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News site Business Insider is laying off 21% of its staff. A memo on Thursday 29 May from CEO Barbara Peng blames a precipitous drop in search engine traffic. [Twitter, archive]
Around 70% of Business Insider traffic came in from search. Business Insider is trying to pivot to stuff that isn’t search-driven — like live events.
Google search traffic has been down for everyone as Google tries to get the AI Overview to give full answers to people searching on Google — without them clicking through to the original sites that AI Overview cribbed from. Then 21% of the staff get fired.
Fortunately, Business Insider can keep pumping out the content! Per Peng’s memo:
Over 70% of Business Insider employees are already using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly (our goal is 100%), and we’re building prompt libraries and sharing everyday use cases that help us work faster, smarter, and better.
So Business Insider will be AI slop, but human-reviewed. Should be a delight to keep working there! And I’m sure the staff will get all the time they need to review the slop for publication.
Axel Springer said that their other US news publications, Politico and Morning Brew, would not be affected. But Politico seems to have already violated an agreement over AI with the PEN Guild, the journalists’ union at Politico, when it started doing AI summaries of live events without working it out with the union first. Note that live events are one of the things that Business Insider is hoping to pivot to. [Wired, archive]
Microsoft has carefully leaked the news of its BIG SALE of Copilot licenses to Barclays Bank! 100,000 seats! Fantastic! [Bloomberg, archive]
That’s a few million dollars? If that. Microsoft claims “dozens” of organisations bought into Copilot big time — but the only other one the Register could confirm was Siemens. [Register]
Microsoft’s Business Applications Launch Event for 2025 Release Wave 1 — snappy title, eh? — included a slide trumpeting the huge momentum for Copilot Studio! 160,000 organisations, sending 251 million messages! Wow! [blog post]
A message costs one cent. So Copilot Studio is generating at most $2.5 million a month, or $30 million a year. Worldwide. Microsoft is forecast to spend $80 billion on AI in 2025.
For 160,000 organisations, that’s 52 messages per day each. That’s a few tens of Copilot Studio actions a day, or one or two agent runs. That’s not using Copilot for real work — that’s playing with it to try it out.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is full AI or bust: [Bloomberg, archive]
“The last five years we spent building, it doesn’t matter. It’s not worth anything anymore,” he recalls Nadella telling them. “Burn the ships.”
Remember Stephen Elop of Nokia’s “burning platform” memo in 2011? Nokia adopted Windows Mobile as their phone operating system — which failed in the market. Nokia used to own the phone market.
We noted previously that Microsoft doesn’t break out its AI numbers anywhere it can avoid doing so. That’s because the numbers are bad.
Nadella going AI is going to be Facebook going Metaverse at the best.
