Microsoft recently decided to put a strategic bet on strongly increasing her position in the market for Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. And then reshape all of her software solutions based on this new technology. With an investment of 1 billion dollar in 2019 and 2021, the company was already one of the early investors in OpenAI – the innovative company behind chatbot ChatGPT, image generator Dall-E2 and other controversial AI solutions. Last month, Microsoft invested another 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, which means that it now owns 49 percent of this company. That decision gives all existing and future Microsoft customers an excellent prospect for major improvements in their software solutions.
In today’s market, we all see a serious shortage of qualified personnel. And due to the enormous aging of the western countries, this problem will only continue to grow in the coming years. Here’s where AI can help. AI tools have the potential to make software solutions much smarter than they are today. Thereby making it possible to increase employee productivity spectacularly.
According to Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, “labor productivity can get a boost through the use of AI. And that is necessary to put the economy back on a growth trajectory”. “In particular knowledge workers will benefit from these new tools”. He drew a comparison with software developers who use these tools as a programming aid. “I have not seen something like this since I would say 2007-2008, when the cloud was just first coming out,” Nadella said.
ChatGPT attracted most of all recent attention to AI. This tool automatically generates text based on written prompts in a fashion that’s much more advanced and creative than past chatbots. The web-based tool went viral after its debut in November 2022. Tech executives and venture capitalists gushed about it on Twitter, even comparing it to Apple’s debut of the iPhone in 2007.
“We’re starting with how to reshape the largest software category on planet earth: search”, Nadella said when talking about the integration of ChatGPT with Microsoft’s own search engine Bing and Microsoft Edge. That is a direct challenge to Google, which currently dominates the search market. Other Microsoft solutions will follow shortly, including the Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM solutions: ”It will be amazing to see how this technology will reshape pretty much every software category. At Microsoft we’re going to move fast!”
If you’re not a Microsoft customer today, the interesting question is how your current software vendor will anticipate on this upcoming AI wave. Since one thing seems very clear: AI has the potential to become a real game changer in today’s business world!
