Spotlight on Microsoft's AI $2.5 Billion Investment

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
If you want to get access to this episode and my next 30 episodes all ad free, so there'll be no ads on them, go check out my podcast AI Chat. You can go search for that on Spotify or Apple. It's AI Chat. I'm going to post all of these news episodes, and I'm also posting interviews, like I just interviewed the CEO of Cohere. They've raised over a billion dollars for their AI model, talking about what they're going to be spending the money on and the direction of the AI industry, along with all of this new stuff. So if you want to go check it out with no ads for free, it is AI Chat. I host two other podcasts. One is called AI Hustle. It's about growing and scaling your business with AI tools. And one is called AI Applied, about using AI in your career. Every once in a while, I play an excerpt of one of those podcasts on this show to give you an idea of what it's like. I'm going to play an excerpt from today's episode of AI Applied. We're talking about Microsoft's $2.5 billion AI bet. I hope you like it. And if you enjoy this episode, go check out the AI Applied podcast anywhere that you get your podcast. It's AI Applied.
Microsoft has just committed $2.5 billion and 6,000 employees to a new AI implementation unit. Now, this is not new. They're not the only ones that have done this. They're following what OpenAI and Anthropic both have, you know, made partnerships with different organizations, Accenture and Deloitte, if I'm remembering correctly. And I mean, there's a bunch of players that have been doing this, a bunch of private equity firms that have been kind of getting in on this and kind of investing money into these sort of AI implementation units. Now, Connor has a spicy take on this that I was reading on LinkedIn, and I was like, Connor, we gotta talk about what you've been saying because this post has been blowing up and I think it's making some people mad. But I see a lot of truth to this. So, and basically his take is that maybe what Microsoft is doing is not the right way to do this, which is, you know, shocker, especially when this is $2.5 billion that are about to be spent on this. So, Connor, I'd love for you to maybe explain a little bit about what these implementation units are hoping to achieve, what you think they will achieve, what you think people should do, and if this is all a giant $2 billion mistake.

**Connor** (1:59)
Total billion dollar mistake, everybody. Yeah, I love the hot take here, man. This is, so by the way, I did have people from Microsoft like writing to me and being like, it's not really 2.5. It's sort of like that's kind of like reallocated, but the message is the same. And even people inside Microsoft are like, yeah, you know, the headline, don't really love the headline. But essentially, like, you know, the headline is essentially, let me grab it. It's from the information originally.
If you don't know the information, but it's expensive to apply, to subscribe to, but it's worth it. Microsoft commits 2.5 billion to new applied AI consulting effort and then says, the new unit comes as large companies. And this is important. The new unit comes as large companies have groused that it can be tricky to configure AI software to their own needs and generate meaningful returns. Jaden, I'll tell you why I am up in arms about this. So, it reminds me, so we were working with the big, so AI Mindset works with big companies to sort of transform from a behavioral standpoint, right, organizations to really transform AI adoption. And I remember working with this huge, like oil and gas, or energy, energy company, sorry.
And we were kind of talking about all this during this big senior leadership workshop, which we do there like three and a half hours long or something like that. And at the end, these folks were talking about when they did like their SAP enterprise transformation thing. And they're like, yeah, and remember how we had to keep on tweaking it? Because people just weren't really satisfied with it and all that kind of stuff. And I kind of paused the conversation. I didn't really want to get involved because it was a conversation kind of among them. But I was like, can I just point something out? Has this happened before? And they're like, yeah, it happens all the time. I'm like, this is what we think about all the time. Every time you sort of like have a new system, Jayden, the digital transformation takes place. Hey, we're now going to use Salesforce. What happens? I promise you, everybody complains, because people like the old system. So what do they do? They blame the system instead of how they work. And so when Microsoft sees this, and I'm telling you, this is what happens. And it's not just Microsoft. I mean, it's every big LAI lab.