For several months now, AI companies have made a great deal of “AI agents,” meaning autonomous software systems that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of humans with minimal intervention.
But no one knows when that ambitious vision will turn into reality. The current crop of agentic AI models still fail too easily, often requiring humans to jump in, effectively defeating their purpose.
The numbers remain disappointing. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that the best-performing AI agent at the time, which was Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time.
And this summer, OpenAI Released your ChatGPT agentPromising that it can “do the work for you, handling complex tasks from start to finish, using your own computer.” But in reality, users found the experience lackluster, describing it as “not very useful,Unstable,” And “slow,
So, it should come as no surprise that Microsoft is struggling to sell its enterprise customers on agentic AI on its own. As Information reportsThe company’s Azure salespeople are seriously struggling to meet some very ambitious sales growth targets, with quotas cut by as much as 50 percent earlier this year.
Microsoft’s stock fell more than 2.5 percent on Wednesday, suggesting investors were unimpressed by the sluggish sales results.
Meanwhile, the tech giant went into damage control mode with a spokesperson Say bloomberg In a statement that “InformationThe story incorrectly combines the concepts of development and sales quotas” and “The overall sales quota for AI products has not been reduced.”
Regardless, the dustup shows that enterprise customers are not convinced that large AI agents are ready to complete complex multistep tasks autonomously. It’s another sign that companies are struggling to convert the huge hype surrounding generative AI into actual revenue, a worrying trend given that AI companies are spending billions of dollars right now, with no end in sight – or return on investment – ​​in sight.
It’s not that Microsoft customers are being unreasonable. Generative AI continues to struggle with the absolute basics, and hallucinations remain a major pain point. Multiply the fact-making capability for an AI as it attempts to complete a more nuanced, multi-step project, and the likelihood of it failing increases even further.
In short, the future being sold to these customers isn’t here yet. And this could hamper AI companies’ lofty expectations when it comes to monetizing the technology.
Then competition has increased the pressure on Microsoft. In June, bloomberg informed Employees preferred to use OpenAI, cutting into its ability to sell Copilot.
Fortunately for Microsoft, most of its current revenue comes from renting cloud computing infrastructure to AI companies, not from selling AI products to enterprise customers. Information notes.
However, cracks are beginning to appear, indicating that sales may be lagging behind targets as customers realize they are being shown a dream of the distant future.
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