great at everything else too.

Microsoft had a great start with the exclusive rights over OpenAI tech but they're not capable of really talking with developers within those large companies in the same sense Google and AWS are rapidly catching-up.

25% up :-D

Would be good if a sales person chime could in to keep me honest, but:

1. There is a difference between sales quotas and sales growth targets. The former is a goal, latter is aspirational, a "stretch goal". They were not hitting their stretch goals.

2. The stretch goals were, like, doubling the sales in a year. And they dropped it to 25% or 50% growth. No idea what the adoption of such a product should be, but doubling sounds pretty ambitious? I really can't say, and neither did TFA.

3. Only a fraction met their growth goals, but I guess it's safe to assume most hit their sales quotas, otherwise that's what the story would be about. Also, this implies some DID hit their growth goals, which implies at least some doubled their sales in a year. Could be they started small so doubling was easy, or could be a big deal, we don't know.

4. Sales quotas get revised all the time, especially for new products. Apparently, this was for a single product, Foundry, which was launched a year ago, so I expect some trial and error to figure out the real demand.

5. From the reporting it seems Foundry is having problems connecting to internal data sources... indicating it's a problem with engineering, and not a problem with the AI itself. But TFA focuses on AI issues like hallucinations.

6. No reporting on the dozens of other AI products that MSFT has churned out.

As an aside, it seems data connectivity issues are a stickier problem than most realize (e.g. organizational issues) and I believe Palantir created the FDE role for just this purpose: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir

Maybe without that strategy it would be hard for a product like this to work.

It has all the same components, just on much higher scale:

1. Billionaire con-man convincing large part of market and industry (Altman in AI vs Musk in EV) that new tech will take over in few years.

2. Insane valuations not supported by an actual ROI.

3. Very interesting and amazing underlying technology.

4. Governments jumping on the hype and enabling it.