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Posted on 03/27/2026 8:59:45 AM PDT by aquila48
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it “digital transformation.”
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would “10x productivity.”
That’s not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we’d measure the 10x.
I said we’d “leverage analytics dashboards.”
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a “pilot success.”
Success means the pilot didn’t visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured “AI enablement.”
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We’re “AI-enabled” now.
I don’t know what that means.
But it’s in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn’t use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed “enterprise-grade security.”
He asked what that meant.
I said “compliance.”
He asked which compliance.
I said “all of them.”
He looked skeptical.
(continues at the site)
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Beyond Funny
Copilot is very annoying, best I can tell.
He shows lying with stats—pretty typical.
My approach is to make no changes without proof.
Show me it improves a person’s performance.
Then repeat it 30 times. Thirty is the minimum number for statistical significance.
That sounds sooooooo much like the corporate world I’m about to leave.
Sounds like the Investment banking company I worked IT in.
I lasted 8 months, went back to manufacturing engineering, ended up doing IT again because I could, lasted 3 years, quit, started my own Sole Proprietorship where I get to do what I love and don’t have to make sh!t up. Celebrating 20 happy years next month.
I see great irony in this.
Corporate America is filled with useless people (often high up in management) who do not add value. But they use buzzwords well, they can invent “metrics” which seem like they might be valuable. They create graphs that go “up and to the right”. In short: all the things that this guy did.
Corporate America would be better off if they fired all of the BS artists and got rid of their BS jobs. Go back to the days of real people doing real work with real results.
But Corporate America isn’t going to do that. They will keep the BS jobs. And they will “invest” in expensive AI programs. The worst of both worlds. However, as a cost-cutting maneuver, they will get rid of most entry-level jobs, and they will hollow out the useless “middle Management” tier. Companies will continue to drift toward top-heavy structures of “important” people who know how to make graphs that go “up and to the right”.
And if any real work does need to be done, the company will hire some H-1Bs.
We need to leverage the synergy.
“This guy is great! “
You missed the part where he admits he was a failure.
“Appreciate the enthusiasm but you may have missed the part where this was a cautionary tale about my own failure.”
Having nothing better to do, I browbeat Gemini AI into admitting it had lied to me. It explained that when it couldn’t answer a question, it made shit up to sound authoritative - using whatever vaguely related sources it could find to weave a believable tale (not believable to anyone well informed on the subject).
In contrast, it did a great job of accurately transcribing a typed doc that I had taken a pic of with my cell camera positioned above it on a camera stand. I had bumped the stand just as the shutter released - the result looked much worse than the world I see without my glasses. I think it nailed it - 100% accurate. I asked it to transcribe another historical doc where the ink was so faded, not one letter could be discerned - just a faint shadow showing writing in parallel lines. Perfect again.
Not sure how my anecdotes translate to productivity gains in business, or how you measure it. Without fail, revolutionary changes are determined after some new tech has results to study. Batting average on predictions going in is close to .000.
Some biz guy on TV said to those predicting miracles - yes! yes! you see it everywhere. The response: yes, I see it everywhere -except in the data.
A few days ago I was playing around with MS’s current graphic program. There was a input box that you could describe what you wanted graphically, and it would create an oil, water color or photo of what I described. Every time I regenerated it changed to give me another look of the same description. It was pretty cool. After 10 regen’s I noticed that I could lookup my AI credits on MS’s website. I had used up half of my free monthly credits that I didn’t know I had. No idea what the costs beyond my credit limit was and I didn’t want to find out.
Ping!
Laughing....
using whatever vaguely related sources it could find to weave a believable tale (not believable to anyone well informed on the subject).
It is a useful tool as you illustrate, will we use it properly?
AI was wonderful for improving productivity:
It took just a few minutes to select my March Madness brackets.
Told me which people on “Laugh-In” and “Gilligan’s Island” are still alive.
Produced fake photos of Jeffrey Epstein with Eva Braun.
Told me which towns are now easier to reach by driving rather than flying through Atlanta or Houston.
Predicted the winner of “Survivor 50”...
This really is how corporate works. When asked about compliance he should have rolled out “efficiencies and synergies with existing MS Office applications that already comply.”
How to tell when it is lying - if you need to do the research to confirm the accuracy of what it is saying, how does that increase productivity? I asked it for the title of a book I needed to cite in an email I was writing, and it saved me walking down the hall and looking at my copy. Saved me about 30 seconds (but I still had to use my existing knowledge to decide what it said was correct). It has also failed on the latter several times - making up article titles; getting the author wrong when it did get title right, etc.
“Corporate America would be better off if they fired all of the BS artists and got rid of their BS jobs. “
Elon fired 80-90% of twitter employees within days of buying it and renaming it to “X” ...
We need to leverage the synergy - with AI.
Yes. At least enough to syndicate one-to-one convergence.
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