Now Shipping

Microsoft's $2.5bn bet: your weekly product briefing

July 13, 2026/1 min read

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