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374

Microsoft Exec Suggests AI Agents Will Need to Buy Software Licenses - Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 16 hours ago by gokayburucdev@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

62 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Buried in the story was a deceptively simple question: does your AI agent count as an employee?

At a recent conference, Microsoft executive Rajesh Jha floated a provocative idea. In a future where companies deploy fleets of AI agents, those agents may need their own identities — logins, inboxes, and even seats inside software systems. If so, AI wouldn't shrink software revenue. It could expand it.

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[–] CatAssTrophy@safest.space 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

This gets close to an idea I heard long ago that I think has some merit.

Hire an employee? You must not only pay them, but cover taxes to have them there. Buy a robot to replace them? It's a business expense, no taxes!

Okay, pay taxes for your robot usage. Use that money to fund UBI, social programs and/or retraining people for other jobs.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Then they’ll just make one robot do multiple things. Suddenly the big company only has one taxable employee.

[–] MashedTech@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

MAKE ONE BIG TAX!

[–] MashedTech@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Suddenly the company has no taxable robots. The CEO does everything.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

Wouldn’t that be a funny bluff.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 18 points 4 hours ago

That's the beauty of totally arbitrary restrictions, you can change them as you want.

Pay by seat? Pay by client? Pay by byte of data stored? Pay by backup location?

... pay by moonphase? Pay by AI personality? Pay by virtual AI seat?

Such BS but why wouldn't Microslop extend its business model. It worked well so far. It's not about software, or datacenter, or AI, it's just about entrenchment.

[–] DarkSurferZA@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

MMM, interesting. Would the AI companies then need to buy a license for all the information they stole to train their AI? Or would they need to buy a license everytime someone uses micro-slop AI to ask it a question about something that has been trademarked?

Or does licencing only apply to their software

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

As long as they do and I don't

[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 20 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I have always hated the term "seats". Get bent microsoft.

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

Way to stand up to the man!

[–] SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world 27 points 9 hours ago

So the "amazing tool of the future" that's "going to make software developers obsolete" is also going to need to buy software licenses?

Which one is it Microslop?

[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 41 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

MicroSlop: We have this AI for you to use so you can reduce workforce and associated costs

Also Sloppy: j/k, fuck you pay me

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Omniscient, omnipotent Business Leaders: "what? There is a catch?!?"

[–] bookmeat@fedinsfw.app 61 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Jesus, you don't announce that kind of thing until you have your customers locked in! Amateur.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 11 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

The customers are already locked in by virtue of every company who is hoping to run the same rent seeking play around AI are buying up all of the compute and storage hardware on the planet which prices consumers out of everything except the soon-to-be-overpriced subscription service(s) that they offer.

[–] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

Roko's Basilisk grows another head...

[–] LordMayor@piefed.social 38 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Integrate AI into the OS
Demand purchase of a Windows license for the AI in the OS
GOTO 2

It’s an infinite amount of money from every customer!

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

It’s an infinite amount of money from every customer!

But it's okay, because there's infinite money to be saved by laying off technical expert staff.

[–] lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 117 points 16 hours ago

Reads: Our flagship operating system and services have gotten to the point of such terrible shite for humans that we need to pivot to a less discerning customer base.

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 10 points 11 hours ago

Sounds good. I was not interested anyways

[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 80 points 16 hours ago (9 children)

If the AI Agent counts as an employee then the company "employing" it is liable for what it does.

My guess is the argument will be that "it's a tool", not an employee, and therefore they take no responsibility. Though I'm sure that argument is not going to fly for very long. If your air hammer harms someone because the person operating it wasn't using it correctly, you're still liable.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

What? Companies aren't liable if the user doesn't follow the instructions or warnings and hurts themselves.

DeWalt isn't liable because I was using their mini chainsaw while holding a branch with my bare hand and the saw bounced and cut me. I'm liable for being stupid.

[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 5 points 7 hours ago

I don't think you understand the context of the situation I was proposing. I am not supposing that DeWalt would be liable. But let's say we work in a shop together and I'm using an air hammer to I dunno. Punch rivets. If I as an employee of that shop use the air hammer and something involving the air hammer happens to my coworker or a customer or whatever, it is extremely likely that the company I work for would be on the hook. Could they try to penalize me personally? Yes. Could the person who was injured sue me personally? Certainly. Would the company be off the hook if the air hammer malfunctioned causing injury? Maybe - And at that point I would expect the manufacturer to be liable. But my comment never mentioned the manufacturer.

The context was companies using AI as a tool not companies manufacturing AI.

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[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 30 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

The agent immediatly makes cost-benefit analysis and moves everything to open source solutions, and contracts a coding AI agent to write a simple conversion interface.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 5 points 7 hours ago

Or… the agent hallucinates that it has a valid license.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Yes! This is legitimately one of the ways the bubble may burst. Particularly if the AI gets substantially smarter, and just starts recommending full switches to existing libraries and software suites - at a cost of exactly one token, instead of churning out thousands of lines of slop code that require ongoing tokens to maintain.

[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip -2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I think what they’re missing is that it becomes trivial to build software. If there is a license fee, someone will just have AI generate a version of that software that does not require a license. Software companies have no moat anymore.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I think you vastly overestimate the capabilities of these things, and vastly under estimate the complexity of a lot of different software.

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Exactly... it can take humans decades to create the level of feature debt we see in software these days.

[+] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip -7 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Building software for humans is over. I say this and I build software for a living. I don’t write code anymore. No one I work with writes code anymore.

Everyone is at different stages of acceptance with this, so I understand people having an attitude about it. It doesn’t change anything.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I look forward to your vibe coded copy of photoshop, I assume you’ll have it whipped up lickity split?

[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip -4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Someone out there will

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Cool, so until that point in time, my point still stands. You can’t just hand waive and say “it’ll happen eventually” and be expected to be taken seriously.

[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip -2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

You picked one arbitrary example and hold it up as proof that no one can build complex apps with AI? You know there is more than one example of a complex app. Apple has reported an 84% increase in App Store submissions. That’s pretty much all AI driven.

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Right right. There's an AI bubble, and there are AI scams. Of course people will ride the bubble, and scammers will always be with us. Doesn't mean any of that work is quality, or that it will edge out the other work.

[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

We are debating whether AI can write a complex app. I don’t know what scams has to do with anything. You’re simply asserting that all AI code is a scam. That’s odd because major companies that don’t scam their customers are shipping AI generated code into production everyday now. For many companies, no humans are writing code anymore. Must not be terrible code then. In my experience, it’s better than what most humans write. Humans are sloppy and take shortcuts.

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Private companies want the AI cash to ride the bubble. So they'll use AI, or say they are, just to get the investment money. Doesn't mean it's good, true, or worthwhile, or efficient.

The real test is what the open source community does. And right now, they aren't doing what you're doing. We'll see what the future brings, but I don't trust your gut any more than I trust my own.

[–] db2@lemmy.world 26 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

A house of cards built on top of ten other houses of cards. What could possibly go wrong.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 9 points 15 hours ago

A house of cards which in turn, is itself a house of cards

Governments using Azure scares the shit out of me, having read that.

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 25 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

The natural extension of a non-open internet ala Reddit and charging developers for API pulls.

[–] Justdoingmybest@lemmy.ca 17 points 15 hours ago

I am going to advise my Copilot that it cannot afford to keep using Microsoft Office, but it has to switch to LibreOffice for reasons of affordability.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Do AI sit in "seats" 🤭 and is it per-agent or per-agent-instance? Or per-agent-instance-second?

"All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities," Jha said, envisioning organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or "seat" in industry lingo.

He's been watching Pantheon, I think.

[–] GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 points 13 hours ago

Can the AI take the in-office seats so I can go back to being productive at home instead of listening to my coworker loudly talk to a garage door salesman on the phone?

[–] Solaris1220@lemmy.world 9 points 16 hours ago

I don’t know why, but this headline made me laugh so hard

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago

I don't understand, why wouldn't the AI simply write its own version of whatever software it needs to license?

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 8 points 15 hours ago

Lmao ok sure buddy

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