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Microsoft is actively pitching that its Copilot AI system will help enterprise customers save money on labor costs— aka not needing to hire more people or giving the ability to lay off existing staff.
Why It Hurts: Tech giants have been trying not to advertise the disruption that their systems could have on company head counts — typically, one of the most expensive line items of any firm. But with Microsoft breaking the seal, expect other companies to gladly follow along.
Between the Code: Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Copilot, wants you to know that spending more on AI means you’ll need to spend less on employees.
- Microsoft has already deployed Copilot across its own sales and customer support teams, allowing it to keep its sales growth despite laying off 10,000 workers.
- British fintech company Finastra used Copilot to build a recent marketing campaign, which allowed it to keep the campaign in-house instead of hiring an outside agency.
- Semiconductor giant Broadcom is using Copilot to run its IT help desk, allowing it to keep its human head count under 20 people and save the company millions of dollars.
- Bell Canada has put chatbots in its customer call center, contributing to $20 million in “labor cost savings.”
Closing Thoughts: Big Tech’s change of heart comes as the market hits an inflection point. Businesses want evidence that dropping money on chatbots will transform their bottom line — not fizzle out like the metaverse or NFTs. Tech giants are in a deep hole with how much they’ve spent on building out the infrastructure of AI systems, so they’re trying to deliver the hard sale to recoup that investment… and then some. As these two forces collide, expect swaths of the workforce to become automated and remaining workers to be saddled with higher expectations for productivity.
Alternate Perspective: AI systems are pretty nifty and all, but they really need a human touch… and the tech is launching new types of positions. The times they are a-changin’.
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