Inside Microsoft's $2.5bn bet

Mike Belsito hosts Now Shipping, Mind the Product's weekly AI news briefing for product practitioners. This episode brings together three stories that share a single throughline: the model era is giving way to the deployment era. Mike unpacks Microsoft's $2.5bn bet on embedded AI delivery, the same company's simultaneous 4,800-person headcount reduction, and an enterprise benchmark study revealing that 71% of executives at billion-dollar companies say their own organisation is the biggest barrier to AI performance.

Chapters:

(0:00) Introduction
(0:23) Three stories, one thread
(1:31) Microsoft Frontier Company
(5:17) The AI layoff wave
(11:39) The organisational readiness gap
(15:10) Wrap-up