Microsoft announced it will spend two and a half billion dollars and deploy six thousand employees to help customers understand artificial intelligence. The company that brought you Clippy now needs an army to explain why you should talk to your spreadsheet.
Six thousand employees. That's the population of a small town. Microsoft looked at the AI confusion plaguing corporate America and decided the solution was a medium-sized municipality of consultants. Each one will presumably knock on office doors asking if anyone needs help turning on the magic robot.
The math works out to roughly four hundred seventeen thousand dollars per employee if you divide it evenly. That buys a lot of PowerPoint presentations about machine learning. That buys an infinite number of conference calls where someone shares their screen and the first fifteen minutes are spent unmuting people who don't know they're muted.
This is what we've come to. AI is so complicated that a two-trillion-dollar software company needs to create an entirely new division just to hold everyone's hand through it. The technology will change everything, they promise. Right after these six thousand people spend eighteen months teaching your CFO that no, the AI cannot predict lottery numbers, and no, it won't write his novel for him.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started Googling which Microsoft competitor will announce seven thousand employees next week. They'll find one. They always do. Then they'll buy calls on Friday and spend the weekend telling their wife's boyfriend about their brilliant AI implementation play.
Two point five billion dollars to teach people how to use the products Microsoft already sold them. That's not a business unit. That's a rental fee on your own confusion.
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
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