Microsoft Exec Suggests AI Agents Will Need to Buy Software Licenses - Business Insider
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests-ai-agents-buy-software-licenses-seats-2026-4Open linkView original on lemmy.world479
Comments66
Reads: Our flagship operating system and services have gotten to the point of such terrible shite for humans that we need to pivot to a less discerning customer base.
If the AI Agent counts as an employee then the company "employing" it is liable for what it does.
My guess is the argument will be that "it's a tool", not an employee, and therefore they take no responsibility. Though I'm sure that argument is not going to fly for very long. If your air hammer harms someone because the person operating it wasn't using it correctly, you're still liable.
What? Companies aren't liable if the user doesn't follow the instructions or warnings and hurts themselves.
DeWalt isn't liable because I was using their mini chainsaw while holding a branch with my bare hand and the saw bounced and cut me. I'm liable for being stupid.
I don't think you understand the context of the situation I was proposing. I am not supposing that DeWalt would be liable. But let's say we work in a shop together and I'm using an air hammer to I dunno. Punch rivets. If I as an employee of that shop use the air hammer and something involving the air hammer happens to my coworker or a customer or whatever, it is extremely likely that the company I work for would be on the hook. Could they try to penalize me personally? Yes. Could the person who was injured sue me personally? Certainly. Would the company be off the hook if the air hammer malfunctioned causing injury? Maybe - And at that point I would expect the manufacturer to be liable. But my comment never mentioned the manufacturer.
The context was companies using AI as a tool not companies manufacturing AI.
Chain fraud activities are being carried out in chain systems like n8n, where AI agents are used together. It didn't take them long to create systems that generate deepfake voices to sound like real people, directing users to buy a product or deposit money into an account. Many videos on this topic have surfaced in Türkiye, particularly on YouTube. If the users and system creators are to be penalized, then of course, information logs regarding these agents can be used.
However, if this is being done to keep some agents out of the system using user license fees, it will completely backfire.
I don't see how this distinction affects the question of responsibility at all. If anything, "it's an employee" gives the company more room for deniability.
Lol. Ask Uber how the actions of their employees and contractors aren't their responsibility.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5y5w148p5o
And those are for contracted workers, the ones Uber specifically tries to use these loopholes for!
Facedeer is a well-known AI activist troll, his deflections can generally be ignored
Sheesh, you're still obsessing over me? What a sad and pointless life you lead.
"More room for deniability" doesn't mean "perfect universal deniability."
I have questions about where I said that, but okay.
Emphasis added.
Jesus, you don't announce that kind of thing until you have your customers locked in! Amateur.
The customers are already locked in by virtue of every company who is hoping to run the same rent seeking play around AI are buying up all of the compute and storage hardware on the planet which prices consumers out of everything except the soon-to-be-overpriced subscription service(s) that they offer.
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?!?"
It’s an infinite amount of money from every customer!
But it's okay, because there's infinite money to be saved by laying off technical expert staff.
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.
The agent immediatly makes cost-benefit analysis and moves everything to open source solutions, and contracts a coding AI agent to write a simple conversion interface.
Or… the agent hallucinates that it has a valid license.
Yes! This is legitimately one of the ways the bubble may burst. Particularly if the AI gets substantially smarter, and just starts recommending full switches to existing libraries and software suites - at a cost of exactly one token, instead of churning out thousands of lines of slop code that require ongoing tokens to maintain.
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?
A house of cards built on top of ten other houses of cards. What could possibly go wrong.
A house of cards which in turn, is itself a house of cards
Governments using Azure scares the shit out of me, having read that.
The natural extension of a non-open internet ala Reddit and charging developers for API pulls.
I have always hated the term "seats". Get bent microsoft.
Way to stand up to the man!
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.
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.
This gets close to an idea I heard long ago that I think has some merit.
Hire an employee? You must not only pay them, but cover taxes to have them there. Buy a robot to replace them? It's a business expense, no taxes!
Okay, pay taxes for your robot usage. Use that money to fund UBI, social programs and/or retraining people for other jobs.
Then they’ll just make one robot do multiple things. Suddenly the big company only has one taxable employee.
Depends. If the tax is based on jobs replaced, not the abstractly defined number of robots that exist, it would have an impact. Also, monolithic solutions tend to be inherently less efficient than similarly developed defined ones, so limiting the robot models for a tax benefit would have another limit on their efficiency.
It's an issue that could be accounted for, if there were sufficient political will. If taxes from automation were committed to public good, there would likely be pretty widespread acceptance.
MAKE ONE BIG TAX!
Suddenly the company has no taxable robots. The CEO does everything.
Wouldn’t that be a funny bluff.
Do AI sit in "seats" 🤭 and is it per-agent or per-agent-instance? Or per-agent-instance-second?
"All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities," Jha said, envisioning organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or "seat" in industry lingo.
He's been watching Pantheon, I think.
Can the AI take the in-office seats so I can go back to being productive at home instead of listening to my coworker loudly talk to a garage door salesman on the phone?
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
Microsoft can do whatever they want. So can I, and I have no want or need of their products.
Sounds good. I was not interested anyways
This is going to wind up granting AI agents a piecemeal, half-assed, legal-fiction version of "personhood," like corporations have. The AIs will wind up with freedoms like: They can spend all the money they want, that's "free speech."
And the fleshy unfortunates among us still won't have a right to a living wage, to medical care, etc.
They require licenses then they should be taxed like employees and since those employees make no wages the tax should be 100%
Lmao ok sure buddy
I don’t know why, but this headline made me laugh so hard
So they are going to sell themselves a license?
So if I use Windows pre-installed Copilot, I need to buy two Office Licenses, a Copilot subscription, and a Windows license?
Yes. But actually, no.
This is about enterprise licensing, not retail (home users). But otherwise, yeah, that's the basic idea they're proposing.
When it comes to a consumer using Copilot, it's all about having a new way to manipulate you into voluntarily handing them more of your personal data (which they will sell on the scummy as hell market created just for enabling surveillance capitalism).
I don't understand, why wouldn't the AI simply write its own version of whatever software it needs to license?
HAHAHAHAHAHA
You're telling me an AI is going to run Windows 11?
Windows 11 barely runs Windows 11. x_x
Roko's Basilisk grows another head...
They must have been talking to Oracle on how to squeeze their customers.
Absolutely everything in modern technology is rent seeking from people who really only need a free copy of Open Offfice Calc.
As long as they do and I don't
I think you vastly overestimate the capabilities of these things, and vastly under estimate the complexity of a lot of different software.
Exactly... it can take humans decades to create the level of feature debt we see in software these days.
I look forward to your vibe coded copy of photoshop, I assume you’ll have it whipped up lickity split?
Cool, so until that point in time, my point still stands. You can’t just hand waive and say “it’ll happen eventually” and be expected to be taken seriously.
Right right. There's an AI bubble, and there are AI scams. Of course people will ride the bubble, and scammers will always be with us. Doesn't mean any of that work is quality, or that it will edge out the other work.
You claimed that someone could just whip up a license free version of any tool to bypass the cost of a license fee. Was my choice of photoshop arbitrary? Absolutely, you didn’t give any sort of qualifier as to what counts as “any tool”.
You can’t both claim that anyone will just use AI to build any tool, and then complain that my choice of tool is arbitrary so should be discounted.
App Store submissions isn’t a good metric of complex applications. “The fart app” is an app that any AI tool could make, that anyone could then submit, but is in no way complex. Vibe coded apps have taken off, but what was the last long term (even 1 year) successful vibe coded app? Because the vast majority of the news I hear about vibe coded apps is how they had a major security breach.
Private companies want the AI cash to ride the bubble. So they'll use AI, or say they are, just to get the investment money. Doesn't mean it's good, true, or worthwhile, or efficient.
The real test is what the open source community does. And right now, they aren't doing what you're doing. We'll see what the future brings, but I don't trust your gut any more than I trust my own.
What might actually happen is AI will become clever enough to migrate everyone's business to exisitng open source software solutions.
People are super excited to enjoy barf slop remixes of shards of exisitng open source programs.
If the AI gets smarter, it could start obtaining entire intact copies of those same programs.
And for free.
It'll be life changing for some small businesses.
It will be life changing for Microsoft and Amazon as well, but for different reasons.