Microsoft executives said that some AI tools are one of the reasons why the company can still maintain sales growth after laying off 10,000 people last year, and encouraged sales staff to use this example to attract customers. The chief marketing officer said, "We can increase the processing capacity of each customer service agent by 12% through Copilot. It means we don't need to hire so many people." This article comes from: Wall Street News, author: Huang Wenwen, original title: "AI giants are not pretending! The ROI of enterprise-side applications has appeared, and it is still "cutting people" in the end"

In the fierce competition in the field of AI, Microsoft has thrown out a propaganda trick to win customers: "Our AI can let you 'throw away' labor."

On December 9, according to The information, recently, Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of Microsoft 365 Copilot software, said that the company's CEO and CFO want to get assurances that the use of AI can save labor costs or reduce the payment of external contractors. They said:

"Refused to expand the budget for Microsoft Copilot AI until there was clear evidence that AI was saving costs in other areas."

Spataro explained that this is why Microsoft adopted this more frank sales pitch, "If you adopt AI services, you don't need so many employees," in other words, "the ultimate development goal of AI is to 'eliminate humans'."

Microsoft is not pretending: AI can save labor costs

For a long time, software executives, including Microsoft's competitors Google and Amazon, have avoided publicly using the statement "AI may replace the potential of labor" and tried their best to ease people's concerns. In January this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was still saying that artificial intelligence will change "the shape of these jobs" while making it easier for untrained workers to complete tasks such as software development to create more jobs.

Researcher Lisette Espín Noboa explained that these companies usually don't say that jobs will be replaced because it is not good for their reputation and image, and they don't want to cause protests.

However, when selling to customers, Microsoft began to emphasize that AI can save labor costs. According to sales staff cited by The Information, Microsoft executives said that some AI tools are one of the reasons why the company can still maintain sales growth after laying off 10,000 people last year, and executives have been encouraging sales staff to use this example to attract customers. Spataro said: ....

"We are able to increase the processing capacity of each customer service agent by 12% through Copilot. This is real money, which means we don't need to hire so many people."

Coincidentally, recently, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman also bluntly stated in an interview that "people will lose their jobs due to AI. Not everyone will like this impact, but it is coming and it is also a scientific achievement of mankind."

AI replaces outsourcing to achieve "cost reduction and efficiency improvement"

Analysis believes that although today's conversational AI still has limitations and still makes mistakes, Microsoft can still point out that many companies have saved money through this technology.

Take Finastra, a British financial technology company with annual revenue of $2 billion, as an example. The company has recently used Microsoft's 365 Copilot to handle marketing work that usually requires the help of external agencies.

In one advertising interview campaign, Finastra used Copilot to parse 4,000 pages of transcribed interviews and generate advertising copy containing executive testimony. The company's chief marketing officer Joerg Klueckmann said:...

"In the past, Finastra would hire external creative agencies and market research companies to produce such activities, which usually cost more than $60,000 and took months. Now, Finastra only needs to pay a few marketing employees to use Copilot, at only $30 per person per month."

However, Klueckmann said he does not expect this technology to prompt him to lay off the more than 60-person marketing team. He said, "I think we will be able to produce more with the existing personnel."

In addition, some corporate legal departments are also using Microsoft 365 Copilot and other AI applications to replace hiring external lawyers.

Not just outsourcing, but also "cutting people" internally

Currently, some companies have begun to use generative AI to replace the role of IT support staff.

Semiconductor giant Broadcom has been considering the economics of its procurement of AI. Stanley Toh, head of the company's IT support division, said that by using software from AI startup Moveworks, the division has kept the number of IT support staff below 20 over the past five years, even as the company's total headcount grew from 10,000 to more than 50,000.

Toh's team spends less than $2 million a year on AI, compared with the roughly $8 million it would have spent if the IT headcount had grown at the same pace as the overall headcount. Toh said:

"When I need to renew a contract, this is the return on investment (ROI) I will show to executives to justify why we spend money on AI software. The pure motivation is to reduce costs and increase efficiency."

Salesforce founder Marc Benioff said the company will not add more software engineers next year because the company has already increased productivity by more than 30% through Agent Force and other AI technologies for engineering teams. However, the company's sales staff will increase because the company needs to introduce people to the value that AI can achieve.