Satya Nadella: a new era of intelligence in Microsoft

Now the largest software developer aims to integrate all products (from Cortana to Office, from Holo Lens to Azure servers with a single set of artificial intelligence technologies). A speech that may help us better understand the trends that will be most relevant for IT in the near future.

“Microsoft was created to do a specific set of things. We provide people in organizations around the world the opportunity to achieve more. And in the modern world we are going to use artificial intelligence for this. ”

So said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the conference of IT-professionals Ignite, organized by Microsoft in Atlanta. In this statement, he clearly made clear the company's current vision of the role of artificial intelligence. It turns out that an unimaginably wide field of activity will become available to him. The examples that were part of the presentation clarify this.
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Here are some of them:

• Use health analysis to help Cortana notice that the user is eating too much junk food and may miss a gym visit.
• Working with Volvo to improve car safety with a driver's facial expression analysis, making sure that he is alert, not distracted and in a mood appropriate for safe driving.
• Inviting football / baseball legend Dion Sanders to test the football bot NFL, which Microsoft hopes to prepare for next season.
• Verifying the identity of Uber drivers using the mandatory selfie, which is analyzed using Microsoft facial recognition technology.
• Use HoloLens Augmented Reality Glasses to preview kitchen designs at the Lowe Store (with recommendations based on Buyer's pins on Pinterest).
• Translation of the novel “War and Peace” in a fraction of a second using the Azure cloud computing service and various FPGA chips (programmable logic integrated circuits developed by Microsoft).

Most of these examples have more than just a WOW effect. But Nadella drew attention to the fact that it is not only Microsoft’s use of artificial intelligence:

“These are not plans for the future . Volvo uses this technology today. Uber is using it today. Lowe uses it today. ”

It cannot be said that the company does not focus on the use of artificial intelligence in long-term projects, including those that most people will not notice, for example, using “biological computing” technologies to better understand how to fight cancer. Nadella says that the company has been involved in such research for many years, and that now it will be able to use its Azure platform to work more effectively in third-party projects, for example, with the pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca, a partner of the company in cancer research.

In addition, Nadella added that now everything is changing so quickly, so the border between research and the project has become incredibly thin. “Sometimes I myself get confused,” he admits. For example, Doug Burger, who demonstrated the benefits of Azure / FPGA products during a speech at Ignite, works in the research department of Microsoft Research, but what he showed is already helping clients of the Microsoft cloud computing system.

Nadella also answered the question of how Microsoft manages its resources to create the necessary artificial intelligence tools, and he said that existing resources are partially used:

“This is a constant update. Our ideas are viewed from different angles. ”

Face recognition technology, for example, originally used in the Kinect sensor for the Xbox, is now distributed as part of a package of cognitive services, used by companies such as Uber; The image search technology integrated into the Bing search service has now become useful for the Holo Lens project.

In some cases, the company is preparing for future acquisitions - such as a deal to purchase a LinkedIn service. The answer to this question Nadella began with a mandatory mention that this transaction has not yet been concluded.

“But we are very, very optimistic. The main thing is that we already have a strong impetus in the use of cloud technologies for business with products such as Office 365 and Dynamics 365. My goal was to tell you how the social network relates to this. This is a business social network, and there is only one such example: LinkedIn. ”

The combined use of effective Microsoft tools and LinkedIn network data about people and their work will help to use all services more effectively. One example: Microsoft’s CRM Dynamics 365 will become a much more powerful intelligence tool if it is directly integrated into the specialist’s LinkedIn network. By the way, we have previously published an article about what skills will be in demand in the future .

Artificial intelligence everywhere

And although the scenarios that Microsoft presented at Ignite were new, the company has been telling the story about artificial intelligence a long time ago, including its Build conference last spring, where agents and bots were the main topic, as well as their ability to transform main products such as for example, Office.

This also corresponds to the current priorities of Microsoft. It seems that this era began when Nadella supervised the presentation of the Office product for iPad (just a few weeks after he took up his current position).

Nadella says that his vision of activity has never been limited to writing applications for operating systems of other companies:

“I was not talking about iOS, or Android, or Windows. It was the first mobile, cloud, universal product. ”

"The keyboard is not connected to the device, it is connected to you"

“From our history, I understood: you cannot believe that a certain device will forever become the center of all activity,” he added, stressing that, just as Windows does not rule the whole world, iOS and Android will not reign forever.

In the time since Nadella began to make the phrase “first cloud”, “first mobile”, the mantra, it became clear: it’s not just that the most famous Microsoft products become compatible with the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

For example, this year the company acquired the rights to use Swift Key, a third-party application - a keyboard for Android and iOS, which, in its version for Android, now uses neural network technology to improve the “prediction” of the words you type:

“We have proven that the keyboard is not connected to the device, it is connected to you. This is a fundamental change in the computer field. ”

Nothing demonstrates the essence of Microsoft's vision of artificial intelligence as using Cortana as an agent (with the client’s consent, of course) who can know a lot about you and share this information with specialized bots on the principle of the minimum necessary awareness.

Now this service has 133 million active users on Windows, iOS and Android systems. As Nadella explains,

"This is only your data, unlike those that will be used for advertising or combined with other data, or transferred to other applications without your consent."

This philosophy is consistent with Microsoft’s overall focus on productivity, but it also helps to clearly differentiate competition from other industry giants that use artificial intelligence to work with huge amounts of data.

“Today we are looking at those who are moving in the same direction as we are. There is Google, there is Facebook. We compete with some, work together with some. Each of these companies has artificial intelligence, but what do they do with it? Even if we choose the same categories, our approaches will differ. ”

And what do you think, will we benefit from what Nadella is talking about?

PS We recommend another useful article on the topic of work on yourself - How to be self-taught .