Despite investing tens of billions of dollars into OpenAI, tech giant Microsoft has a problem: it's in direct competition with its business partner, and OpenAI is winning.
As Bloomberg reports, Microsoft salespeople are having trouble wooing both potential and existing customers with the company's Copilot, its AI assistant built on OpenAI's tech. Basically, it feels like a worse version of ChatGPT — which has a free version online.
Some companies, like the New York Life Insurance Co, told the magazine that they've purchased both to see which employees prefer. For the drugmaker Amgen, which bought Copilot software for 20,000 of its staffers only for them to ignore it in favor of ChatGPT, the winner is clear.
As Amgen senior vice president John Bruich told Bloomberg [it has a website but i wouldn't call it a website when it has a print magazine], employees at the pharmaceutical company still use Copilot when they're forced to by Microsoft-specific apps like Outlook and Teams. Nevertheless, they seem to prefer ChatGPT for tasks like research and document summarizing because, apparently, it's just better and more enjoyable.
"OpenAI has done a tremendous job making their product fun to use," Bruich said.
According to Bloomberg's unnamed insider sources, Microsoft itself is partially to blame for falling behind its partner at OpenAI. Because Copilot wasn't launched until November 2023, a full year after ChatGPT dropped, employees at the companies Microsoft pitches to had already begun experimenting with the OpenAI chatbot for themselves.
Even now, OpenAI updates still take weeks to integrate into Copilot. As Microsoft workplace AI czar Jared Spataro told Bloomberg, the company insists on testing each out before letting them go live because, as he puts it, "not every change that is being made to the models actually is net positive."
As the two tech companies hash out the shaky future of their multi-billion-dollar partnership behind the scenes, employees at longtime Microsoft customer Bain & Company seem to have chosen a side.
Representatives from the management firm told Bloomberg that it recently deployed ChatGPT to some 16,000 of its employees, many of whom are now using it regularly. Comparatively, only 2,000 Bain & Co employees regularly use Copilot, and even they are mostly utilizing it as an assistant on programs locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, like Excel.
At the end of the day, according to Bain & Co chief technology officer Ramesh Razdan, it seems that workers just don't respond to Copilot as well as ChatGPT.
"It’s improving," Razdan said of the Microsoft AI assistant, "but I don’t think it’s at the same level."
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