The Six Five Team discusses the Microsoft AI and Surface Event.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: But let’s move on to the Microsoft AI and surface event. Pat, we brought The Six Five, we brought the analysis.
First of all, just a really good event. I love these kind of pop-up, one day, high impact, lots of announcements, big mix of media personalities, analysts, executives, a lot of access. And when I say a lot of access, Pat, first time what in five years that Satya sat down and really did an in-depth conversation with the analysts here, was amazing. And not only did he sit down, but he was very engaged, connected and grateful, which I loved. And gave us a lot of great feedback. Pat, we covered the gamut of hybrid on-premise data. You asked a great question. I think you got great question twice in one answer from him. So that was the most great question that he gave to anybody all the way to where I was asking him about regulatory and policy. And he really gave us a very succinct feedback on all of that. But moreover, let’s talk about what got announced.
I’m going to talk about the copilots, Pat, and I’ll leave you to talk about the devices a little bit maybe, and obviously as much as you want to talk about the copilots, but we’re entering an era where we need to bring simplicity and we need to bring generative AI value to our organizations. We’ve been hyping and talking and Microsoft has been at the forefront since November of last year when ChatGPT hit. It made its early announcements, Pat, we were in Redmond beginning of the year. We heard about the first Bing with GPT inside of it and then it started moving through the M365, it started moving into Edge and Windows 11, it started moving into productivity tools and of course D365. We’re going to see co-pilots in everything.
But really the idea is a copilot for everyone and it’s kind of starting off with a copilot for the consumer and a copilot for the enterprise. And then as we move forward, and this was something I’m very interested in, we’re going to start to see Microsoft really attempting to deliver a copilot for your life, which is going to blend the physical and work and digital and consumer experiences together. And yesterday was really a moment where we saw some GA happen. I think one of the biggest announcements, the ones I got most excited about was the copilot going GA for M365 and their productivity suite.
Pat, I have been waiting to try this. I know, I believe I’m really influential, but they did not let me have it. So my ego has been in a cobweb in the corner of the office for a while, but my ego’s coming back because I’m going to be building PowerPoints in two seconds when it’s going to be able to read my mind. And Pat, another thing is I loved was the Outlook tool, the sound like me tool that was announced yesterday.
I don’t know if anybody knows, but I really love the way I write. I’m kidding. Today I’m just feeling spunky. But the idea of a lot of generated text is you read it, Pat. We’ve talked about some analysts that probably shouldn’t be proud of the fact that they do most of their writing with ChatGPT or other tools now. I call them-
Patrick Moorhead: Gross.
Daniel Newman: They’re just tools, period. But the idea of it being inspirational is great, but what about the idea of it being inspirational and then being on tone to sound like you? When I write an email, there’s a way that I address people. There is a way that I send off people. There is kind of an inflection that I use inside of in my writing that right now when I use tools to look at it doesn’t sound anything like that. And that’s mostly been testing for me, Pat.
But the idea that we could have these tools sound just like us with the click of a button is very, very cool to me. Yesterday was, but in my opinion was really all about, I put out a tweet like a too long don’t read. And I said it was all about the democratization of the copilot for bringing the copilot to the person. And that’s really what happened yesterday. Whether you’re in Windows, whether you’re in the Edge browser, whether you’re in the applications, and Microsoft really showed its hand that it’s going to move from the consumer Edge of the browser and Windows all the way to the enterprise Edge of your dynamics and of your enterprise search.
And I felt, Pat, that was a really powerful point. We had some good time with the leadership team, not just Satya. We got face-to-face with fellows. We got face-to-face with heads of surface, heads of AI strategy, Pat. A lot of talk about responsible AI, and so I’m going to leave it there, let you kind of chime in here. It was a really exciting … I don’t know, I left energized, although I won’t lie, I did fall asleep on the flight home. I was exhausted.
Patrick Moorhead: Well after all the New York deli stuff, I would totally understand that.
Daniel Newman: It was like a four pound turkey sandwich and I ate yours too.
Patrick Moorhead: I know, half of it.
Daniel Newman: Well, I was hungry.
Patrick Moorhead: So Satya did a really good job kicking it off, really making the case for this being a new category, new interface, new reasoning engine equals new category. And if you look at how long that we’ve been using keyboard and mouse to get in there and trackpad, I think he has a good case. And I don’t think he stretched it too far at all. Like you said, really the punchline of the event was copilot. Two products, one experience, and this cuts across consumer and businesses. And I think this is a differentiator. They’re the only company at scale who is doing this for both right now.
And there’s a lot of arguments for Google and what they’re doing. They don’t touch as many businesses, but they touch more consumers. I expect Apple to show up at some point and they’re primarily a consumer play. One thing that a lot of people missed because I saw some of the coverage from some of the press, it’s like a way to hold an event for nearly no new products in GA for Microsoft 365. This capability is now embedded into Windows and it’s adding generative AI capabilities into photos. It’s adding generative AI into things like Clipchamp, which is so easy I might actually use to get some of my videos and content onto Instagram.
And I think that’s what people missed, a black and white upgrade and big image creator using DALL E 3. I mean I was not that impressed. I probably wouldn’t have used much of the content that came out of the original Bing image creator, but I can see myself using this one now.
Daniel Newman: Looked great. It did. It looked great.
Patrick Moorhead: It did look phenomenal. And the first version, right, this just came with DALL E, faces were weird, hands were weird, humans were weird. And I think I saw enough to know that this is going to be different. New surface devices surfaced as well. And I think the one that I’m most excited about, and probably you because you carry this as your daily go-to, is the Laptop Studio. I carry a 15-inch surface, but I just really enjoyed some of the usage scenarios running circles around the MacBook Pro M2 Max. They did a visual imaging demo and it lapped the MacBook by three to four X as they were running a Llama 2 instance. I love that stuff and really gave us a peak to what the next generation of generative AI experiences are going to be.
Some of those experiences will be delivered through the cloud, primarily delivered through the cloud. Some of them will be primarily delivered on the client computer and some will be a hybrid mixture of those. So I like their strategy. Again, huge Azure, huge capabilities, huge SaaS particularly on the personal productivity side and then very big capabilities. And these Windows capabilities are not just on Surface, they’re in other brands as well as provided by the Windows operating system. Great stuff.
I want to follow up on my one question I got with Satya. If we’ve ever been at an event together, a big part of my research that I’m trying to get my head around is public cloud is 14 years old and first AWS service was 2009. It was a queuing service. Yet 75% to 90% of enterprise data is still on-prem or in devices and not in the cloud. So how does anybody activate these types of experiences if you’ve got to have access to the data and you either have to infer on it, you have to train on it at a minimum, you have to prompt against it?
And one way to do it is send it up to the cloud. And that’s what we’ve seen in these first level experience. But I asked him, “What is your strategy with this in mind?” Net, net, he said, “Microsoft is going to activate data wherever it sits.” And he cited the Oracle database at Azure as a good example. He cited some things that I took as Azure stack and if I read between the lines of his response, I wish I would’ve recorded it, I saw little pieces of federated learning and federated learning is doing the activation wherever the data is. They have Azure Stack as well, which is as I find … so that’s one thing I’m going to keep my eyes on, but Satya seemed very confident in his responses to me on that.
Daniel Newman: Just a quick boomerang because we got to keep moving here, but the idea of a natural language interface and reasoning engine was a big takeaway here, and this was kind of my Shazam moment is the human machine era begins when we are able to naturally interface with the machine and the machine understands and reasons with us in a way that feels empathic and human. As you tie these things together, it gets really interesting and really exciting.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
