Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.
Not saying that sales is useless, far from it. But with an established product that people know about, the sales team is more of a conduit than they are a resource-gathering operation.
Why do people use this useless phrase template?
Yeah, the point is that it's not selling, and it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.
So why are the sales-peops being blamed?
If your organization is filled with the $4k type and not the $25k type, you're going to have a bad time.
I was #7 in the US while working at a small dealership. I moved the the large dealership mentioned above and instantly that dealership became #1 for that brand in the country, something they had never done before. Because not only did I sell 34 cars a month without just cannibalizing others sales, I showed others that you can show up one day and do well so there weren't many excuses. The output of the entire place went up.
So, depending on the pay plan and hiring process, who exactly is working at Microsoft right now selling AI? I honestly have no idea. It could be rock stars and it could be the $4k guys happy they're making $10k at Microsoft.
Think about it: MS has a giant advantage over every other AI vendor, that they can directly insert the product into the OS and LOB apps without the business needing to onboard a new vendor. This is best case scenario, and by far the easiest sell for these tools. Given how badly they're failing, yeah, turns out orgs just don't see the value in it.
Next year will be interesting too: I suspect a large portion of the meager sales they managed to make will not renew, it'll be a bloodbath.
Considering enterprise typically is characterized by perfunctory tasks, information silos, and bit rot, they're a perfect application of LLMs. It's just Microsoft kind of sucks at a lot of things.