Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft’s substantial AI investment.
Petulance aside, tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool. At best, they’re a way for skilled employees to be more productive and save time on low-level tasks, but those tasks were already being handed off to lower-level employees. Having an AI do it and fail half the time isn’t exactly a winning alternative.
Other AI companies are just doing better, too. Windows Central reports that OpenAI’s ChatGPT commands over 61% of the market, and Google’s Gemini is now less than 1% behind Microsoft’s 14% with Copilot. That’s after a 12% growth over the last quarter, too, suggesting Gemini is well on its way to becoming the real second-place alternative to ChatGPT.
Wired has been running a lot of paid pro-AI content along the lines of “a small cohort of early adopters has cracked the code and if you don’t hop on now you’ll never catch up” so I’m assuming there’s a wave of doubling down coming.