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.
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