AI will rain money and save failed businesses
The magic of AI was on full display this week (again).
The first story comes from Microsoft, which announced the introduction of AI functionality into its Office365. And with that comes a $30 price increase.
Considering that there are about 345 million paid subscribers and in 2022, the Microsoft 365 suite generated USD 63.36 billion in revenue, you can imagine the impact on both revenue and profit.
The obvious question is: What do I get for this hefty price increase?
Among the features, you will get to 'draft emails in Outlook, pen documents in Word and make virtually all an employee's data accessible via the prompt of a chatbot' and on top of that you will get 'copilot' which will summarize your Teams calls. In the words of a Microsoft executive 'this tool would pay for itself through time savings and productivity gains' and 'You don't take notes in meetings anymore, don't attend some meetings..'
If I understand this correctly, these features will allow you to write emails or documents you don't want to write in the first place. This is possible because they are repeating something which has been said in the past, so it doesn't require any original thought. These documents will become part of an agenda for a meeting which nobody will attend and where the presenter will have a monologue, which later will be distributed as a summary to the non-participants. All the data then will become available via the prompt of a chatbot.
But that's not all. There are more Ginsu knives as part of this offer.
Microsoft is also including the 'Bing Chat Enterprise, a bot in its search engine that can generate content and make sense of the Internet' - in which 'the enterprise version will not allow any viewing or saving of user data to train underlying technology.'
This is the dream, vision and delusion of software vendors to introduce an enterprise search. It always sounds great when reading marketing material, but it always falls short when implemented.
Major vendors like IBM and Google tried it in the past. It didn't work.
Among the issues are maintenance of the accuracy of the index and the Access Control List. You can't just index everything. Unlike the generic search engine where any information found by the search crawlers is available to everyone, in the corporate setup with hierarchy of who can see what and when, the search has completely different requirements. Palantir is one of the companies focused on this type of search. You can read some of their posts describing the complexities of search. But with Microsoft, you will finally make sense of the Internet.
But all that won't matter. The Microsoft marketing machine won't mention anything like that. Instead, it will portray the future with AI as a place where AI does the heavy lifting and you will be able to focus on the truly innovative work.
Not to fall behind the AI hype, the company behind Microsoft's AI wonder, OpenAI is here to provide help to support local journalism. Here AI will help local news organizations through the use of AI. A few weeks ago I wrote about the attempts by the Canadian government to fight Google and Facebook on behalf of the news industry.
Somehow, we are led to believe that more technology will save the industry without first fixing the underlying problem - the news business model. As mentioned in the post, news organizations badly managed the transition from paper to digital. Now, the premise is that AI generated content will provide more money for the journalists. Will one person be able to cover all the missing dogs mysteries, local election of unelectable people or the exciting win of a local team over the team from next town?
The narrative of super abilities of AI is not helped by a recent report that the performance of the ChatGPT system is getting worse and nobody knows why. Even OpenAI is saying nothing.
ChatGPT is a technology in very, very early stages of development. It is a product in its beta version, not ready for production. Tech companies are again selling new technology to the business with unrealistic expectations. As always, business people will fall for it. Then, both parties will blame each other for the failed projects. But this time, the painful recurrent pattern won't be repeating. This time we will get the help of the ever powerful AI...