Its to use the employees to train AI to replace them and they know it.
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Nah its just part of the MLM scheme that is "AI". Its useful because they said it would be useful. Its worth the investment because it cost a lot of money. Once you realize that all these companies care about is revenue and "growth" then it all clicks. It doesnt have to work or be profitable, it just needs to look good to investers.
They will even go as far as firing loads of workers and saying publicly that they "replaced them with AI" while in reality those workers were just doing something that the company was willing to sacrifice. They just replaced something with nothing to make it look like their magic AI can actually do things.
Cory Doctorow put it better than i ever could: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/
The whole post is good but i will just quote this section.
The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."
Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy.
Ai definitely can't replace many (if any) microsoft employees.
I think shouldn't is better to say than can't. They are definitely going to try.
suits have been replacing long term essential employees with outsourced trash even before in name of global redundancy and efficiency. now they will just the ai buzz word to hide behind.
Their hope is probably that AI can let current employees bear a greater workload so they can downsize.
Ding! Any gains in productivity will mean more work for less people.
Anyone who can’t see this coming - I have several bridges for sale.
Yeah and what it should mean is the same productivity (or slightly higher) over fewer hours worked. So everyone can get more of their lives back to go be happy and spend time with their friends and families. Or literally whatever else people would rather being doing besides working all the damn time.
Microsoft support was already mostly useless. So, yeah, a useless AI probably could replace that, but it would also probably be more expensive.
Not even the guys who call me on the phone to tell me that I have a virus on my computer?
Being judged by a fancy magic 8 ball, the future keeps getting better and better.
I feel like this is going to cause so many problems in the near future. They’re not ready for it and they don’t even know.
Malicious compliance and use it solely for internal emails.
can i send an AI bot to all my Teams meetings? THAT would actually increase my productivity.
Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.
Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they're treating as headcount.
The only hope for Microsoft is if Xbox takes over all of Microsoft and transforms the whole company
At my company too but it's owned by yet another cancerous private equity firm so it was expected.
The AI said that trying to reason with you is a waste of precious tokens.
Good luck with that Microsoft
Yes but can it tell the business why it can't deliver on time with they change the requirements 3 different times?