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

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

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Sep 28, 2018
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A chief information officer of a pharma company paid extra to have 500 employees use Office 365 Copilot in the fourth quarter of 2023 and first quarter of 2024. This is Microsoft's much-heralded AI upgrade to its popular suite of productivity software.

After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade because the AI tools weren't good enough to be worth the extra money.

he compared the slide-generation capability of Microsoft's AI tools to "middle school presentations," according to a transcript of a call with the Morgan Stanley analysts that was included in their research note.

The E3 version of Microsoft's 365 software suite costs about $34 per user a month. Adding Copilot AI features costs another $30 per user a month. For 500 employees, that would roughly add an extra $180,000 a year.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microsoft-copilot-ai-tool-2024-7?IR=T

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/five-signs-that-the-genai-honeymoon

A chief information officer of a pharma company paid extra to have 500 employees use Office 365 Copilot in the fourth quarter of 2023 and first quarter of 2024. This is Microsoft's much-heralded AI upgrade to its popular suite of productivity software.

After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade because the AI tools weren't good enough to be worth the extra money.

he compared the slide-generation capability of Microsoft's AI tools to "middle school presentations," according to a transcript of a call with the Morgan Stanley analysts that was included in their research note.

The E3 version of Microsoft's 365 software suite costs about $34 per user a month. Adding Copilot AI features costs another $30 per user a month. For 500 employees, that would roughly add an extra $180,000 a year.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microsoft-copilot-ai-tool-2024-7?IR=T

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/five-signs-that-the-genai-honeymoon

Screenshot for those who are blocked by the paywall
Screenshot_20240801-143851_Opera.jpg
This is what I knew was going to happen. My job we have a few higher ups in IT trying to push CoPilot down everyone's throats all the while I see little to no major value to spend that kind of money.
This is what I knew was going to happen. My job we have a few higher ups in IT trying to push CoPilot down everyone's throats all the while I see little to no major value to spend that kind of money.
(As the AI bubble bursts), GPU price crash incoming ???
Well, did anyone consider that this could be an AI-generated article, cause with all the gazillions of $$ that pharma companies make by massively overcharging people for their drugs, I find it hard to believe that they would be whining about spending a mere $180K on anything. Hell, they probably spend that much or more on break room & office supplies & other incidental expenses every year....

And as for the legal issues around keeping meeting transcripts, I don't know about the pharma industry, but in my field (Industrial engineering/construction), more often than not, having meeting transcripts on file has saved our arses when clients, vendors, regulators, suppliers etc have claimed that they did not know about or were not made aware of certain details & information relating to a project, which in turn prevented many baseless, money-draining non-compliance claims & lawsuits :)

But given the way pharma operates here in the US, they probably have quite a few "back-room/confidential" meetings that they would rather not have records of, ones which would probably implicate them in collusion, conspiracy, and other underhanded, illegal activities...

I was at an event and a Microsoft dev was doing a presentation on Office 365 with AI , like making a whole powerpoint presentation by just writing a few lines of prompt .
I wouldn't use it probably , but it was pretty neat feature.
"Not seeing the value" is the best case scenario.

It's way better than adopting the shit and then watching as planes fall out of the sky and bridges collapse because it comes to incompetent conclusions and plrovides erroneous data.

I can't wait for this over-hyped AI bubble to burst, and if it takes all of Silicon Valley down with it, oh well. That's no big loss. Once the dust settles the world will be a better place.

A chief information officer of a pharma company paid extra to have 500 employees use Office 365 Copilot in the fourth quarter of 2023 and first quarter of 2024. This is Microsoft's much-heralded AI upgrade to its popular suite of productivity software.

After six months, the exec canceled the upgrade because the AI tools weren't good enough to be worth the extra money.

he compared the slide-generation capability of Microsoft's AI tools to "middle school presentations," according to a transcript of a call with the Morgan Stanley analysts that was included in their research note.

The E3 version of Microsoft's 365 software suite costs about $34 per user a month. Adding Copilot AI features costs another $30 per user a month. For 500 employees, that would roughly add an extra $180,000 a year.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microsoft-copilot-ai-tool-2024-7?IR=T

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/five-signs-that-the-genai-honeymoon

Nice I just came across this article

Quick on the draw ✍️

1722526611152.png
bots posting pay walled "news" again?

good, i hope all the ai crap blows up in their faces. no one asked for this garbage.

bots posting pay walled "news" again?

good, i hope all the ai crap blows up in their faces. no one asked for this garbage.

I didn’t post it

Also what about leveraging archive.is ?

I didn’t post it

Also what about leveraging archive.is ?

HA! you admit it! ;)
whoops, my apologizes.
no idea what you mean by that.
Forget AI $34 per month per user is the real scam
That $180,000 price tag for a year looks weird because $30 + $34 per user per month = $64 per user per month = $768 per user per year = $384,000 for 500 users unless there is some kind of bulk discount.
That $180,000 price tag for a year looks weird because $30 + $34 per user per month = $64 per user per month = $768 per user per year = $384,000 for 500 users unless there is some kind of bulk discount.
They are counting only the extra cost of the AI o365 add on
remember when, not that long ago, 500 retail office licenses without volume discounts would have been around $200,000 as a one-and-done purchase.
I like AI as a coding assistant, it doesn't get everything right but if you can review the code and make modifications it works pretty well. If you're not a person who writes code it's not going to change your life or anything, but if you are and need to bang out some easy features it's pretty simple.

Today I had it make me a "notched slider" in Unity, unity by default just has a normalized slider from 0 to 1, but I needed on that snapped to different notches and overall it did a decent job to get me started, and then I fleshed out the fine details with it. It's basically stack overflow on steroids. This is Claude Sonnet 3.5 btw. I'm just curious how much "better" it can get, like what else do they have out there for it to ingest and spit back out to me? I really don't know what the future is for programming, but I could see there being a lot fewer jobs over the next 3-5 years until we have a new baseline for what expectations are for programs in general.

Let Microsoft keep increasing prices, the businesses will realize they can do without them and switch to a cheaper alternative. Maybe a new office suite can become the new standard.
lol several have tried, all failed.
Here's the thing, if you're big enough you don't pay retail, I just signed my renewal for 750 A3 licenses for the year and I didn't break $15K in Monopoly money. IF they tried to charge me $200K for that shit I would be personally driving to Staples and buying typewriters.
bots posting pay walled "news" again?

good, i hope all the ai crap blows up in their faces. no one asked for this garbage.

"Not seeing the value" is the best case scenario.

It's way better than adopting the shit and then watching as planes fall out of the sky and bridges collapse because it comes to incompetent conclusions and plrovides erroneous data.

I can't wait for this over-hyped AI bubble to burst, and if it takes all of Silicon Valley down with it, oh well. That's no big loss. Once the dust settles the world will be a better place.

"“Perceptive’s AI-driven robotic system will transform dentistry," adds one Karim Zaklama, DDS, a general dentist and member of Perceptive’s clinical advisory board. "The patient experience will be better because of streamlining procedures and enhancing patient comfort. The advanced imaging capabilities, particularly the intraoral scanner, provide unparalleled details which will enable us to diagnose issues earlier with greater accuracy and allow us to connect with patients more effectively. This efficiency allows us to focus more on personalized patient care and reduces chair time, enabling us to treat more patients effectively.”" https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/robot-dentist-world-first/
1722582675176.png
Oddly enough I know several people that tried Office copilot and found it quite valuable and worth it.
Both the presentation help and the meetings summaries were points they valued.
To be fair they were above average in the tech savy department and for example in the case of presentations their main use for copilot was to point out improvements to existing presentations.
For my use case GitHub copilot has been a good accelerator when coding.
I don't think AI will be useful eveywhere but in the places it can be, it seems to me, it also needs some user know-how in how to make it useful/worth it.
“Money Pit
Microsoft has spent a staggering amount of money on AI — and serious profits likely remain many years out, if they're ever realized.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/microsoft-losing-money-ai


If stories like this are being run now, maybe the AI bubble IS about to burst after all.

That is sooner than I was expecting.

At least we can hope!

I would like nothing more than to see the stock price of every company heavily invested in AI to go down in flames.

If stories like this are being run now, maybe the AI bubble IS about to burst after all.

That is sooner than I was expecting.

At least we can hope!

I would like nothing more than to see the stock price of every company heavily invested in AI to do down in flames.

UK Government Shelves $1.66 Billion Tech and AI Plans
Hmm​

remember when, not that long ago, 500 retail office licenses without volume discounts would have been around $200,000 as a one-and-done purchase.
I don't remember the actual costs, but I do remember when rumors of Microsoft turning Office into a subscription based service came with a resounding "HELL NO!" from the single user who may only use MS Word to large universities who can happily run 8 year old office software in their computer labs.
remember when, not that long ago, 500 retail office licenses without volume discounts would have been around $200,000 as a one-and-done purchase.
The company local IT to reproduce that kind of Office 365 offer would have probably been quite higher, the server to backup and share document between employee, what would have been Teams and so on.

They could still buy retail license one-and-done, there is reason they do not, perpetual office professional price did not went up despite 25 years of inflation, still around that price today without any volume rebate.

Those google-microsoft type of offer are probably reducing local IT need quite a bit versus then, that $180,000 a year that a very small IT department.

We are going to roll it out to a few SME's in various departments.

I think there's a lot of people thinking it's a solve all for things. But, as with a lot of technology, there's a lot of solutions without a problem. It IS like doing a middle school presentation. You're using AI for the little things that really shouldn't need it, but it's not solving or helping anything. It's almost making it worse.

AI can be great for things, just need to look at it that way.

Yup, the bubble has already started to burst, the few times I have tried to use ChatGPT for anything remotely technical has resulted in old outdated information being spewed, or just out right wrong.
If stories like this are being run now, maybe the AI bubble IS about to burst after all.

That is sooner than I was expecting.

At least we can hope!

I would like nothing more than to see the stock price of every company heavily invested in AI to go down in flames.

But it’s driving sales into Dynamics and Jesus does it make building report templates easier.
The problem is you don’t need an AI license for everybody you need it for specific people.
So here out of the 750 licenses I have for O365 I need it for maybe 9 people, 5 for sure, I’m on the fence which would bring it to 6, and 3 want it but I don’t want them doing the jobs they claim it would help them with because they constantly fuck it up and I have to fix it anyways. I’m not sure AI will prevent them from fucking it up just make it harder for me to fix.