6 ms·

Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"

Havoc 2y ago
I’d imagine the larger companies get discounts?
- natas 2y ago
  they usually give it for free, so they can report to markets that there's a strong adoption, then a year or so down the road, they start charging a little bit.
  - hhh 2y ago
    I don't believe this is the case with Copilot.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Whattttttt? Impossible. Surely the AI must have been adding value. A big company wouldn't just look to shove AI into something because it's trendy and fool themselves into thinking that customers would pay them for it, would they? Also, why are we linking to some forum and not the articles?
- tempodox 2y ago
  Given what people are fantasizing what “AI” can do, it's not surprising MS thought their users must be ecstatic about this. Besides, MS always knows better what their users want than the users themselves.
- snapetom 2y ago
  My boss, the VP of Product, went on a spree about GenAI these past few months. We've been working on regular prediction and optimization things, but when ChatGPT went nuts, everything was GenAI. He was reading generative AI into RFPs and proposals that didn't even mention generative AI. I tried talking to him that it's still garbage in and garbage out. If the solution was never there to train on, LLMs aren't going to make them out of thin air. There's also the "language" part of LLMs, that he didn't get. We get pulled into a workshop with Amazon, who also wouldn't give us free resources unless it had a GenAI angle. After all this effort, you know what we made? A fucking chat bot. A fucking chat bot, that's also near useless, because our customers are highly driven and only interested in mathematical predictions. Turns out, you have to actually solve the hard math problems first with many examples, before GenAI can even take a terrible attempt at it.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
adventured 2y ago
First the inital, irrational exuberance. Along with out of control spending on anything AI. Then the lack of financial return on investment from the initial exploratory (try everything) stages. Leading to a sizable pullback in spending across the entire ecosystem. Then the doom & gloom (talking heads on TV; smarter-than-thou industry pundits); death of garbage start-ups (the great thinning); painful layoffs; stocks decline. And last, given some time - very substantial, tangible value (productivity gains, new products) is realized across decades. Rinse & repeat.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Still waiting for that substantial, tangible value realised by the users who went all in on Clippy.
- taylodl 2y ago
  You just described the Gartner Hype Cycle - https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy... My favorite is the Trough of Disillusionment!
monero-xmr 2y ago
They gave my brother in law’s company a discount on the yearly renewal if they enabled GitHub copilot for all 5000 devs or so in the organization. Our theory was they thought all the devs would become addicted to copilot then demand the company pays for it the following renewal. Paying for copilot did not happen.
rvz 2y ago
That is another way of saying: "I got scammed by Microsoft."
1970-01-01 2y ago
Office features haven't increased in value since Office 2000. It's been 99% bugfixes, 1% feature evolution since then.
- rvnx 2y ago
  The ribbon actually was a good idea (~2003 I think)
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    2007. 2003 was the last without that abomination.
  - ronsor 2y ago
    I feel like the ribbon is one of Microsoft's most universally reviled design choices, next to Metro UI.
    - tomrod 2y ago
      As an office 2003 power user (God, has it been so long!) the 2007 office ribbon was awful.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  Yet what it does is really good. Goal seek in excel is fantastic (in the ~2003 version I have). Being able to install 20 year old software on a new computer and have it work is pretty nice. Of course, some people may think subscription fees and cloud storage are features, but to me they are bugs...
- blibble 2y ago
  30% devolution they even broke the Save dialog in an attempt to push their onedrive garbage what used to take 1 click now takes 3-4
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    I still haven’t figured out how to export a copy of an excel sheet to csv without that csv becoming the document I have open afterward, and having to close it and reopen the xlsx file. (note: desktop Excel 2016) There's an "Export" section in the awkward full-window UI that they replaced the File menu with, but instead of exporting it's just another way around to add extra clicks (File -> Export -> Change File Type -> CSV -> Save As) and get to the same "Save As" dialog that makes the CSV file take over your window as the active file after you "export" it. You can also get to that via Save As -> Browse and pick CSV in the "save as type" dropdown, which behaves how you expect Save As to work (where that copy should stay active in the window afterward, as opposed to Export where it shouldn't). But this spot is also stupid because now have to go File -> Save As -> Browse because somebody at Microsoft wanted to insert an extra page where they could default your location to OneDrive and make you click Browse to get a normal file browser. I saw an article yesterday about how Microsoft is moving toward "user-centric design" and removing ads from Skype, but how about doing that in the products anybody gives a shit about?
serjester 2y ago
This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI. Their bing chat is a bloated mess and while I haven't personally tried AI Office 365, I suspect it follows the same theme. Anecdotally, I've heard demand for OpenAI's enterprise tier is ridiculous from someone working within their GMT function. I guess you can say Microsoft did a great job of hedging their bets.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI. This says pretty clearly that what Microsoft is peddling isn't even remotely an AI. They used AI purely as marketing term and ignored the obvious market consequences that would arise from that.
hhh 2y ago
They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot. I have been using Copilot for over half a year or something, and I haven't found it to be useful in Word, and it is rarely useful in Outlook. I don't use Excel a lot, so I get a lot of value out of the formulae generation stuff when I have to use Excel. There are several meetings that I need information from, but don't need to attend. Culture has been to take the summary from a meeting and dump it into the chat after, and if it misses anything add it below it. Really nice for action items and things like that.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  Idk. I've read through those summaries after meetings and they can often be misleading of miss important context. I still think you need to have a human to read through the meeting summaries to confirm they are accurate.
  - beaugunderson 2y ago
    the zoom ones are so bad. straight up fabrication. not worth the 5 seconds it takes to dump them into the readout of the meeting.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot. Are those actually... good? I've only seen the Zoom ones, but those are _comically, unusably bad_.
PreInternet01 2y ago
> After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade This, combined with the otherwise non-specificity of the article gives me pause. Is AI bunk? Sure! Even the latest-and-greatest models can't explain how to programmatically create a DNS record in Azure using the latest C# SDK, how to create a searchable/sortable React data-table with a remote data source, or how to achieve world peace (just to cite 2/3 topics everyone utterly failed at the last month when I tried). Is this article bunk? Yeah, most likely -- no exec in any pharma company in their right mind would admit failure after only six mere months, and without any lawsuits...
d_watt 2y ago
I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck." Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on? But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's pretty damning it's so bad 2 years later.
- voxic11 2y ago
  Wasn't that a specifically advertised copilot feature? Does copilot not actually support it? They are still claiming to support this it seems https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-new-presentation-with-copilot-in-powerpoint-3222ee03-f5a4-4d27-8642-9c387ab4854d https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-new-pres...
  - d_watt 2y ago
    When I tried it with a copilot trial at one business, it basically just dumped huge text blobs into big text fields. They push the "generate image based on prompt" as the main add for slides to make them not just bullets, but no real foundational slide creation is baked in. Things may have changed since I demo'd it ~6 months ago. Google Slides is just generated images and transform text as far as I've seen.
- taylodl 2y ago
  All my documents - Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel - are all on OneDrive. Give me an NLP interface to query information from these sources. When providing the information, note the source where it came from. That's what I want!
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    Give me good sharepoint search!! I'd love the R part of RAG, but Microsoft can't even do that it appears?
- 2y ago
josefritzishere 2y ago
I'm just waiting for the AI hype bubble to pop.
- sghiassy 2y ago
  Patience my friend. It’s coming
- surfingdino 2y ago
  12-24 months, the VC money will eventually run out.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
truetraveller 2y ago
Why is this post off the front-page after < 1 hour? or even the second page, or third page? In 1 hour, it garnered ~60pts, and it's a very interesting topic. I seriously think Big AI (Microsoft, Open AI and other players) somehow influenced this burying. It's super-damaging to Microsoft, who have tooted O365 "AI" like crazy. Not to mention their investment in OpenAI. Continued criticism like this about their clumsy "AI" is probably going to cost them a few billion.
- sirspacey 2y ago
  Because of how HN manages the front page to de-emphasize low value comments
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > I seriously think Big AI (Microsoft, Open AI and other players) somehow influenced this burying. This feels unnecessarily conspiratorial. Occam's razor would imply that it's just that a lot of legit HN users are pretty emotionally invested in this stuff, and dislike seeing negative stuff about it. You can see this in the comments on these sorts of articles; there's definitely a cohort who have a quasi-religious zeal about this stuff.
senectus1 2y ago
the company i work for is going to tell MS to stick its co-pilot tax up its ass as well.

I’d imagine the larger companies get discounts?

natas 2y ago
they usually give it for free, so they can report to markets that there's a strong adoption, then a year or so down the road, they start charging a little bit.
- hhh 2y ago
  I don't believe this is the case with Copilot.

Whattttttt? Impossible. Surely the AI must have been adding value. A big company wouldn't just look to shove AI into something because it's trendy and fool themselves into thinking that customers would pay them for it, would they? Also, why are we linking to some forum and not the articles?

tempodox 2y ago
Given what people are fantasizing what “AI” can do, it's not surprising MS thought their users must be ecstatic about this. Besides, MS always knows better what their users want than the users themselves.
snapetom 2y ago
My boss, the VP of Product, went on a spree about GenAI these past few months. We've been working on regular prediction and optimization things, but when ChatGPT went nuts, everything was GenAI. He was reading generative AI into RFPs and proposals that didn't even mention generative AI. I tried talking to him that it's still garbage in and garbage out. If the solution was never there to train on, LLMs aren't going to make them out of thin air. There's also the "language" part of LLMs, that he didn't get. We get pulled into a workshop with Amazon, who also wouldn't give us free resources unless it had a GenAI angle. After all this effort, you know what we made? A fucking chat bot. A fucking chat bot, that's also near useless, because our customers are highly driven and only interested in mathematical predictions. Turns out, you have to actually solve the hard math problems first with many examples, before GenAI can even take a terrible attempt at it.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

adventured 2y ago

First the inital, irrational exuberance. Along with out of control spending on anything AI. Then the lack of financial return on investment from the initial exploratory (try everything) stages. Leading to a sizable pullback in spending across the entire ecosystem. Then the doom & gloom (talking heads on TV; smarter-than-thou industry pundits); death of garbage start-ups (the great thinning); painful layoffs; stocks decline. And last, given some time - very substantial, tangible value (productivity gains, new products) is realized across decades. Rinse & repeat.

surfingdino 2y ago
Still waiting for that substantial, tangible value realised by the users who went all in on Clippy.
taylodl 2y ago
You just described the Gartner Hype Cycle - https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy... My favorite is the Trough of Disillusionment!

monero-xmr 2y ago

They gave my brother in law’s company a discount on the yearly renewal if they enabled GitHub copilot for all 5000 devs or so in the organization. Our theory was they thought all the devs would become addicted to copilot then demand the company pays for it the following renewal. Paying for copilot did not happen.

rvz 2y ago

That is another way of saying: "I got scammed by Microsoft."

1970-01-01 2y ago

Office features haven't increased in value since Office 2000. It's been 99% bugfixes, 1% feature evolution since then.

rvnx 2y ago
The ribbon actually was a good idea (~2003 I think)
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  2007. 2003 was the last without that abomination.
- ronsor 2y ago
  I feel like the ribbon is one of Microsoft's most universally reviled design choices, next to Metro UI.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    As an office 2003 power user (God, has it been so long!) the 2007 office ribbon was awful.
readthenotes1 2y ago
Yet what it does is really good. Goal seek in excel is fantastic (in the ~2003 version I have). Being able to install 20 year old software on a new computer and have it work is pretty nice. Of course, some people may think subscription fees and cloud storage are features, but to me they are bugs...
blibble 2y ago
30% devolution they even broke the Save dialog in an attempt to push their onedrive garbage what used to take 1 click now takes 3-4
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  I still haven’t figured out how to export a copy of an excel sheet to csv without that csv becoming the document I have open afterward, and having to close it and reopen the xlsx file. (note: desktop Excel 2016) There's an "Export" section in the awkward full-window UI that they replaced the File menu with, but instead of exporting it's just another way around to add extra clicks (File -> Export -> Change File Type -> CSV -> Save As) and get to the same "Save As" dialog that makes the CSV file take over your window as the active file after you "export" it. You can also get to that via Save As -> Browse and pick CSV in the "save as type" dropdown, which behaves how you expect Save As to work (where that copy should stay active in the window afterward, as opposed to Export where it shouldn't). But this spot is also stupid because now have to go File -> Save As -> Browse because somebody at Microsoft wanted to insert an extra page where they could default your location to OneDrive and make you click Browse to get a normal file browser. I saw an article yesterday about how Microsoft is moving toward "user-centric design" and removing ads from Skype, but how about doing that in the products anybody gives a shit about?

serjester 2y ago

This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI. Their bing chat is a bloated mess and while I haven't personally tried AI Office 365, I suspect it follows the same theme. Anecdotally, I've heard demand for OpenAI's enterprise tier is ridiculous from someone working within their GMT function. I guess you can say Microsoft did a great job of hedging their bets.

akira2501 2y ago
> This says more about Microsoft's execution than AI. This says pretty clearly that what Microsoft is peddling isn't even remotely an AI. They used AI purely as marketing term and ignored the obvious market consequences that would arise from that.

hhh 2y ago

They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot. I have been using Copilot for over half a year or something, and I haven't found it to be useful in Word, and it is rarely useful in Outlook. I don't use Excel a lot, so I get a lot of value out of the formulae generation stuff when I have to use Excel. There are several meetings that I need information from, but don't need to attend. Culture has been to take the summary from a meeting and dump it into the chat after, and if it misses anything add it below it. Really nice for action items and things like that.

yoyohello13 2y ago
Idk. I've read through those summaries after meetings and they can often be misleading of miss important context. I still think you need to have a human to read through the meeting summaries to confirm they are accurate.
- beaugunderson 2y ago
  the zoom ones are so bad. straight up fabrication. not worth the 5 seconds it takes to dump them into the readout of the meeting.
rsynnott 2y ago
> They didn't use meeting transcriptions or the query features related to that, which in my opinion is the primary value add of Copilot. Are those actually... good? I've only seen the Zoom ones, but those are _comically, unusably bad_.

PreInternet01 2y ago

> After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade This, combined with the otherwise non-specificity of the article gives me pause. Is AI bunk? Sure! Even the latest-and-greatest models can't explain how to programmatically create a DNS record in Azure using the latest C# SDK, how to create a searchable/sortable React data-table with a remote data source, or how to achieve world peace (just to cite 2/3 topics everyone utterly failed at the last month when I tried). Is this article bunk? Yeah, most likely -- no exec in any pharma company in their right mind would admit failure after only six mere months, and without any lawsuits...

d_watt 2y ago

I really want 365 or gemini to do the obvious thing: "Using this template, summarize this document into a slide deck." Maybe it won't be good, but it's surprising to me it can't do it barebones. Considering LLMs do an okay at summarizing into markdown, maybe the issue is a lack of proper intermediate DSL to represent slides it can train on? But autogenerating at least a scaffolding for a deck seems so obvious, it's pretty damning it's so bad 2 years later.

voxic11 2y ago
Wasn't that a specifically advertised copilot feature? Does copilot not actually support it? They are still claiming to support this it seems https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-new-presentation-with-copilot-in-powerpoint-3222ee03-f5a4-4d27-8642-9c387ab4854d https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-new-pres...
- d_watt 2y ago
  When I tried it with a copilot trial at one business, it basically just dumped huge text blobs into big text fields. They push the "generate image based on prompt" as the main add for slides to make them not just bullets, but no real foundational slide creation is baked in. Things may have changed since I demo'd it ~6 months ago. Google Slides is just generated images and transform text as far as I've seen.
taylodl 2y ago
All my documents - Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel - are all on OneDrive. Give me an NLP interface to query information from these sources. When providing the information, note the source where it came from. That's what I want!
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Give me good sharepoint search!! I'd love the R part of RAG, but Microsoft can't even do that it appears?
2y ago

josefritzishere 2y ago

I'm just waiting for the AI hype bubble to pop.

sghiassy 2y ago
Patience my friend. It’s coming
surfingdino 2y ago
12-24 months, the VC money will eventually run out.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

truetraveller 2y ago

Why is this post off the front-page after < 1 hour? or even the second page, or third page? In 1 hour, it garnered ~60pts, and it's a very interesting topic. I seriously think Big AI (Microsoft, Open AI and other players) somehow influenced this burying. It's super-damaging to Microsoft, who have tooted O365 "AI" like crazy. Not to mention their investment in OpenAI. Continued criticism like this about their clumsy "AI" is probably going to cost them a few billion.

sirspacey 2y ago
Because of how HN manages the front page to de-emphasize low value comments
rsynnott 2y ago
> I seriously think Big AI (Microsoft, Open AI and other players) somehow influenced this burying. This feels unnecessarily conspiratorial. Occam's razor would imply that it's just that a lot of legit HN users are pretty emotionally invested in this stuff, and dislike seeing negative stuff about it. You can see this in the comments on these sorts of articles; there's definitely a cohort who have a quasi-religious zeal about this stuff.

senectus1 2y ago

the company i work for is going to tell MS to stick its co-pilot tax up its ass as well.