Microsoft Touts $500 Million in AI Savings While Slashing Jobs (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0178320396
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/09/1831232/microsoft-touts-500-million-in-ai-savings-while-slashing-jobs
- Source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-touts-500-million-ai-171149783.html
> During a presentation this week, Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff said artificial intelligence tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
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> Althoff said AI saved Microsoft [2]more than $500 million last year in its call centers alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of dollars, he said.
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/02/1330223/microsoft-to-lay-off-as-many-as-9000-employees-in-latest-round
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-touts-500-million-ai-171149783.html
Victory! (Score:2)
At least the investors will be impressed!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Such a fucked up system that employment is now a pawn used by marketing to pretend AI is 'ready'.
AI Everything (Score:1)
Saw this one coming!
After trying over and over to sell that AI was going to make companies earn billions at the press of a button we move to "claiming" substantial savings from "AI-productivity" with no validated proof or scientific study.
Something tells me the savings are the realisation of the constant layoffs in the fiscal reports masked as productivity for the investors and shareholders.
Can't wait for the next "AI-announcement", neither the narrative of layoffs doesn't cut it anymore nor the produc
Keep in mind this is real (Score:3)
Microsoft is a publicly traded company and they couldn't tout numbers of this size without them being real. I mean they could but the SEC would probably have issues with that and although they will let Elon Musk off the hook for basically anything that reality distortion field doesn't apply to much of anyone else.
That half billion a year of savings is almost certainly because of layoffs.
Now a lot of it is call centers and I don't think Microsoft has any call centers left in America. But we live in a global economy whether we want to or not. And that's going to put increased pressure on us one way or another.
One thing is certain no one reading this is going to see a dime of those savings. Your 401k will continue to barely grow and periodic economic collapses will make sure that any attempt to seriously invest for profit fails miserably.
The new American dream is to die peacefully before the investor class comes for you and your property. Not exactly what I expected when I was a kid but here we are.
Yeah Nah (Score:3)
Give me humans, you can reason with most humans.
Evil is as Microsoft does (Score:2)
Your joke here.
But it doesn't matter. Check your EULA and MS ain't liable.
Just finished another book on cyber-crime and totally unable to conceive of trusting valuable data to any machine running any flavor of Windows.
I have data accessible via Windows machines. Therefore my data must have zero value! Problem solved.
"increased satisfaction" Bulls*COUGH*hit (Score:2)
I do not believe this even a little. In my experience call center workers do not like AI and customers hate it so much that they are now asking support workers to prove they are human, like some real-time voice captcha puzzle, because they refuse to deal with it.
See also: [1]https://www.techspot.com/news/... [techspot.com]
[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/108547-call-center-workers-their-ai-assistants-create-more.html
As they ask for more H1-B's! (Score:2)
Their [1]request for more H1-B's [newsweek.com] should be FLAT OUT DENIED! And they should be stripped of as many H1-B visas they have for each person they layed off.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-h1b-visa-applications-2094370
from my experience with customer support chatbots (Score:3, Insightful)
Replacing nearly useless, $/hr with completely useless, 0/hr is just cutting service and pocketing the savings.
There is no value provided on the "AI" side of the equation.
Was that a brain fart from an AI chatbot? (Score:1)
'Nuff said. Actually too much said.
Re: (Score:2)
They're not replacing it with $0/hour AI, that shit is expensive. I doubt they're saving nearly as much in salary as they're claiming, and I'd be willing to bet they're getting far less value for that money than they were with actual humans. This is almost certainly an executive making some pretty wild claims so they can get a bonus and move on to another company before the investors figure it out.