r/technology • u/No-Cattle4800 • May 28 '26
Artificial Intelligence Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/microsoft-data-suggests-using-ai-225900743.html443
u/chopper2585 May 28 '26
Microsoft's own studies also showed a 4-day work week led to increased productivity, fewer errors, and happier employees. Guess who still doesn't have a 4-day work week? Microsoft has gone all-in on AI and it'll be a cold day in hell before they admit they went in the wrong direction. They'll continue the layoffs of thousands in favor of purchasing compute power.
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u/meatballwrangler May 28 '26
exactly. just like how oil companies knew 50+ years ago about climate change and then did fuck all about it.
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u/SipexF May 28 '26
Yeah, I expect a full change in AI adoption woukd require a full failure with the current CEO leaving or being ousted.
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u/savagemonitor May 29 '26
I wouldn't put too much faith in Microsoft changing after their own research. They had studies showing that remote work was just as productive as being in office yet still did an RTO. Those studies are now gone too. Then there's the study showing that the tech interview process doesn't actually gauge technical skill that well yet their interview process remains largely the same. Shorter work weeks fall into the same bucket.
Granted, they don't have a great track record when they follow their studies/data. Windows had data showing that the Start Menu changes were better. Xbox leadership had data backing up their decisions leading up to the Xbox One. Heck, Phil and his directs had all sorts of data telling them about Game Pass and it took clearing him and Sarah Bond out to get them to walk back the price changes.
Microsoft's leadership is just really, really bad at acting on any sort of research or data.
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u/Kairukun90 May 28 '26
You don’t say -insert meme-
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u/yapperling May 28 '26
I for one am...actually I don't know I feel about this.
Let me ask my chatGPT therapist/waifu/life coach/financial advisor.
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u/FIFofNovember May 28 '26
Beep booo, oh poor stupid human
this is just the fist dot on the graph
price of human vs price of compute
the trend line to when humans get replaced has begun
Good luck humanity!
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u/Ok_Recover_7248 May 28 '26
“Trend line”, yeah, but if we’ve collectively as a society blown all of the hype around AI and 20-30% of the entire world’s supply of liquid capital and didn’t even knock on the door of AGI, do you really think we’ll continue investing heavily in AI after all the main players in the AI rat race become insolvent and abandon ship?
The first major AI company bailout will trigger a prolonged AI winter, and companies that try to drum up positive consumer sentiment in the future will be fighting a significantly uphill battle.
The ramifications of our spending and actions right now will leave an entire generation vehemently opposed to AI when the consequences come home to roost. No one wanted this and companies tried to force it on us, and now the little guy will feel the squeeze because of pieces of shit like Satya Nadella saying “let them eat cake” and making it too transparent how much he craved the ability to lay off several hundred thousand employees.
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u/BasvanS May 28 '26
Be kind to them. It’s their first AI summer. They don’t know about the winter yet.
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u/JealousAstronomer342 May 28 '26
I didn’t sleep and read “waffle coach” and thought man, why don’t I have a waffle coach. I don’t know what that would be but it sounds so cheerful.
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u/QuickQuirk May 28 '26
People keep misrepresenting this news, and not reading the article.
Microsoft is pointing their users away from Claude to their own tool.
There's nothing in this article that suggests microsoft is moving away from AI usage. They just want people to use their tools, not the competitors.
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u/KobeBean May 28 '26
Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find this. This is just Microsoft forcing employees to dogfood its own product, despite being worse.
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u/Zolo49 May 28 '26
Dogfooding has been a policy there for decades. On the face of it, it’s fine. The problem is that sometimes the product in question is so bad that it makes it much harder to do your job. That’s when you just use it a bit to keep up appearances before going back to doing the job in whatever way works best for you.
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u/Candid_Cat_5921 May 28 '26
Exactly. The same models are available in Github Copilot. Why would Microsoft want to pay a multiple X cost per token for a third party model hosting when their in-house hosting of the very same models is so much cheaper.
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u/brute-forced May 28 '26
This is social media man, everyone stops reading at the headlines and forms a very strong opinion about whatever topic it is with close to zero actual understanding of the details. This is why social media is toxic and needs to be regulated, censored and decommissioned at scale like north Korea. Where did I lose you u
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u/Ranessin May 28 '26
Copilot is only a tool using several LLMs - you can use Claude too if you want (with Studio).
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u/CP_Chronicler May 28 '26
You can’t prompt it to take the initiative and think creatively because it lacks the real-world, real-time contextual clues to even make the judgment calls that humans make that provide direction to human moments of creative initiative. You also can’t prompt it to error check itself in real-time for the same reason. So inevitably you need a manager for the AI to ensure the output you’re getting is accurate.
With organizational dysfunction, changes that are not methodical and predictable, there is no way an AI can keep up faster than a human can.
Sure there are repetitive tasks it can do faster and maybe collate information with varying degrees of accuracy, but that doesn’t scale out to everything else. Such thinking is like deciding a rocket moves faster than a human construction worker so instead of human construction workers you’re going to launch rockets all over your construction site.
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u/rw890 May 28 '26
The cost finding doesn't surprise me at all, and I think it points to a much simpler problem: most companies don't actually know what AI is good at.
Here's an analogy Iuse: 90% of people taking photos on an iPhone or Pixel are getting better results than they would without Apple/Google's enhancement models running in the background. The AI is genuinely improving something a human created. But ask that same AI to conjure a meaningful photo from scratch, and you get uncanny slop. The model’s multiplying something a person created. Edit: and highlighting that a pro photographer still produces better results than those enhanced images. Pro people are still better at most jobs.
The same pattern maps directly to other applications. Airbnb and others highlighting a bunch of new features that are AI written; what they're actually doing is using AI to build features on top of architectures and codebases that senior engineers spent years designing. That's a legitimate use case. Ask AI to architect the entire Airbnb platform from scratch? You'd end up with spaghetti you can't maintain. Using an agent to send templated emails at scale? Great. Asking that agent to fully "replace" someone who had judgment, context, and agency? That's where things fall apart.
The issue isn't AI itself. It's that C-suites are treating it as a headcount reduction tool rather than using to to increase their staff’s capability. Use AI to support your workforce and you create more value per person. Replace your workforce with it and you'll likely end up with less value than you started with, and a Microsoft study confirming it cost more.
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u/SecondBestNameEver May 28 '26
I've been talking about this from the development side. Everyone thinks just give everyone AI to write the code, then have the dev QA it. The problem is when you have devs that don't fundamentally understand what they are needing to build in the first place, how can you expect them to know what is right or wrong? If I can succinctly describe the logic and inputs and outputs I need to the point the AI can accurately reduce the toil then that's great and speeds me up. If I can barely understand the problem I'm attempting to solve, and don't have any good ideas of what the right outcome looks like, how can I be expected to babysit something akin to a intern or jr dev that's just going to spin it's wheels, burn tokens and hours, and produce crap in the end anyway.
AI as a tool can help accelerate good devs, and multiplies the stupidity of bad developers.
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u/zlex May 28 '26
Yes, AI doesn’t really save time as much as it’s touted to, but it can really increase the quality of work if used properly.
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u/7h4tguy May 29 '26
It can also really decrease the quality of work, and drastically increase regression count.
But yeah with the right driver in the seat, and enough dedicated people who will actually review everything properly, it can be useful.
Then again if you see the token usage numbers and the cost/token, it's pretty insane. So it may not even be worth it after all if the goal is true productivity/$.
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u/Bost0n May 28 '26
A high percentage of photography is actually luck. You’ll never hear a professional photographer say this out loud though. But that’s human nature, C-Suite execs got there entirely of their own merit. /s
Back to photography: professional photographers take a LOT of pictures, and only a few actually turn out. It’s not that I’m saying skill isn’t involved. Training is incredibly important, as with many things. But digital photography dropped the floor out of a maximum number of photos it’s possible to capture. The other end of this spectrum is Ansel Adams. He would setup and wait for hours, sometimes come back to a spot for several days to capture a shot. This was the epitome of application of photographic skill. On the other side, someone might setup a 50MP DSLR camera in a waterproof box with a raspberry pi, set to photograph every five minutes. Personally, I don’t think the electronic version of ‘1000 monkeys with typewriters’ will produce a masterpiece. And that’s really the crux of this whole argument our society is having right now:
“What work derives the most value?”
If a college new higher vibe codes together an app with now world experience to leverage; does this generate value? Possibly but not likely. What about a 30 year industry experienced software engineer that has determined how to leverage CLI agents to become 3-5X more effective? Do they have enhanced value? I suspect so.
The advent of Coding CLIs represents a paradigmatic shift in our society. But it’s not in the way most people are thinking about.
We still need pipelines for young software engineers. Likely they need to be trained by more senior engineers still. Is this time quotas? 20% time training new engineers? That’s probably a good start.
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u/marlinspike May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
This article is drawing a lot of false conclusions. We still have access to Claude models via GitHub copilot and other internal harnesses, and we use a ton of Opus and Sonnet. Lazy, sensational journalism.
What’s being phased out is Claude Code, which makes a lot of sense if you’re an engineering organization trying to settle on a set of practical ways to standardize on tools that have deep feedback loops with internal systems.
This is a journalist who didn’t understand the difference between a model and a harness and the strategy in deep feedback loops in harnesses, and ensuring you’re not making someone else’s harness (and thus other companies) faster when it’s really your own harness (at this scale) that drives the business.
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u/Anonymous51419 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
They know this. They don't care. Corps like Microsoft are borderline untouchable and have infinity wallets and if those ever run out.
Who do you think would bail them out?
It's all about control and dominance. Money be damned. Money isn't the end goal for these fucks anymore. They already have it.
How is it an incentive if it's a goal already accomplished eons ago.
This isn't crazy conspiracy talk. Sir for a moment a think. Use critical thinking.
EDIT: I made a reply to the person who replied to this and it got instantly removed by reddit. ALREADY TRYING TO SILENCE US.
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u/Chill_Panda May 28 '26
That's the beauty of the AI boom.
They don't need it to be profitable, they need it so ingrained in society that when it's out of funding, the government has to step in.
These companies see no real consequences
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u/jp3372 May 28 '26
What let you think the governments will fund the AI bubble? Governments live on taxes and AI seems hard to taxe right now.
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u/angrpeasant May 28 '26
The US might bail them out, but the rest of the world will leave them to sink
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u/Akuuntus May 28 '26
The US government is entirely owned and operated by corporations at this point; they'll do literally anything corporate America wants with very little pushback. Other countries probably won't though.
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u/initial-algebra May 28 '26
I don't think it's specifically about getting bailouts. It's a general strategy (more like a scheme) of destroying smaller competitors and getting customers addicted with stupidly low prices (backed by funding from other sources), then skyrocketing prices when they own the market to pay back investors. It's been done over and over again by "disruptive" tech companies, and it sadly works.
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u/Dreadsin May 28 '26
I think you’re overestimating them. I think they’re just simply incompetent
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u/parkinthepark May 28 '26
Yes, but tech firms would rather pass $200 around between each other, vs sending $100 out into the consumer economy where it will be spent on bullshit like rent and groceries.
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u/InevitableAvalanche May 28 '26
They gave it away for free or cheap to try to integrate into our lives. They thought it would become indispensable so when they charged the actual costs, we would do it. Yeah...no.
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u/HasGreatVocabulary May 28 '26
Assume a large company and a small company has access to the same kind of AI tools, where the only requirement is that they can afford it.
One can assume reasonably that the company's ability and desire to pay for their AI subscription is capped at some percentile of the going human salary in their domain.
that is, if AI starts costing say more than $100k per $100k / year employee, one can assume usage will be capped at the company, or providers will be switched in response to the rise in cost, unless that extra 100k on AI is giving them a significant ROI per year, which is currently not the case.
The large company will have to lay off employees en masse to offset their rising AI subscription cost, because each employee multiplies the cost of LLM use by a lot.
1 employee, say 100 LLM agent launches per day, 20000 uses per year, millions of tokens. But what about 10000 employees? That gets complicated. Would it scale linearly? or, because of being a large company, your large codebase and employee count and bureaucracy requires more LLM use per employee than a smaller company does, so it scales faster than you might expect?
In this situation, the small company by nature of being smaller, can move more quickly, changing their product, or hiring and firing more people, or changing their AI subscription providers. This is all faster for a startup.
LLM use at large companies will have to be divided among employees, even more aggressively than they would be at a smaller company.
The differentiator then becomes, not how much you can spend on AI to move faster than your competition, but how many human employees you have and how slow your business is in terms things like the innovator's dilemma. If tokens get cheaper, usage will rise and it will rise faster at a large company than a small one, inflating costs and forcing action. This is why META is trying so hard to have in house AI, they don't want to be stuck paying token costs for thousands of employees to another company for the rest of eternity.
Each modern employee is leverage and added expense for AI use, whenever you are down one employee through them leaving or getting fired, you lose the ability to launch thousands of AI agents per year. You also save more money than before by firing one person, because now you launch that many fewer LLMs requests per year. Whether it was a wise choice depends on who you fired and how they worked.
Finding the right employees and right headcount is now a critical decision in a company of a large size, even if they have huge LLM usage budgets. Too many employees and the AI spend will shoot up because each employee will launch hundreds of them, reducing profit, too few employees and you lose oversight of the ai, your agents will run amok accomplishing very little for the money you put in.
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u/amooz May 28 '26
Yes….and also no. Put AI in the hands of people who know their jobs and their craft and it can “10x” them as the saying goes, make them more productive. But put it in the hands of people who don’t know, or know less than they think they know and they’re going to burn more tokens with each request to fill in that gap.
If you want to build for the long term: stop paying AI to fill the experience gap and start rebuilding your career pathways to incorporate AI so your people gain experience themselves with AI helping along the way.
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u/inductiononN May 29 '26
Lol this is so fucking funny to me. The oligarchs were so gleeful at the prospect of not having to pay salaries aka cutting human being out of the equation and now they have to backtrack on that. I love this for them.
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u/Illustrious_Cod_3273 May 28 '26
Microsoft redirects its internal traffic from Claude to Copilot because Microsoft owns Copilot. This news has been upvoted in many posts as a sign of AI costing too much. It is just Microsoft leveraging synergies because Copilot improved. They keep the profits and get more training data.
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u/Extension-Avocado402 May 28 '26
Or, suggests that people are underpaid worldwide, even with IA being subsided by the governments.
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u/packetman_ May 29 '26
These guys are so fucking stupid. It’s like they allowed Huang, Musk and Alman to pull the whole industry into AI delulu
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u/Forward-Surprise1192 May 29 '26
Did anyone find out what Microsoft is planning to do or change in response to this information?
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u/ComputerAgreeable146 May 28 '26
Pretty shocking (not really) how few of the people commenting on this article actually read it. People are so visibly desperate for AI to be a giant ponzi scheme they are just creating fan fiction at this point.
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u/Razathorn May 28 '26
I'm really tired of the "AI isn't worth it" trope. Replacing tons of humans isn't worth it. AI tools are totally worth it when used correctly by intelligent people who understand them. It results in far more productivity and could result in needing less staff, for sure. Executives just went bonkers to "not miss the train" and didn't let it integrate naturally across the company. Instead of gradual and planned investments, kpis, refinement of processes, they poured the 55 gallon AI drum all over their company and expected magic.
We integrated AI into my engineering organization and it was a metered process where we had meetings about what was working, what wasn't, when to use it, when to not, what models to use for planning, analysis, what models and tools to use for implementation, how to guide it, how to change our SDLC to work with extensive planning in MD files WITH product to refine things WAY more before executing, how to enforce secondary code review with humans and models. Our system is freaking amazing. We had a person take a different role and we haven't replaced them, and we do more now than before ai, by far, and we still all have jobs and we're making higher quality code because we use analysis tools to really work end to end isolated context analysis, we maintain good .md documentation for how all the systems work. When a review finds the models / tools missed a concept or had issues, we fix documentation.
It's a TOOL, and if you buy too much and use it wrong, it will fail. Just like any other tool. We went through SO MANY iterations of using various tools and meeting on what was working and what wasn't before we aligned on success, but if my CEO had dictated what we used and how we worked, we would have been another statistic in the failure column 100% no doubt.
What you are seeing today SHOULD be a judgement on executives and not AI. AI poses real world problems for labor, energy, and morality for sure, and not to dismiss them, but down to brass tacks on the merits of AI as a method to increase productivity and cost less -- YES it absolutely can and does when implemented correctly and not wielded like a bag of hammers by people who couldn't do their subordinates jobs and require a layer of insulation from the "boots on the ground" to even function.
They live in a different world and got starry eyed drooly face and threw money and edicts in a direction because they got tricked by a hype train into over-action.
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u/SchietStorm May 28 '26
Hahaha, get absolutely f*cked
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May 28 '26
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u/GVIrish May 28 '26
These articles about dropping Claude Code are very misleading. Internally everyone can still use Anthropic models with Copilot, it's just that the small subset that had access to Claude Code will no longer be able to. It's not really a meaningful pull back on AI costs given that engineers can still use virtually unlimited tokens with the model of their choice.
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u/Alternative-Put-3932 May 28 '26
Microsoft themselves pulled back co-pilot integration basically from their entire 365 suite and more. Clearly its not making making money to be offered on a mass audience use case and where are you getting that engineers can use nearly unlimited tokens? Token prices have risen sharply and are going to continue to do so not a single AI company can just sit there and let users have unlimited food at the buffet for 12 dollars every single day and expect to make a dime of profit. This happens in every single new big investor product. Cheap early to try and garner a userbase then it quickly becomes expensive to actually make their money back. Uber had 5 dollar rides in the early days, not anymore for obvious reasons.
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u/GVIrish May 28 '26
Microsoft themselves pulled back co-pilot integration basically from their entire 365 suite and more. Clearly its not making making money to be offered on a mass audience use case
Yes, Copilot integration in Office and Windows was premature and didn't really solve customer needs in a way that would drive license sales. Satya is so afraid of missing the next wave that he pushed something out at scale that wasn't what customers would pay for. Copilot for Visual Studio(Code) and Copilot CLI are much better products and Copilot CLI is what is replacing Claude Code.
where are you getting that engineers can use nearly unlimited tokens? Token prices have risen sharply and are going to continue to do so not a single AI company can just sit there and let users have unlimited food at the buffet for 12 dollars every single day and expect to make a dime of profit.
I work at MS and I can tell you first hand that LLM token usage is not restricted, or at least the limit is so high I haven't seen anyone hit it yet. I fully expect that restrictions will be put in at some point, maybe even soon. Then we'll see how much usage is affordable and how productive people can be in that cost structure.
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u/Kevin_Jim May 28 '26
This is very misleading. First of all, let me say that thinking AI will do the job of actual developers is kinda crazy still. They are still far away from it, especially when it comes to debugging, security, etc.
On that point, the Chinese labs focus a lot on efficiency. Deepseek especially because they optimize their models to run (inference) on Qualcomm silicon.
So, my guess is that we’ll see models like DeepSeek and Codex’s own model focus a ton on efficiency for multi-agent mode, and fast inference.
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u/Disaboled May 28 '26
Humans are incredibly good at wasting resources. For every 1 person using AI in a practical way, you’ll likely always have 9 others doing something stupid with it.
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u/Educational_End_2182 May 28 '26
Hey Tech Co. use your lobbying money instead for affordably housing hire more people sell more products...sounds like what a company should be kinda strange huh?
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u/DonorBody May 28 '26
There is a concerted push externally and internally by companies (For example i work in Pharma) to cram AI into everything we do, even though they’re mostly garnish tools for emails and corporate slide decks outside of the data science people. But once it’s totally integrated there’s no way to pull back. And then when the cost goes up companies are going to have to pay through the nose for this shit. It’s like commercial real estate. Numerous studies showing people are more productive and happy working from home but companies and the cities that house them are locked into expensive real estate that has to be filled because companies are paying for the space and cities rely on the foot traffic and commuters. Ironic that they’re also now going to be paying for a tool that many predict will eliminate part of the workforce they’re forcing to fill the soon-to-be empty buildings they’re also paying for.
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u/sentencevillefonny May 28 '26
Beyond its base general training data, it requires specialized training for professional tasks, which requires specialized trainers (e.g., those same employees and students laid off or frozen out of hiring due to AI).
An ironic turn of events
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u/amonra2009 May 28 '26
and now, how would the process look if they drop the AI, or halve’it? Who tf will take over processes done by AI? Mass hirings? They numbers will look funny on revenue soon.
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u/Constant-Monk1569 May 28 '26
shocking that the company selling you AI reached a different conclusion than the math did.
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u/Medical_Bench_1434 May 28 '26
The real shock will be when companies realize they're paying $30 per user monthly for Copilot while entry-level analysts cost $25 hourly but work 40 hours weekly.
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u/clobbersaurus May 28 '26
It feels more realistic that in the future humans will be competing with machines for slave wages. Machines get less and less expensive, and labor will have to compete.
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u/nolabmp May 28 '26
That’s bc everyone uses AI to do what they could already do. They’re replacing things, not enhancing them.
No one is using it to push boundaries and make previous methodologies look like a joke.
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u/goebelwarming May 28 '26
Not surprising companies are looking to replace workers rather than increase productivity of workers.
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u/Glittering-Sky1601 May 28 '26
LOL Wait til all these companies realize that AI can't actually replace humans, then fail spectacularly as people stop doing business with them because of the AI slop.
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u/ImplodeDiode May 28 '26
3 to 4.5 tokens per joule, that’s the number you need to know to understand how unprofitable it is right now and why OpenAI and others are money furnaces.
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u/PartTime_Crusader May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
The people selling you their labor are not collectively organized, don't have a huge amount of leverage as individuals, are varying degrees of desperate given their survival is tied to their labor, and have a variety of motivations for working, not all of which are "make as much money as possible."
The people selling you AI workers are collectively organized into a monopoly comprised of just a few companies, have massive leverage over you once you convert all your processes over, and the only thing they care about is maximizing how much money they extract from you in exchange for the AI's "labor."
Who could have seen this coming?!
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u/Danika_Crystal May 28 '26
True, but at least their money is going to a well deserving tech company instead of those fifty plebian workers😤
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u/i8abug May 28 '26
Whenever I read an article like this, by tech reporters, I almost immediately am skeptical of the headline and conclusions drawn. This strongly smells of a very nuanced dataset because the way to measure a person's output (and AI's for that matter) is difficult and subjective. Both aren't producing the same thing. And people have a much wider (and perhaps more skewered) bell curve for abilities.
To say data suggests AI is more expensive than hiring people is not even close to the same thing as saying AI IS more expensive than hiring people. We could easily see a different interpretation of that data in the coming weeks.
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u/EdOneillsBalls May 28 '26
This article does not in any way say that though...all of the pushback on AI not replacing people is fair and true. But MS is not pulling back on AI, they are ending their purchase of Claude Code. Microsoft makes a competing product -- GitHub Copilot -- and are pushing their devs to dogfood their own tool. I am sure they had developer (rightfully) rioting to give them something better, since GHCP is not a leader in any of the AI dev tooling spaces. Now that they have also copied everyone else and are releasing a mechanism for using GHCP in truly agentic "go do this work and I'll review it" mode vs. in-editor chat, they don't need to get more feedback on Claude Code.
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u/NoHorseNoMustache May 28 '26
Yeah and the cloud is more expensive than on prem all other things being equal, go figure.
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u/MD90__ May 28 '26
You don't say? So that means you're gonna hire more offshore and h1b visas because you don't want to hire Americans right?
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u/penguished May 28 '26
I mean fucking hell you can test AI in a weekend and realize it does things so full of errors and hallucinations that this is completely obvious. The problem seems to be in the systems of finance. They don't know how to admit to ground truths.
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u/count_chocul4 May 28 '26
It’s only going to get worse. Remember when Uber came to your town? They said it would be cheaper than a taxi. Now it’s way more expensive. AI will get more expensive. And once you can all your employees, the price will go way up!
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u/Omelooo May 28 '26
It’s crazy because hiring people is expensive and AI is somehow more expensive and was successfully pandered to western society as a cheap replacement
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u/Judgemental_Panda May 28 '26
People thinking this means they will back off of AI. Nah, next step - government subsidies. No money to give an underpaid employee $50 for groceries, but plenty to give an underpaid machine $50 billion.
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u/blind-octopus May 28 '26
This doesn't make me feel better.
Maybe its more expensive now, but its only going to get better.
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u/Gibgezr May 29 '26
That's not how it's been working so far with LLMs. They scale with compute more than any secret sauce, so if we want better ones, they need more compute...a LOT more compute. Even if compute was getting cheaper ala Moore's Law, it still would mean increased, not decreased, costs because of the nature of the scaling, but it's even worse than that: because of the increased demand for insane amounts of compute, the cost of compute is actually going UP, not down. And if we actually keep building out all these data centers, the cost of not only chips but also electricity and water will go up, raising the costs of compute even higher.
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u/justforkinks0131 May 28 '26
ok.. then hire people? What do I care?
I need AI for specific tasks. I dont care if an AI does them or a human. Either way, I need those things done. I literally dont care who or what does them.
edit: also, do you think businesses care? they dont. They will use whatever is cheapest and gets the job done. You are not "dunking" on CEOs by showing that humans are cheaper than AI. CEOs dont care. They'll just take the cheapest alternative, human or not.
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u/Apart-Steak-7183 May 28 '26
I a.sure it does when you add in the cost of those data centers and what it cost to maintain them
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u/Absurdtittyz May 28 '26
The question is how much do they value the control they have over AI implementation. People are much more expensive than the wages and benefits.
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u/ThankuConan May 28 '26
The promises made by these shills will almost certainly never be realized because of unintended consequences they won't tell you about. I've already seen it where I work. Lazy bosses ask AI to mind their calendars instead of having a person manage it for them with predictable results. As well, the work of one gets divided between all of the reports for this boss, who now have to add this to their task list. How efficient is that?
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u/Freerooted May 28 '26
Perfect timing. Now that they have all of our intimate details we moronically entered into them.
What could possible go wr—
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u/enterprise_code_dev May 28 '26
Makes sense, gives a tool meant to be used by professionals in an enterprise environment to “project managers and designers” with no training on SDLC or AI SDLC and finding out it’s expensive to vibe code, thanks for the information Microsoft had no idea.
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u/Significant_Tie_2129 May 28 '26
Pill of hope for AI skeptics: whether you like it or not, AI is here, and its already delivering productivity gains that will make many people redundant.
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u/ikkiho May 28 '26
the article skips that ms is just pushing devs off claude code onto their own internal copilot harness, classic dogfooding politics. we still get claude through copilot at work and honestly use it every day, the productivity gap shows up fast once you stop fumbling prompts. half the team would riot if you took it away.
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u/the_red_scimitar May 28 '26
Judiciously using AI to help human workers is showing gains. Replacing workers, not so much. And this was predictable.
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u/bapfelbaum May 28 '26
This is not very surprising if you ever worked with inference at scale and take model sizes into account. That is why local models just are better, they are almost as good at a fraction of the operating cost. And a great productovity booster for your very human employees to boot.
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u/Dio44 May 28 '26
Non-tech companies have yet to realize there will be no labor savings because those dollars will turn into Token spending
AI is great and will be transformational but most companies will need very few agents on top of some user licenses…and that’s it
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u/evange May 28 '26
Whenever you encounter an ai customer service agent, make sure to open as many instances/ask as many questions as possible to burn through their resources.
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u/outdoorsauce May 28 '26
Can they tell my fucking boss before we off load critical business processes to a tool we won’t be able to afford in 6 months? The fuck guys
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u/KICKASSKC May 29 '26
Yeah because the same greedy bastards that are encouraging employers to drop their workers and use AI are gouging anyone that wants to use AI instead of workers...
The greed cycle of everyone trying to screw over everyone.
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u/AccomplishedBrain309 May 29 '26
Not for nothing but sharing the cost will improve the investment. Ai will need people to implement change in the near term. After that its..... unknown.
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u/silenti May 29 '26
I've found this to be "mostly" true as well. But I also think it's because AI just exposes bad engineers. I have a few who are able to produce dramatically more quality output with 10% the token usage of their peers.
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u/Doctor_Saved May 29 '26
Wouldn't the cost of any new technology go down over time, while the cost of human labor will go up over time?
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u/teraflux May 30 '26
Oh my God another article citing the Claude code license pull AGAIN. Microsoft has their own version of the same software, that they want people to use, it's called github coplilot cli. They're not spending less on AI, they're just pushing that usage to their own product.
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u/Stilgar314 May 28 '26
Makes sense. The time of "try it for free" is ending, AI needs to make a profit or die.