Microsoft’s Satya Nadella evangelises over AI potential
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has spoken of the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning techniques for his company and beyond with the ability to convert large amounts of data into intelligence.
Speaking at the company’s Ignite conference Nadella said “AI is at the intersection of our ambitions,” adding that the nascent technology would soon allow the software giant “to reason over large amounts of data and convert that into intelligence".
Equating AI to the invention of books and the web ,Nadella sought to position Microsoft as a gatekeeper to this brave new world by being able to make sense of unimaginable volumes of data which are expected to be generated in the not too distant future.
Some of the first practical fruits of this work are already appearing through the emergence of ‘intelligent assistants’ that are capable of understanding people on a far deeper level than today’s devices.
Nadella further pledged to enhance other services such as Office 365 by making sense of the data underlying applications, real-time Skype translation and improved spelling correction in Word.