Microsoft CEO stays committed to AI bots

Despite recent Tay debacle, Satya Nadella confident that software can benefit business

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, says his company is committed to the emerging market for artificial intelligence-based chat software, one week after the company’s first Internet chat bot in the U.S. was so manipulated by users that it had to be pulled down.

“It’s a simple concept, yet it’s very powerful,” Nadella said about the strategy the company has dubbed Conversations as a Platform. “It is about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively in all our computing.”

In a keynote speech Wednesday at the company’s Build conference for software developers in San Francisco, Nadella outlined Microsoft’s strategy for conversation-based products working with bots — software that use artificial intelligence to automate tasks — as well as tools for developers to create their own.

Nadella has been trying to expand Microsoft’s reach and influence in AI, emphasizing how the technology can augment mobile and cloud-computing products. He views the bot strategy as a key way to bring the benefits of artificial intelligence to businesses, consumers and developers. The CEO predicts such programs will dominate the next generation of computing, replacing apps in some scenarios.

On March 23, Microsoft released Tay, an online AI chat bot designed to mimic the personality of a teenager, to attract millennial users. Yet the company had to yank the program after Internet users taught it to spew racist, sexist and pornographic remarks in what the company called a “co-ordinated attack” that took advantage of a “critical oversight.”

In his keynote, Nadella said the company is taking a principled approach to AI in the wake of Tay’s misbehaviour: “We want to build tech so it gets the best of humanity, not the worst,” he said.

Microsoft isn’t the only company pursuing bots. Facebook is opening up its Messenger app to bots that assist with shopping and appointments and the social-media leader is expected to expand that effort in coming months. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Google is working on bots, and the AI programs are rampant on messaging services such as Slack and Telegram, among others. Tencent’s WeChat, an inspiration for Microsoft’s strategy, has been an early leader.

Bots will be “one of the future tenets of the mobile business,” said Michael Facemire, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Cortana, and Microsoft’s strength with developers, will be an advantage as the software maker embarks on this strategy.

Microsoft also showed a video of an artificial intelligence program for vision-impaired customers that answered questions about food and prices on a restaurant menu using a mobile phone camera to read and voice software to speak.

Still, the Tay debacle loomed large over the proceedings. Though Microsoft plans to recommission the bot once it’s been made safer from exploitation, Gartner analyst Chris Howard said the ease and speed of Tay’s public reprogramming may delay corporate adoption.