The Q in AI
What can we learn from the Microsoft AI Tour that was held at London’s ExCel on February 24th? It would seem – at least from the queues – that thousands of people were waiting to get in to hear the keynote from CEO Satya Nadella, about artificial intelligence (AI) in business.
What is absolutely clear when Computer Weekly finally got through to the keynote, is that there were still many people on the escalators leading down to the bag check and badge pickup, as Nadella launched into a talk looking at the Microsoft way of thinking about AI.
The hour-long keynote included a couple of demos – something regular conference delegates have come to expect from tech company events, where the company’s leaders turn to a product leads to showcase the latest tricks and tips in their products. But that wasn’t why people were queuing to get in. It was to hear Nadella, and listen to his view of AI – and on Tuesday February 24th, it was mainly about agentic AI – and how this is providing new productivity gains for businesses and the public sector.
It was perhaps with a bit of foresight that co-founder, Bill Gates, introduced to the world the idea of “information at your fingertips” in the 1990s. And Nadella referenced this in his presentation, when he spoke about having knowledge at your fingertips. At the time of Gates’ remarks, information was business intelligence and with timely, up-to-date information, people could make informed decisions. It was the era of the relational database and enterprise applications that were built on top of this foundation.
How should IT leaders consider enterprise applications in the era of AI. If we assume that raw data is of low value until it can be interpreted, then information is the first level of interpolation where relationships between datasets can be drawn upon to infer new insights. Nadella sees this evolving to knowledge, through AI baked into enterprise applications. These applications intrinsically “understand” enterprise data, whether it is stored in databases or it’s unstructured, such as an email trail or a conversation thread on something like Slack or Teams.
Microsoft is positioning its office productivity and developer tools suites as the hub and axle on which the AI revolution can roll forward. It’s very clear that Microsoft 365 is central to the company’s AI strategy. It’s no longer about just office productivity tools, but Teams, Outlook, Excel, Word and the rest of the Office productivity suite are being promoted to enterprise knowledge stores, analogous to how SQL Server is positioned as Microsoft’s enterprise data store.
Given Microsoft’s direction of travel regarding AI, IT leaders need to consider the risk versus reward of being locked into Microsoft 365.