Microsoft appears ready to bet on artificial intelligence, with CEO and president Satya Nadella outlining his intentions to integrate artificial intelligence with essentially all of its customer solutions and every layer of technology stacks.
The company has made several big plays in AI in 2023, with its partnership with OpenAI and its Copilot AI integrated into the web browser being key examples of this.
Here's my annual letter to shareholders, a look at how we're reinventing every layer of our technology stack in this new era of AI and the growing opportunity ahead. https://t.co/lMZjxhDcMj
- Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) October 19, 2023
In an annual letter shared via LinkedIn on October 19, a Microsoft-owned platform that recently launched an AI assistant โ Nadella emphasized that โthe next generation of AI will reshape every software category and every business, including ours.โ
โEvery area of โโcustomer solutions and every layer of our technology stack will be reinvented for the AI โโera. And that is exactly what we have already started to do.โ
Speaking about the company's AI Copilot, Nadella highlighted that Microsoft is "integrating Copilot into all of our most used products and experiences," in addition to creating a standalone app.
โJust as today you launch an operating system to access applications or use a browser to visit websites, we believe you will invoke a co-pilot to perform all of those activities and more: shopping, coding, analyzing, learning, creating,โ he wrote.
In the letter, Microsoft's CEO highlighted two key advances that he believes will be critical in "this new era of AI."
First, he highlighted natural language processing, a branch of AI focused on helping computers understand text and speech in a similar way to humans.
"We believe we have reached the next big step forward: natural language, and we will quickly go beyond it to see, hear, interpret and make sense of our intent and the world around us," he wrote.
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Second, he noted the โemergence of a powerful new reasoning engineโ (also known as generative AI) and its capabilities for things like answering questions, solving problems, and recognizing images.
"This generation of AI helps us interact with data in powerful new ways, from completing or summarizing text to detecting anomalies and recognizing images, to help us identify patterns and gain insights faster than ever."
To date, Microsoft has already integrated its AI Copilot into services such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and GitHub. For his game drive thoughNadella did not specifically outline the company's AI plans in that area.
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