From where I sit, the big challenge for Microsoft is to manage or even hide the complexity of AI from the user while still offering the management, security, and governance the tools require.
Microsoft opened its annual Ignite conference in Chicago this week by focusing on AI agents, Copilot, and advances in its Fabric data platform and some security platforms.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella set the tone in his keynote by talking about how we are in the “middle innings” of AI and that we’re going through a major platform shift toward AI.
Three new capabilities combine to create this platform. First is a new universal interface that is multimodal, supporting speech, images, and video, both for input and output. Second is new reasoning and planning capabilities, in which we essentially have new neural algebra to help solve complex problems, such as detecting patterns or relationships among people, places, and things. Third, we have the ability for the models to support long-term memory and rich context and teach these models to use tools.
Putting all those things together, “you can build a very rich agentic world defined by this tapestry of AI Agents, that can act on our behalf across our working life, across teams, business processes as well as organizations”, Nadella said.
Nadella talked about scaling laws, comparing the advances in AI performance to Moore’s Law governing the performance of PCs. AI performance has been doubling every six months or so, he said, noting the recent debate about whether we’ve hit the wall in scaling. Nadella said it’s important to remember that these are not physical laws, just empirical observations, and skeptics motivate people to focus on innovations such as model architecture, data regimes, or systems architecture. If anything, we are seeing the emergence of a new scaling law, showing how test-time or inference time has really improved with OpenAI’s GPT-4o1 for open AI applications, he said.
“Copilot is the UI for AI”, he said. Ideally, every employee will have a Copilot that knows them, knows their work, helps their productivity, enhances work, and saves time. Copilot Studio will allow you to create agents that automate specific business processes, while IT departments will have systems that manage, secure, and measure these systems. “What ‘lean’ did for manufacturing, AI will do for knowledge work”, according to Nadella.
Over the past year, Microsoft has released more than 300 product updates to the various Copilots. Responses are now two times faster, and user satisfaction with the answers is up three-fold in the past year.
