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.
They require licenses then they should be taxed like employees and since those employees make no wages the tax should be 100%
So they are going to sell themselves a license?
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.
It’s also a billing strategy that only works in a monopoly situation. If there was healthy competition and no vendor lock-in for the office suite of tools, Microsoft wouldn’t be able to even float this as an idea.
The one thing Microslop excels at is precisely lock-in.
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
Omniscient, omnipotent Business Leaders: “what? There is a catch?!?”
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?
On a technical level, that makes zero sense.
AI “agents” are basically just fancy prompts with a tool calling harness. They are infinitely replicable, at zero cost, with no intrinsic value; the cost comes from the generic CPU host, and the API calls to GPU servers, databases, or whatever else that are all centralized anyway.
Wanna hear a dirty secret?
“AI” cost is going to zero.
Model capabilities aren’t scaling, but inference efficiency is exploding, thanks to more resource-constrained labs and breakthroughs in papers. The endgame of the current bubble is mediocre but useful tools anyone can host themselves, dirt cheap. Maybe a bit more reliable and refined than what we have now, but about as “intelligent.”
And guess what?
Microsoft can’t profit off that. None of the Tech Bros can.
Point being, this exec is either delusional, or jawboning, so the world doesn’t realize that “AI” is a dumb utility/aid, and they can’t make any profit off it.
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
A house of cards built on top of ten other houses of cards. What could possibly go wrong.
The natural extension of a non-open internet ala Reddit and charging developers for API pulls.
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.
I don’t know why, but this headline made me laugh so hard
Lmao ok sure buddy
I don’t understand, why wouldn’t the AI simply write its own version of whatever software it needs to license?
As long as they do and I don’t
Roko’s Basilisk grows another head…
