Among the big five tech giants, Microsoft has been most active in leaning into all the recent AI excitement. This has been an opportunity to gain market share for Bing, among other things. What is the company doing and thinking behind the scenes? We hear directly from the source…
Key Takeaways
Here are a few key messages or insights that we gleaned from this session.
- Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI has given it an inside track for AI, which we’re already seeing with ChatGPT integrations in Bing and the Edge Browser.
- Microsoft is proceeding opportunistically but also carefully… as AI has potential pitfalls in things like misinformation and early-stage technical issues.
- Microsoft sees AI as an additive part of the consumer journey, rather than a technology that replaces it.
- Microsoft’s goals with ChatGPT involve a few pillars. The first is its longstanding goal of providing a better search experience. The second is the joy of discovery which plays out through suggestions in the results. The third is to spark users’ creativity, and AI gives them a tool to do that through creative text prompts.
- ChatGPT could drive toward search meeting users’ cognition. In other words, we currently search through keywords (which average 3 words in the aggregate). AI could get us closer to searching with natural language.
- Similarly, search results have traditionally been “10 blue links” which isn’t how the human brain works. The goal behind AI-infused search is to provide answers beyond just a long list of links.
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AI From Theory to Reality
In 2020, Microsoft’s CEO recognized that the future of AI wasn’t in smart assistants like Cortana, Siri, and Alexa. Instead, Satya Nadella saw the future of computing would be in generative AI, like what is now ChatGPT. After Microsoft’s initial invested $1b investment in ChatGPT’s creator, it recently announced a follow-on $10b investment. Among other topics, this session will explore how SMBs / SMB partners can think about leveraging this new model for their advertising needs.
Aaron McGrath, Microsoft
Kelly Thomas Nojam, Microsoft
