Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft’s substantial AI investment.
Petulance aside, tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool. At best, they’re a way for skilled employees to be more productive and save time on low-level tasks, but those tasks were already being handed off to lower-level employees. Having an AI do it and fail half the time isn’t exactly a winning alternative.
Other AI companies are just doing better, too. Windows Central reports that OpenAI’s ChatGPT commands over 61% of the market, and Google’s Gemini is now less than 1% behind Microsoft’s 14% with Copilot. That’s after a 12% growth over the last quarter, too, suggesting Gemini is well on its way to becoming the real second-place alternative to ChatGPT.
On one side, cool and of course, glad to see more AI bullshit failing. On the other side, this is just normal market stuff…there’s thousands of bullshit AI products out there, most of them will fail and just a couple will succeed, that’s how business works. So Microsoft failing with Copilot doesn’t mean much, they’ll just purchase someone else’s AI software that works better and continue to jam it into everything anyway.
Yeah there’s an institutional rot problem with Microsoft where the higher ups still have that 90’s-aughts mentality of “we’re Microsoft, we can brute force our way into people using our platforms.” So anything built up internally feels like a product that skipped the “be good at launch to entrench a wide user base” step and went straight to enshittification.
just look at how long they kept fucking up with Internet explorer… they’ll just keep going until finally they either buy something people use or they’ll reskin it and say it’s theirs
Microsoft clearly isn’t good at marketing AI crap either. So buying a “better” “AI” isn’t going to be smooth sailing for them.