An important aspect of Christopher Young’s work as executive vice president of business development, strategy and ventures at Microsoft is to help “corporate" or top leadership at the company think about “what"s gonna move the needle for us in the long run," he says, over a three, five, seven-year horizon or even further out.
“Where should we be thinking about placing our long-term bets?"
Young and his team have helped Microsoft work on complex partnerships—one of the best known today is with OpenAI—which help fill gaps in Microsoft’s own product portfolio, scale various business operations, and continually make Microsoft a more prominent presence in multiple tech ecosystems.
This has led him and his team to work on a wide range of technologies, from cybersecurity to autonomous vehicles to AI for consumer PCs.
Another role he dons is that of an evangelist of the company’s AI products, such as its Copilot and its “agentic" capabilities, meaning, its ability to fulfil various tasks on behalf of human users instead of merely returning useful information in response to various queries.
During a recent visit to India and Bengaluru, Young sat down with Forbes India to talk about how Microsoft’s aim is to become a platform on top of which customers in every market can take up AI development and innovation.
In this conversation, recorded on November 21, he also spoke about how the company’s large team in India will play a role in this, as well as how India’s growing tech products ecosystem will be a source of world-first AI innovations, in areas such as healthcare. Edited excerpts.
Q. How is AI adoption among businesses changing, and anything noteworthy in India on that front?
Globally AI adoption is happening in a few of different ways. Copilots such as the GitHub copilot are becoming very popular amongst developers in tens of thousands of organisations.
Similarly, the Microsoft 365 Copilot, which corresponds with all of our Microsoft 365 products, is seeing strong adoption. In India too, many of our partners such as the large IT services companies, for example, are using GitHub Copilot for their developers across the board. Companies such as Infosys and Wipro are also using Microsoft Copilot both internally and on behalf of our joint customers.
We"re also starting to see specific vertical use cases emerge. For example, I met with a startup in Bengaluru that"s focused specifically on enabling retailers to use AI in their marketing stack. For products businesses, AI is helping them reduce time taken, effort, expense and the complexity involved.
Customer support is another well-known area today in which AI is making a big difference. AI is helping (human) agents be better, faster at answering questions, doing follow-ups and so on. Microsoft has deployed AI in its own customer support, as you can imagine.
AI is also helping us write up cases after the fact, which helps us learn from the interactions. Overall, AI is really shrinking the amount of time people have to spend. It"s improving their overall satisfaction. It"s improving our ability to help our customers.
Q. In his keynote at your recent Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella spoke about AI doubling every six months. Explain this for us.
What Satya is referring to in that case is really the capability of AI is changing quite rapidly. And it"s enabling more and more use cases. If you rewind the clock back a year, one of the knocks on using generative AI was around mathematics. Like if you asked it to solve a problem, it actually might give you an approximated answer as opposed to an exact answer. It wouldn"t actually calculate the answer for you. That"s all changed now.
As you know we recently had a big election. I actually asked Copilot to calculate for me under different scenarios what would be the tax implications of some of the different policies that the incoming administration has talked about implementing. Today, AI is not only able to give me the answer, but to actually walk me through the calculations that it was doing as part of the answer. That’s an example of how it’s evolving.
I would say the tools are becoming more intuitive. We"re getting much better at figuring out how to get the right answers out of our AI agents as well. This is another important thing. Not only are the tools themselves scaling and getting better, but so is our ability to use them, to provide the right context for these agents to be able to give us better answers.
And then there is this path of agentic AI—the ability for these AI agents and co-pilots to do work on our behalf. AI is evolving from just being able to give you good answers to being a companion that will actually perform a task on your behalf. We weren"t there six months ago, but that"s all happening in real time.
First Published: Dec 20, 2024, 12:30
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