Anecdotally. Folks I know at MSFT seem to just be a lot more stressed and working a lot harder to make up for less staff, rather than seeing any magical gains from the AI being forced down their throats.
I have no idea what to think about the AI savings claim.
I see tons of these claims, it almost seems required that various executives make these claims ... really without going into detail about what exactly they mean or real investigation about the results.
> I have no idea what to think about the AI savings claim.
Microsoft sells AI. That's all you need to take away.
On one hand, yes, anonymous sources can say whatever they want.
But they are referring to call centers when it comes to savings: I don't know if half billion USD is real, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would be close to reality. The problems call centers face are usually about a handful of topics, and if an agent doesn't know something that another agent does, that can very frustrating for everyone, especially for the caller.
It was meant for AI, and I am very much waiting for my ISP to fire all their call center helpdesk agents, and have AI, so I can get real help when they mess up my connection in their datacenter.
Of course, there is a small percentage of cases when a real human touch is mandatory - those problems will remain unsolved unfortunately.
Did the executives get their bonus? Did the stock price go up? Let's focus on the questions that really matter.