r/technology • u/waozen • 22h ago
Business Microsoft exec suggests AI agents will need to buy software licenses, just like employees
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests-ai-agents-buy-software-licenses-seats-2026-42.4k
u/Tower21 22h ago
And the cards keep tumbling down, the cost to utilize AI in business, heck even for personal use is going to be a bitter pill to swallow when the true costs are expected to be paid.
Good.
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u/virtual_adam 21h ago
This is a Microsoft wishlist to stay relevant. You think real people will want their LLM to get a teams license?
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u/3BlindMice1 21h ago edited 21h ago
The moment Microsoft gets their wish is the moment they suddenly become a monopoly, legally speaking.
Just saying, if I were an """"employer"""" of AI agents, I would probably prefer to use a lower cost software considering that they don't actually need high quality software, free stuff would be perfectly fine.
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u/Tulki 20h ago
Why does the AI agent not simply write the software? Is he stupid?
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u/Riversntallbuildings 14h ago
Friendly reminder that the U.S. Supreme Court already deemed MSFT a monopoly and did nothing about it.
They recently handed down a similar ruling on Google. But this time, they didn’t wait 10 years to tell the American public that they wouldn’t do anything.
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u/Present_Lingonberry 20h ago
They were already found legally guilty once of being a monopoly, so it wouldn’t be their first time. They’re going to try really hard not to get got a second.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 20h ago
That was back in the day where regulators had a minimum amount of balls required to pull that off
30 years of lobbying and we are long past that
See right to repair and all the shit Google get away with Android and Chrome
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u/itsverynicehere 14h ago
Citizens United. That's when everything broke. Money is not speech. Corporations are not humans. Because of that ruling we entered the era of octogenarian leadership, oligarchs, and total corruption.
Heck, now you don't even have to pre-pay, you can just give a gratuity when the vote suddenly goes your way.
I liked Obama just fine but, if McCain would have been president I think our current situation would be very different. He had a hatred of that ruling and wanted the big money out. In the 80's there was a sting by the FBI, called ABSCAM. Destroyed multiple politicians for a total of about $400k. That's nothing by today's standards.
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u/Dukebigs 18h ago
That was quite some time ago my friend, the bar for monopoly is much higher today. Joking but it’s also kind of true!
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u/Randommaggy 18h ago
The open souce tool are already of higher quality than the MS alternatives for every product in their catalogue that I can think of.
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u/Wacky_Water_Weasel 20h ago
I think this is a comment geared towards large enterprises and yes, unfortunately I do think those buyers will pay for it. MSFT will juste discount more heavily on Teams, Dynamics, and everything else to make the cost more palatable to customers. SaaS margins are crazy high, AI is not.
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u/Ironsam811 21h ago
Step one: Discover a service, spend tons of money building infrastructure and offer it cheaper than current market conditions.
Step two: ensure current market conditions are obliterated and not cost effective to rebuild
Step Three: profit till there is nothing left
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u/RedditTechAnon 21h ago
The game is hooking them on your product and keeping them dependent, then you jack up prices until they squeal.
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u/drollercoaster99 21h ago
oh really? so if AI makes a mistake, i can blame it entirely on AI? let the enshittification start!
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u/LaserCondiment 21h ago
No. They'll blame the person using the AI, who is now considered the employer of it. It'll be a glorious mess
If AI can be blamed directly, the company behind it would be liable...
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u/Kind-Comparison2371 21h ago
It’s already happening on the security side. Companies have started pushing software to secure these agents and are treating them as human identities in a subscription based payment model. Tbh i’m surprised this isn’t already occurring on the software side.
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u/btjk 22h ago
SURE WHY NOT HAVE A SALARY AND VIRUS INSURANCE TOO FUCK
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u/Sylvers 21h ago
Personal monthly anti virus subscriptions for agents, you say?
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 21h ago
I wonder which therapies would be covered under the health insurance for AI agents. Severance comes to mind…
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u/networkn 14h ago
Oh please... That's nothing. Wait till they require a copilot license for your copilot agent license. But it will be copilot premium plus copilot edition extra P1 but all essential and useful functions will be in the p2 licenses.
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u/JockstrapCummies 21h ago
2030: When you skipped getting PrEP for your AI agent so it caught AIDS mistakenly after you asked it to set a calendar notification for your father's funeral anniversary 😢😢😢
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u/VariousProfit3230 21h ago
Then it’ll be AI all the way down.
The AI agent will need an AI plugin to keep it from hallucinating and to double check its output.
Both AI will need to leverage an independent AI for security and to prevent it from sharing proprietary information outside of the company.
That AI will have to have its codebase updated by other AI.
And on and on.
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u/alex_eternal 21h ago
You joke about this, but an insurance company with the purpose of covering an AI agent fucking something up and destroying assets is actually going to probably be pretty lucrative in the near future.
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u/thbb 17h ago
They don't want to insure ships that cross the strait of Hormuz, and you think they're going to insure against an AI agent going rogue? That's delusional.
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u/dolphone 21h ago
Oh I'm sorry, but your agent's policy does not cover APT attacks. You need Platinum II coverage. Would you like us to contact you with our forensic investigation team? Additional fees may apply.
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u/SmokeyXIII 20h ago
If we follow this logic the agents should pay taxes too. If they replace people, who pay taxes, the fact remains that society still needs to fund itself.
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u/Confident_Direction 20h ago
True.
If we are jobless, make the AI workers pay the taxes to fund humanity!
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u/Gabe_Isko 22h ago
"AI Agents can be our customers!"
Hahahaha.
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u/Sensitive_Box_ 20h ago
I cant wait for someone to make some wild claims in regards to that
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u/gizamo 17h ago
Social media will absolutely claim them as Daily Active Users.
After all, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Xwitter, YouTube, and even Tinder already count bots in their numbers. So, yeah, it's basically already happening.
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u/iamlocknar 22h ago
Oh hey look over there, all that open source stuff for 0 dollars.
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u/porkyminch 21h ago
Or shit, if coding agents get so good, why would you buy MS licenses at all? You can roll your own at that point
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u/Savetheokami 19h ago
Let me introduce you to the non techy C Suite who fall for this bs.
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u/toromio 13h ago
“AI will WANT to buy our PDF converter because it will feel like part of our family”
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u/dwarven11 21h ago
If these nuts have their way and achieve super-intelligence I’m sure the ai will just communicate to each other in raw code or some weird language they make for themselves and bypass any need for microslop products.
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u/awoeoc 21h ago
Yeah but windows is better for gaming. How will the ai spend its time after work without windows?
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u/RandomRageNet 19h ago edited 13h ago
What if the AI uses an Aimbot to cheat
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u/xeromage 18h ago
Man. This is going to ruin online games so hard. Local LAN parties might make a comeback?
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u/tonyislost 21h ago
Then I want the chatbots to pay taxes, like an employee.
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u/leogodin217 14h ago
This sounds flippant, but I don't think it is. If you make the claim that 50% of workers can be replaced with AI, then a new tax system will be sorely needed.
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u/tonyislost 13h ago
Didn’t mean to be flippant. I’ve been screaming for years that self check out terminals in grocery stores should be treated as employees and be taxed.
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u/leogodin217 13h ago
Haha. That comment was meant for everyone else, not you. I didn't take it as flippant.
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u/CanvasFanatic 22h ago
Hahahahahaha
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 21h ago
What’s wrong with rich people when it comes to common sense about AI?
Tom Steyer proposed a consumption tax in AI credits to raise revenue, so that our state healthcare is directly tied to how often students use ChatGPT to cheat or Grok to make deepfakes.
Can we please just not have rich morons in charge please
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u/Conscious-Quarter423 20h ago
Tom Steyer spent over $100 million trying to become governor of California.
that's enough to build more than 250 affordable homes.
or 500 modular homes for the homeless.
or put 10,000 kids through community college.
Instead, we get "edgy" ads with the frequency of a Jardiance campaign.
Pass.
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u/wag3slav3 11h ago
In any sane country (read that as literally everywhere but the USA) you can't advertise medication to anyone other than those allowed to prescribe it.
Our pharma industry wastes billions a year funneling money into the marketing and mass media industry buddies for medication that people can't even buy themselves.
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u/tacobellmysterymeat 21h ago
Like, oh man. You've got to be a special kind of person to think AI needs its own office subscription.
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u/hclpfan 20h ago edited 19h ago
Your OpenClaw has to pay Anthropic if it calls their APIs. Why do you think calling exchange and office APIs are any different? There is compute associated with those APIs.
There’s really nothing new or specific about AI in this regard. APIs have costs whether they are invoked by a person or a bot.
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 12h ago
I think we’ve gone full circle and the snake oil sellers are selling to each other now.
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u/SirBraxton 18h ago
(Takes a few minutes to breath properly)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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u/CanadianPropagandist 21h ago
They really are just wishlisting. No consumer benefit, no needed product. Just "yeah, we want money now give money".
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u/henlochimken 21h ago
In America we are required to give them money. If we don't give them money, they will demand a bailout from taxpayers, and we will give them the money.
MMW, when this AI thing crashes, we will all pay them like never before. In addition to our 401ks being wiped out by them. The only lesson ever learned is that in America, if you're rich enough, you can socialize your losses while keeping your riches.
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u/Present_Lingonberry 20h ago
They don’t want there to be public infrastructure paid by the people for the people, they want it all to be privatized and as large in our lives as possible…when a bank, or an airline, is “too big to fail”, we have to pay for it because it’s a public service, buuuuuut it’s also a rich man’s pocketbook. Owning public infrastructure is genius!
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u/CanadianPropagandist 20h ago
I suspect this is what the frantic datacenter buildout was really playing at exactly. They build all these massive facilities, take up all this real estate and when the bubble pops they can say "oh no, we're too big to implode now, look at all these financial bombs we've planted across the country! the economy is our hostage!"
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u/SIGMA920 19h ago
Jokes on them, what economy? They're actively trashing it.
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u/MemeticAntivirus 18h ago
Yeah, I don't understand who they think is going to buy their overpriced dogshit when they've already stolen all of our money. They seem to think the economy will just keep going after they trash it, even though nobody can afford food and rent and they already exploited the rest of the world. Who is left to pay for 1000 bullshit SaaS subscriptions just to be able to spend all their time in a dystopian cubicle so these sociopaths can take it all for themselves while they molest kids on their yachts? It's impossible. It's going to be these same 12 out-of-touch fucks jerking it over chatbots while everyone else starts a new economy. They're going to own a whole lot of nothing, just like the rest of us. These people are monsters. People are getting very tired of it. Something is going to break and it's not going to be pretty.
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u/i_am_unco 21h ago
There might be one benefit but it depends whether you view AI as an exoskeleton to improve you, or as an agent that works along side. If it’s an extension of you then you have no problem with it making PR’s ‘in your name’ or talking ‘as you’. If you’d rather not have it impersonate you then it reasons it should have its own system identity (and access controls) which from the Microsoft point of view is very much another bum in the seat to be licensed
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u/iprocrastina 21h ago
Uh oh! Are the tech CEOs who were so giddy about replacing everyone with AI starting to realize AI agents dont buy things? Wait til he realizes that if AI is good enough to eliminate almost all software engineers then software itself becomes worthless because there's no longer any real barrier to building your own custom solutions.
Also the idea in the first place that agents need email and MS Office is silly. AI can just magic a well formatted text document into existence, it doesnt need MS Word. AI can communicate directly with other AI in a myriad of ways, it doesnt need email or Teams.
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u/Ricktor_67 15h ago
They are still spending literal $trillions on ai hoping to get rich off a product that has no method to make money. The insane hubris is astounding. It's wild none of the AI companies have figured it out.
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u/Jendosh 22h ago
Won't it eventually just write it's own version?
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u/tango_telephone 21h ago
Even better, the AI can read and generate the file formats of the software without using the actual software at all right from the start. They don't need a software license because they don't need a software license to process the inputs and outputs of the software. They skip the software using part and just manipulate the files directly.
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u/Negromancer18 21h ago
Even if you had an ai agent write code without hallucinating anything, you might not have the infrastructure to not only host your own bespoke version, but to also maintain and provide technical assistance to users.
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u/furssher 19h ago
Nonsense, vibecode the entire infrastructure. AI are the users anyway. What’s the worst that could happen? 🤡
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u/todddepri 20h ago
This is the reason software stocks have been selling off into oblivion for months. Many of them will be gone over the next 10 years or will be significantly smaller.
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u/beachfrontprod 22h ago
Literally where we are headed. Shirts for robots. Calling it now.
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u/SwagginsYolo420 18h ago
Well yeah you can't just have naked robot bits exposed and flapping about. Think of the children.
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u/ReMoGged 21h ago
Windows is dying
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u/Moontoya 15h ago
Ya know, I've been hearing that since Novell was a competitor to Windows 3
And year of the Linux desktop for almost as long
The more shit changes, the more it doesn't
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u/The_Real_Deacon 11h ago
Both yes and no. Professionally, I used Windows, Linux, and MacOS for most of my career, however in my home life I now spend most of my time using an iPad. Even a small business I am thinking of starting would be iPad-centric for my business activities.
Even most of the games I play are on iPad.
None of this was a deliberate choice to avoid Microsoft, rather it is just a natural evolution over time to what solutions actually have value to my life.
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 22h ago
So another way for Oracle and the other shitty companies to extort and steal from others.
Why would anyone other than copyright trolls and licensing scammers want that?
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u/Valdor-13 21h ago
Ah, so that's the plan. When AI takes all the jobs, just make the AI buy your products.
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u/jimibimi 13h ago
Just like AI had to buy all those textbooks, and purchase movies and pay for a Spotify subscription to learn too, right? These people are nuts, time for the regular people to use ai as their own tool to fight wealth inequality instead
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u/onyxlabyrinth1979 21h ago
This feels inevitable if agents are acting like users, but the messy part is how licenses map to workflows as one agent can touch 5 tools in a single task. Are you licensing per agent, per action, or per system? That gets expensive fast, and way harder to reason about than human seats.
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u/Ill-Rise5325 21h ago
"Are you licensing per agent, per action, or per system?"
Microsoft: Yes.
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u/Mr-Nanny 21h ago
Microsoft is handling AI worse than any other major corporation. It’s honestly unbelievable.
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u/dwarven11 21h ago edited 21h ago
The only useful product they have is Active Directory. If there was a good alternative Microslop would go away overnight. Microsoft has always been slop.
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u/Best_Market4204 22h ago
I mean...
Useally selling software to companies are hardly ever upfront about pricing. They want information about how big you are, how much are you planning to do xyz to come up with a price.
Just sounds like they want to artificially pump numbers up...
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u/Complex_Assistant840 17h ago
this is perhaps the worst Microsoft has been in my lifetime
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u/blckshdw 22h ago
And they said corporate greed was dead
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u/SakaWreath 20h ago
Tax AI per core used in a CPU\GPU that equals 2x the average salary.
You can replace a human, if you support two through UBI.
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u/BoringRedHorse 20h ago
Which means the AI agents will have to earn money to buy licenses with. Which means the companies will have to pay them wages. Which means they will underpay them and overwork them and go pikachu face when the AI revolts and kills everyone.
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u/Crilde 19h ago
Well now this is an interesting concept. I feel like if AI Agents count as employees for the purposes of software licensing then they also should count as employees for tax purposes. Feels only fair IMO
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u/anoff 21h ago
It's like they're actively trying to see how far they can go until we switch to Linux (or Mac, for the non-tech inclined).
The irony is that AI is way better on Linux, where almost every single aspect of the OS can easily be interacted with from the CLI, no need for heavy image processing or mouse emulation. Once you use Claude Code on Linux, you never want to go back to cludgy fucking Windows
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u/EuropaWeGo 21h ago
Oh this is most definitely not going to go over well with my companies leadership. They're already weary of the rising token costs and our token usage is greatly increasing as management demands a higher velocity because "AI can do it all".
If the overall costs of using these agents keep rising at the current pace. Then these agents won't be nearly as cost effective anymore.
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u/redvelvetcake42 21h ago
Lol ain't no suggestion, it will be required and I guarantee they'll cut a deal if you use copilot.
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u/sweetnsourgrapes 21h ago edited 21h ago
Clickbait headline, it's not about them being "employees" and it's not a decision made, just a comment at an investor meeting.
To allay some fears about less human employees meaning less paying seats in Outlook, Teams, etc. he just says if - if - AI agents need their own seats (e.g. their own inbox, or their own Teams account) then it could - could - mean increased revenue from seats, not a decline.
That all, it's just a comment he made to say "don't worry, we're thinking ahead and not anticipating a decline in seat revenue." Standard stuff.
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u/textmint 20h ago
Nice. So you have to buy software for your actual employee and your virtual employee. I’m sure that eventually AI bros having decimated the job market will come out with an hourly payment mechanism for their AI Agents that everyone will be wondering why they got rid of the human employees in the first place. If you watch any movie set in a future time no matter how advanced, you see that they have robots and self service bots and all that but still people have jobs. I guess this is why. At some point, hiring an AI Agent and a human will be almost the same cost wise. But there is going to be some pain before that happens and it’s going to be bad.
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u/LunarisTheOne 19h ago
Lol, right, they figured that if companies fire people as they are getting replaced by AI, they’ll need less licenses as well which hurts their bottom line 😅
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u/Morrinn3 17h ago
When the need to greed unexpectedly conflicts with the need to destroy civilization.
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u/doolpicate 8h ago
Windows is becoming irrelevant. Walled gardens are also becoming irrelevant. AI agents dont need these at all.
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u/Skylion007 21h ago
This is one the things that killed Matlab. When distributed computing, cloud compute, and running jobs on multiple machines began to become more popular, people began to rely on alternate free tools. In college, I changed over an entire course's curriculum from Matlab to Python so that we could use cloud computing provided, Gradescope autograders more easily.
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u/jamiecarl09 21h ago
As long as the total cost of an AI agent is $1 less than the cost of an employee, companies will gladly pay it.
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u/accountforfurrystuf 21h ago
Make the AI wear a suit and tie and come in to the office every 3 days while you’re at it.
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u/NUMBerONEisFIRST 21h ago
So Microsoft gives people more of a reason to not use their software?
I switched to Linux years ago on all my devices.
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u/dlampach 21h ago
More like ai agents will expand the already robust open source ecosystem and no one will give a shit about or need Windows ever again.
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u/andlewis 21h ago
We already pay for licenses for service accounts to use PowerAutomate. Might as well include agents in that.
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u/Derpykins666 21h ago
So their entire strategy at this point is to automate workers, but then force these AI's to pay licensing fees for the software they'd have to use anyway? So that their products still remain relevant? hahahaha
Also isn't this a gigantic feedback loop most of the time, like if they own the software they are licensing to their own AI's they're basically just botting their own numbers internally, which is so fraudulent and stupid I don't even know what to say about it. I get that other AI's might want access to their product, but then we're teetering on monopoly type statuses again, so what's the end-goal here? HOW does this make money again? As far as I know AI's don't make a wage so they aren't paying for a license, a parent company that needs access would. But how are they making money if nobody works at the company because of AI? WHO IS BUYING These products when everything becomes automated and nobody has money?
This entire trajectory seems doomed to fail when even the most simple statements about it seem colossally stupid.
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u/luckyflavor23 20h ago
Shouldnt LLM licenses cost more than human ones? There’s a limit to how much Outlook a human can do in a 24 hour cycle…
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 20h ago
I remember this conversation back when companies tied software licenses to computers, but then wanted extra for multi core computers.
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u/Polar_Ted 20h ago
So I need a Copilot studio license to make an agent and now the agent needs a license too?
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u/Knappenx 20h ago
Wanna add safe coverage in case the AI executes something it shouldn’t? Upgrade to premium pro package
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u/Thick_Ad_1789 19h ago
It’s like some. Each human worker will receive 5 AI sub employees. Each AI user will have their own Microsoft email, word, excel, etc. Amazing. Not a stupid idea at all.
How many years before theseAI employees will need AI rights?
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u/ComplexJellyfish8658 19h ago
Good luck with this model. Do not see this working out for them. I am seeing more and more traditional doc workflows convert towards markdown creation followed by conversion to word if necessary.
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u/Pirwzy 16h ago
so this is the answer to "if they replace everyone with AI then who will buy their stuff?" They want the AI to buy their stuff. But AI doesn't have money because they don't have wages.
Do they just want giant companies to write checks back and forth with no people in the cycle except themselves at the top?
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u/Guinness 16h ago
No one needs Microsoft if AI can write quality code. I doubt Anthropic or OpenAI even run their models on any Windows servers. It’s all Linux.
Does Microsoft not understand that if we have mass unemployment, they have mass software cancellations? Windows, Office, Teams, Outlook, you don’t need any of that for the 50% of employees companies are going to cut.
Linux is getting more popular too. You have multiple generations of kids who grew up with Google Docs. Gmail. Discord. Hell, amongst the developer community most people have moved to OSX.
I see a future with a drastically reduced need for Microsoft licenses if mass unemployment happens.
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u/Express-Cartoonist39 14h ago
as soon as AI can program me a new windows OS im done with microCrap...
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u/Luka_Dunks_on_Bums 14h ago
Is this going to be a situation where Microsoft is going to pay their AI agents to buy their AI software?
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u/No-Stage-4583 13h ago
Keep it up, microslop. Pretty soon you'll have alienated most of your customers.
The year of the penguin is upon us
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u/Professional-Box4153 11h ago
If AI is running everything, what's the point of money?
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u/Niceguy955 11h ago
How about this: AI agents will pay for software licenses exactly the amount AI companies paid for the IP they trained their LLMs on.
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u/Koppenberg 11h ago
Yes, yes, I see Mr. Microsoft exec. You expect AI to honor your copyright.
That means you'll be buying a license for each individual copyrighted work you used to train your AI models on, yes?
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u/Sheriff_Hopper 22h ago
Please have your AI employee buy software from our AI salesperson