Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
> Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
> While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet.
And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.
Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams.
Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
"Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams"
Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop.
Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world.
Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams
Depends on the BigCorp. One of the most quentessential BigCorps out there, IBM, is deep into Apple stuff. As far as publicly shilling for Macs with extremely questionablly extrapolated data - they did a pilot with power users for a year, and came out saying Macs cost less in hardware and support than equivalent Windows Lenovos over the full lifecycle of the machine; which is literally impossible to know a year in a pilot with power users compared to the 4 year lifecycle for all sorts of people.
I'm very happy that "AGI office workers" will use Microsoft products - so I don't have to do it anymore... But: they will not pay a dime for the licenses...
For the average office task they don’t seem far off being competent, at least to the average workers quality.
Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
Which average office tasks would those be? Writing project proposals? Putting budget numbers into a shared spreadsheet? Composing a progress report? Preparing presentation slides for an executive status update meeting? Writing performance reviews? Taking mandatory compliance training? Going to planning meetings?
One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
I prefer fusion power as the go-to vapourware technology. It’s been “10-20 years out” for 70 years and counting.
I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
Could you name a specific person whose estimate of when we might get AGI has doubled twice since 2022? Or do you mean you found one person with a really short estimate in 2022, another person with a longer one in 2024, and another with a longer one now?
Also, if you compare with 50 years ago, AGI has also (better than) halved the interval experts are commonly predicting since then.
(Of course the experts could turn out to be hilariously wrong, for fusion or AI or both. I just don't think your comparison is anything like apples-to-apples.)
> Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup
That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world.
"Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
It needs to get through dense downtowns where there isn't much space between buildings, and wires and skyways to dodge as well. A skilled pilot could do it - but they wouldn't try because while space physically exists there isn't enough margin for error.
People will just have the thing open in another window, and move the result over, rather than pay for a bunch of Teams licenses.
In general, we should expect more AI use to decrease the value of human oriented products. A word document is just some XML collection to a computer program. An AI won't need Word to create or edit the files.
Another way to say it might be that we've been shielded from the effects of not investing in our own children by the immigration of smart and educated young adults, where countries with less immigration are more acutely aware of how well its own educational system is performing.
Anyone who has ever worked on any sort of sales funnel knows: every time you ask someone to take an additional action, you lose people. Ask everybody to reapply, you'll end up with fewer people. You can say that's evidence of previous fraud, but it's largely just going to be people who didn't make it through the additional friction.
These extra steps can cause him weeks of stress, physical and mental. These extra steps cost him money he does not have. The stress can set him back physically for weeks.
Reapplying, waiting on hold for half a day, going down to offices, etc are not easy for some folks. People fall through the cracks and die.
This is called forced attrition. It's pretty common in the business world when companies don't want to fire people. Make it too difficult to bother, so folks stop bothering. Unfortunately this is a literal lifeline for millions of people, so it's more like make it too difficult to bother, so folks start dying.
It doesn't pass the sniff test. If they "know" 186,000 people are deceased who are receiving benefits, then they can simply stop disbursements to those accounts. It doesn't require any action from those who are alive.
> If someone doesn't reapply for food stamps then they weren't that critical for their survival.
For a good number it might be that they don't successfully reapply due to living on a knife edge that lacks the slack to jump through yet another hoop.
The experience here in Australia is that raising welfare barriers hurts those that need welfare the most, the actual fraudsters have the resources to beat the system.
> somehow incapable of doing basic things for something they care about
Even my ADHD often made me incapable of doing basic things for stuff I cared about. I can't imagine the struggle for people with more severe live conditions. Same goes for you, apparently.
You go through the process of actually calling, get sent through a 4-5 week rabbit hole, and then people wonder why less people make it through the funnel that has more holes than a grater.
Remember the whole "waste fraud and abuse" stuff in the beginning of the year? Yeah, there's a lot of waste in how inefficient it is signing up for this government stuff.
> Hate this argument so much. You lose people in your sales funnel because they didn't actually care all that much about the product to justify the extra effort.
On more than one occasion I've been the primary decision maker for a technology choice that was going to be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more per year.
For reasons that aren't relevant here, didn't have a ton of time to do the evaluation... extreme prejudice was exercised against anything that didn't have a 'download now and get started button'.
Even if I wanted to jump on a sales call, I didn't have 2 and 1/2 days to wait for you to get back to me.
Maybe a sales funnel is the right tool for certain industries but when your primary user is technical, don't make them jump on a phone call. Get out of their way and make sure the documentation is good. If they like what they see and they have questions, they will chase you down. That is when you should do the pitch call...
The online troll farms of today make me nostalgic for an age when intelligence agencies were putting effort into promoting jazz and modern art for national security reasons.
AI is absolutely replacing jobs though. I personally know multiple people whose companies have downsized departments or eliminated departments completely, offloading the work to fewer people using AI tools.
Here AI is more like a magic solution to stretch the employees you have. I don't know a single person who has been replaced by AI, but plenty of companies and government office hopes to be able to get more work done fast with AI. I doubt it will work.
No the OP is right, we had a whole department vanish: translators. Half laid off and half absorbed to other roles. I am waiting for this to backfire eventually, but even if it does, it will still be cheaper to handle the backfire than employing all those people.
At a big hospital system, nurses call patients with complex medical issues and help organize appointments and tests and whatnot. Previously, they had about 20 people who would transcribe recordings of the calls and then write up documentation for the medical records. Now AI transcribes and writes the report and sends it to the nurse to sign off / make edits.
I think for these tools that still less than a full Drop-in Office Worker Replacement, it takes some time within organizations to figure out how they can be used to reduce human labor needs.
So what might start out as an additive tool for existing workers, over time, managers start to see ways to reorganize the work between AI and humans and find efficiencies that can lead to headcount changes.
I've been seeing AI-based call center software replacing jobs in droves. This has affected my company negatively as well, since a good chunk of our own users are call center employees.
Leaving my long-term relationship was the best decision I ever made. It has been 3 years and it still makes me smile every day just realizing how much happier I am now.
These were Brian Niccol decisions before he parachuted over to his ~$100M pay package at Starbucks as their CEO.
> In 2018, Niccol became the CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, replacing founder Steve Ells. Although Niccol had moved west to Newport Beach, California to join Taco Bell, he did not move back east to Denver when he joined Chipotle. Rather, under his leadership, Chipotle moved its headquarters from Denver to Newport Beach. During his tenure, he helped double Chipotle's revenue while its profits increased almost seven times. The stock price of Chipotle has increased by almost eight times under Niccol. Niccol also increased salaries for Chipotle's retail staff and expanded employee benefits. In 2023, Niccol's total compensation at Chipotle was $22.5 million, or 1,354 times the median employee pay at Chipotle for that year.
As govt inflation rates are often reported lower than actual, there's a good chance real inflation (or perhaps food inflation) was higher, and in spitting distance of 45%.
All takeout food did. I struggle to find why Chipotle would be considered expensive relative to other takeout options. You're getting chicken and 10 additional whole foods options for $10, when most other Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, taqueria, etc. options are at least a few $ more.
In the East Bay, I've noticed that the chain restaurants are consistently more expensive. Chipotle is more expensive than the taqueria down the street, not by a lot, but by a buck or two. And the bigger chains jacked up prices by more than the more regional ones: Subway costs the same as Togo's. McDonald's costs more than In n Out.
Businesses have found that people are willing to spend ~$20 on a fast/fast-casual lunch, and now most everybody charges that amount. But the national chains are also aiming for food consistency between locations, which means that my Chipotle and McDonald's meal is going to be only as good as they can economically make it in a blasted food desert like Indianapolis, whereas the local restaurants and regional chains can take advantage of me living less than 200 miles of 40% of the country's fresh produce production.
The fast food / fast-casual segments are losing price differentiation, and the fast food options are losing on quality.
That’s interesting because I’m in the East Bay Area too and have the opposite experience.
Chipotle burrito is $10.50, 80% of taquerias are $15 burritos.
In N out double double meal is $11, but McDonalds app has free fries so a Double Quarter (with 2x meat), fries, and drink is $9…
I just looked it up. At my local Chipotle, a burrito is $13.65 + $2.50 guac + $2.80 for chips and salsa + $2.85 drink, comes out just over $21.80 before tax. Tacqueria around the corner, Super fajitas burrito $15.49 + free chips and salsa + $3.75 for a drink, comes out to $19.25 before tax.
If you consider guacamole an extravagance, the more basic burrito at the tacqueria is $13.49, so the gap shrinks, but is still in the tacqueria's favor.
Between the two, Chipotle's chips are better, but everything else is a downgrade quality wise.
And I don't think it's reasonable to include coupons in McDonald's pricing. I'm not installing malware on my phone to save the $3 a McDonald's fry costs.
Other fast food options have recently marketed and offered cheaper options. Chipotle doesn't have a very deep menu. I see they sell a single taco for around $4 but not many other "value" options.
That’s kind of why Chillis is doing pretty well. It costs almost the same as McDonalds and for a few bucks extra, you’d get a reasonable sit down experience.
They're also benefiting from being practically the last man standing in the family dining segment. They're not in a menu category that was going to butt up against nicer sit-down dining places (if Olive Garden, for example, raised their prices much they'd be running up against sit down Italian places, likewise for Red Lobster and nicer seafood). And they adapted well to the COVID-era takeout boom, which suggests that they were actually serving food people would choose to eat, not merely offering the sit down experience like say Applebees.
All the expensive local run city restaurants benefited from inflation.
The McDonalds burger went from $12 to $18, but it's still the same terrible product. The hipster burger joint price went from $20 to $22, and that is a dramatically better burger.
The difference is that the local burger place doesn't have to show a 7% increase in profit year after year in perpetuity. Their price was set for "I can live a modest life off the profit and pay my employees a wage competitive enough to actually staff my restaurant, and therefore also end up with people more competent than your average fast food worker". That gives you more value per dollar, because more of your dollar is being spent on actual product and service rather than paying absurd and unjustifiable salaries to an entire building full of overpaid "management" and administration in the highest cost of living part of the country. Fewer shareholders to pay too.
So instead of the price delta between absolute trash and quality being $8, now it's $4.
I am told inflation is a bad thing, but it is making lots of small business that we desperately want and need much more competitive. A smaller business has far less pricing power and therefore less ability to pass on a cost increase.
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
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