Article

Ignite 2016: Microsoft AI Tech Promises to Touch Consumers, Enterprises with Hyperscale Performance

by Dann Anthony Maurno
Assistant Editor, MSDW

"We're not pursuing [artificial intelligence] AI to beat humans at games; we are pursuing AI so we can empower every person and every institution" with the tools of AI. So began Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's afternoon keynote at Ignite 2016.

Nadella went on to describe why this lofty goal is necessary, and how Microsoft is achieving it. He also described how Microsoft has stealthily souped-up its global cloud infrastructure, with a ten-fold boost in compute capacity. (More on that below.)

AI an historic "inflection point"

Nadella described AI as the third of three inflection points that democratized intelligence, the first being the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1400s when perhaps 30,000 books in the world burgeoned suddenly to millions; and the second being the World Wide Web in the ‘90s.

But you can read a book in a few sittings. With information coming fast and furiously from dozens of sources (consider your email inbox alone), how, Nadella asks, are we to make sense of it all?

Time is the key constraint on human productivity; brains don't work as fast as information comes, and have limited capacity. AI in essence gives an individual a larger, faster brain. That "intelligence" is not data, it is rich, contextual, active, rapidly-accessed knowledge, garnered from the user's own habits (like contacts used and searches executed). Rather like Netflix knows your viewing habits and offers suggestions, but on a far grander scale.

Nadella outlined a four-pronged approach to "democratizing" AI, including: 

  • Agents: Harness AI to change how we interact with ambient computing ("agents").
  • Applications: Infuse AI into every application that we interact with, on any device, at any point in time, with ...

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About Dann Anthony Maurno

Dann Anthony Maurno is a seasoned business journalist who began his career as International Marketing Manager with Lilly Software, then moved on as a freelancer to write for such prestigious clients as CFO Magazine; Compliance Week;Manufacturing Business Technology; Decision Resources, Inc.; The Economist Intelligence Unit; and corporate clients such as Iron Mountain, Microsoft and SAP. He is the co-author of Thin Air: How Wireless Technology Supports Lean Initiatives(CRC/Productivity Press, 2010).

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