AI and blockchain for all what Microsoft CEO wants
Nadella says businesses of all sizes need access
TORONTO • Microsoft Corp.’ s CEO says he wants to make new technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain available to businesses of all sizes, to ensure that it’s not just the “high priests” of industry that will shape the future.
“( Democratization) to me is Microsoft’s core identity,” Satya Nadella said in an exclusive interview. “We are not about celebrating our AI prowess, our cloud scale or our mixed reality. It’s what can others do with the technology. That’s why we talk about our mission a lot. It’s to empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
Nadella was in Toronto in October as the closing speaker at Sibos, an annual travelling conference focusing on financial services. He spoke about the Redmond, Wash.- based company’s focus on new technologies and how it’s changed its culture to support it.
Microsoft released a new protocol called the Coco Framework in August to more easily allow enterprise customers to adopt blockchain and allow the new technology into more hands. When it comes AI, the company has been more aggressively integrating an AI platform into its Azure cloud services so customers can make sense of large amounts of data being stored online.
“Microsoft is not about ‘ here is one consumer service of ours and everyone uses it.’ That’s not us,” Nadella said. “We are really about making sure that we can have broad economic surplus that gets created... Hopefully as the economy itself becomes more digital, our ability to have that impact in the next five or 10 years is a quantum leap from what we have done in the last 40 years.”
From mining large amounts of data stored in the cloud to learning user behaviours and traits, AI is quickly becoming the must-have tool of the tech industry.
In September, Microsoft opened an AI lab in Montreal following its acquisition of Canadian AI startup Maluuba, plus it made an investment in Montreal incubator Element AI. Other tech giants such as Google, Apple and IBM have also been spending heavily in the space, whether it be acquisitions or datacentre expansions.
As all of these companies shift significant resources to cloud-based services with AI capabilities — an area that is predicted to hit US$ 130 billion in 2020, according to research company Statistic — it’s what they do with their technology and how they offer it to customers that will set them apart.
Nadella has often proclaimed that Microsoft’s cloud platform business is its future, and the company said in October that its cloud unit’s annualized revenue run rate passed US$20 billion for the first time. The tech giant’s total revenue for 2016 was US$85.3 billion, according to its annual report.
“Microsoft has always been a platform company,” Nadella said, adding that making artificial intelligencebased services more readily available to developers will help further the technology for everyone and lower costs.
“We are going to democratize access to new technology. It can’t be the high priests of new technology that make a real dent,” Nadella said.
“Whether it’s speech, vision, text, natural language or the ability to build bots, all of that is capability that we are just making available to every developer so they can — whether it be a bank, an energy company or a retailer — really transform their business processes with AI.”
The open source-based approach for Microsoft spills over to blockchain, cloud infrastructure and mixed reality as well, he said, where Microsoft creates the “building blocks” for new technology and brings down the cost.
“Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, can bring down transactional costs broadly in an economy and getting that with the right security framework, the right productivity and development frameworks is going to be what we do,” Nadella said.
One of the challenges for any tech firm is retaining the talent that develops new technologies such as artificial intelligence, which is quickly growing in demand.
Since Nadella took the helm of Microsoft in 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, he has been focused on changing the company from a group of “know it alls” to “learn it alls” — a concept borrowed from Stanford professor Carol Dweck, who researches motivation, personality and development.
“Instead of thinking of this as some type of a one- time culture change, it’s ‘ how can we have that continuous process of learning, renewal and curiosity?’” he said. “Having that sense of purpose and sense of mission drive, in fact, what we do and how we do things.”
Being willing to say the company makes mistakes as it experiments with new things and will never be perfect is “the transformational journey of culture” Microsoft is on, Nadella said, adding it includes everyone from executives and engineers to retail employees in local malls.
“Ultimately our customers will rightfully judge us not by our culture and not by our mission but by what we have done in terms of creating innovation that’s useful for them,” he said. “But for me, internally at Microsoft, having these things have been the anchors that are facilitating us to do better when it comes to innovation.”