I wonder if OpenAI can break into enterprise. I don’t see much of a path for them, at least here in the EU. Even if they do manage to build some sort of trust as far as data safety goes, and I’m not sure they’ll have much more luck with that than Facebook had trying to sell that corporate thing they did (still do?). But if they did, they will still be facing the very real issue of having to compete with Microsoft.
I view that competition a bit like the Teams vs anything else. Teams wasn’t better, but it was good enough and it’s “sort of free”. It’s the same with the Azure AI tools, they aren’t feee but since you don’t exactly pay list pricing in enterprise they can be fairly cheap. Co-pilot is obviously horrible compared to CharGPT, but a lot of the Azure AI tooling works perfectly well and much of it integrates seamlessly with what you already have running in Azure. We recently “lost” our OCR for a document flow, and since it wasn’t recoverable we needed to do something fast. Well the Azure Document Intelligence was so easy to hook up to the flow it was ridiculous. I don’t want to sound like a Microsoft commercial. I think they are a good IT business partner, but the products are also sort of a trap where all those tiny things create the perfect vendor lock-in. Which is bad, but it’s also where European Enterprise is at since the “monopoly” Microsoft has on the suite of products makes it very hard to not use them. Teams again being the perfect example since it “won” by basically being a 0 in the budget even though it isn’t actually free.
Man, if they can solve that "trust" problem, OpenAI could really have an big advantage. Imagine if they were nonprofit, open source, documented all of the data that their training was being done with, or published all of their boardroom documents. That'd be a real distinguishing advantage. Somebody should start an organization like that.
The cyber security gatekeepers care very little about that kind of stuff. They care only about what does not get them in trouble, and AI in many enterprises is still viewed as a cyber threat.
One of the things that i find remarkable in my work is that they block ChatGPT because they're afraid of data leaking. But Google translate has been promoted for years and we don't really do business with Google. Were a Microsoft shop. Kinda double standards.
I mean it was probably a jive at OpenAIs transition to for-profit, but you’re absolutely right.
Enterprise decision makers care about compliance, certifications and “general market image” (which probably has a proper English word). OpenAI has none of that, and they will compete with companies that do.
Sometimes I wish Apple did more for business use cases. The same https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ tech that will provide auditable isolation for consumer user sessions would be incredibly welcome in a world where every other company has proven a desire to monetize your data.
Teams winning on price instead of quality is very telling of the state of business. Your #1/#2 communication tool being regarded as a cost to be saved upon.
It’s “good enough” and integrates into existing Microsoft solutions (just Outlook meeting request integration, for example), and the competition isn’t dramatically better, more like a side-grade in terms of better usability but less integration.
You still can't copy a picture out of a teams chat and paste it into an office document without jumping through hoops. It's utterly horrible. The only thing that prevents people from complaining about it is that it's completely in line with the rest of the office drone experience.
In my experience Teams is mostly used for video conferencing (i.e. as a Zoom alternative), and for chats a different tool is used. Most places already had chat systems set up (Slack, Mattermost, whatever) (or standardize on email anyway), before video conferencing became ubiquitous due to the pandemic.
And yet Teams allows me to seamlessly video call a coworker. Whereas in Slack you have this ridiculous "huddle" thing where all video call participants show up in a tiny tiny rectangle and you can't see them properly. Even a screen share only shows up in a tiny rectangle. There's no way to increase its size. What's even the point of having this feature when you can't see anything properly because everything is so small?
Seriously, I'm not a fan of Teams, but the sad state of video calls in Slack, even in 2024, seriously ruins it for me. This is the one thing — one important thing — that Teams is better at than Slack.
consider yourself lucky, my team uses skype business. Its skype except it cant do video calls or calls at all. Just a terrible messaging client with zero features!
I’m not sure you can considering how broad a term “better” is. I do know a lot of employees in a lot of non-tech organisations here in Denmark wishes they could still use Zoom.
Even in my own organisation Teams isn’t exactly a beloved platform. The whole “Teams” part of it can actually solve a lot of the issues our employees have with sharing documents, having chats located in relation to a project and so on, but they just don’t use it because they hate it.
Email, Jitsi, Matrix/Element, many of them, e2e encrypted and on-premise. No serious company (outside of US) which really care about it's own data privacy would go for MS Teams, which can't even offer decent user experience most of the time.
> I wonder if OpenAI can break into enterprise. I don’t see much of a path for them, at least here in the EU.
Uhh they're already here. Under the name CoPilot which is really just ChatGPT under the hood.
Microsoft launders the missing trust in OpenAI :)
But why do you think copilot is worse? It's really just the same engine (gpt-4o right now) with some RAG grounding based on your SharePoint documents. Speaking about copilot for M365 here.
I don't think it's a great service yet, it's still very early and flawed. But so is ChatGPT.
I view that competition a bit like the Teams vs anything else. Teams wasn’t better, but it was good enough and it’s “sort of free”. It’s the same with the Azure AI tools, they aren’t feee but since you don’t exactly pay list pricing in enterprise they can be fairly cheap. Co-pilot is obviously horrible compared to CharGPT, but a lot of the Azure AI tooling works perfectly well and much of it integrates seamlessly with what you already have running in Azure. We recently “lost” our OCR for a document flow, and since it wasn’t recoverable we needed to do something fast. Well the Azure Document Intelligence was so easy to hook up to the flow it was ridiculous. I don’t want to sound like a Microsoft commercial. I think they are a good IT business partner, but the products are also sort of a trap where all those tiny things create the perfect vendor lock-in. Which is bad, but it’s also where European Enterprise is at since the “monopoly” Microsoft has on the suite of products makes it very hard to not use them. Teams again being the perfect example since it “won” by basically being a 0 in the budget even though it isn’t actually free.