For many months now, AI companies have made a huge deal out of “AI agents,” meaning autonomous software systems that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of humans with minimal intervention.
But when that ambitious vision will turn into a reality remains anybody’s guess. The current crop of agentic AI models is still getting easily tripped up, often requiring humans to jump in, effectively undercutting their purpose.
The numbers remain dismal. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best-performing AI agent, which was Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time.
And this summer, OpenAI released its ChatGPT agent, promising that it can “do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish.” But in reality, users found the experience lackluster, calling it “not very useful,” “shaky,” and “slow.”
As such, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft is struggling to sell its enterprise clients on its own take on agentic AI. As The Information reports, the company’s Azure salespeople are seriously struggling to meet some extremely ambitious sales growth targets, cutting quotas by up to 50 percent earlier this year.
Microsoft’s stock sank over 2.5 percent on Wednesday, showing that investors are unimpressed by the tepid sales results.
Meanwhile, the tech giant went into damage control mode, with a spokesperson telling Bloomberg in a statement that “The Information’s story inaccurately combines the concepts of growth and sales quotas” and that “aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered.”
Regardless, the dustup suggests that enterprise customers are far from convinced that large AI agents are ready to autonomously complete complex multistep tasks. It’s yet another indication that companies are struggling to convert the enormous hype surrounding generative AI into actual revenue, a concerning trend considering the billions of dollars AI companies are burning through right now with no end — or return on investment — in sight.
It’s not like Microsoft’s clients are being unreasonable. Generative AI continues to struggle with the absolute basics, and hallucinations remain a major pain point. Multiply the potential for an AI to make up facts as it attempts to complete a more nuanced, multistep project, and the chances of it tripping up rise even further.
In short, the future that’s being sold to these customers simply hasn’t materialized. And that could hamper AI companies’ sky-high expectations when it comes to monetizing the tech.
Then there’s competition ratcheting up the pressure for Microsoft. In June, Bloomberg reported that workers preferred to use OpenAI, which was cutting into its ability to sell its Copilot.
Fortunately for Microsoft, most of its current revenues come from renting out…
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