Is Scout Just a Fancy Addiction Machine like Social Media?

This is disturbing, but not surprising.

Microsoft reveals strategy to “addict” users to new Scout AI agent

The surprising part is that someone put the word in a memo. They wrote it down. (Or maybe Copilot wrote it and they didn’t catch it?)

What’s not surprising is that this is the market strategy for an AI tool. Microsoft has a ton of money invested in AI. In many ways, they bet the company on the success of AI generally, and Copilot in particular, and the market just hasn’t developed the way they expected. So, what’s the next step?

Agents that do everything for you, automatically, with close to zero effort from you, that you become so reliant on that you don’t even blink as the token use costs keep going up and up, helping Microsoft recoup some of that investment.

This is the coming reality for AI users: more and more new features will require higher token costs until someone stops and realizes that AI spend doesn’t make sense. Maybe the cost will make sense in some niche cases or in certain jobs in certain industries, but I’m not sure that having everyone in the organization spend money on tokens is in anyone’s best interest.

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