By: Fred Humphries, Corporate Vice President, U.S. Government Affairs, Microsoft
AI is a defining technology of our time, and we are optimistic about what it can and will do for people, industry, and society. Microsoft’s advancements in AI are grounded in our company mission to help every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Our investment in AI spans the entire company, from Microsoft Teams and Outlook, to Bing and Xbox, and it’s our goal to democratize our breakthroughs in AI through Azure to help people and organizations be more productive and go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society. We’re committed to making the promise of AI real — and doing it responsibly.
For 30 years, Microsoft Research has been at the forefront of advancing the foundations of computing and translating new scientific understanding into innovative technologies to create value for Microsoft customers and broad benefit to society. We’re not inventing for the sake of inventing, we are focused on how the AI systems of today can help people solve real-world challenges. Driven by progress in supercomputing and machine learning, the industry has been able to train large AI models that can accomplish a wide variety of tasks using natural language —from summarizing and generating text, to generating photorealistic images, to writing sophisticated computer code. These AI models are already helping with tasks like content summarization, document management, and streamlining sales flows, and could eventually even extend to areas like designing new molecules for medicines or creating manufacturing recipes for 3D models.
Microsoft believes that when you create technologies that can change the world, you must also ensure that the technology is used responsibly. We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society, and are committed to creating responsible AI by design through our Responsible AI standard. We take a cross-company approach through cutting-edge research, best-of-breed engineering systems, and excellence in policy and governance. We are committed to sharing our own learnings, innovations, and best practices with decision makers, researchers, data scientists, developers and others, and we will continue to participate in broader societal conversations about how AI should be used.
Microsoft is focused on helping organizations take full advantage of AI, and we are investing heavily in programs that provide technology, resources, and expertise to empower those working to create a more sustainable, safe, and accessible world. Microsoft AI is helping customers solve some of society’s greatest challenges, whether it’s helping make farming more sustainable, protecting vulnerable communities from climate change, studying endangered species, or cleaning up the world’s oceans. Our cloud and AI services help businesses cut energy consumption, reduce physical footprints, and design sustainable products themselves. Using AI and Azure, customers can manage their businesses in a way that protects communities, biodiversity, and the planet.
In February, we unveiled the new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge to reinvent the future of search with your copilot for the web. We aimed to tackle a universal problem with traditional search – that nearly half of all web searches go unanswered, resulting in billions of people’s searches falling short of the mark. We launched the new Bing to bring you better search results, answers to your questions, the ability to create and compose, and with a new level of ease of use by being able to chat in natural language. Bing combines powerful large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 with our immense search index for results that are current, cited and conversational – something you can’t get anywhere else but on Bing. This is fundamentally changing the way people find information.
In March, we introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot which will bring powerful new generative AI capabilities to apps millions of people use every day like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more. In May, we announced that we will bring the Microsoft 365 Copilot preview to more customers and introduced new Copilot capabilities in Whiteboard, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
To ready leaders and businesses for the age of AI, we recently surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries and analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals, along with labor trends from the LinkedIn Economic Graph. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index shows that many employees are ready for AI to reshape work as we go from AI on “autopilot” to AI as copilot. The pace and volume of work is only intensifying, and we see the strain on employees in the data—as well as their optimism that AI can help. The data points to three urgent insights business leaders must know as they look to quickly and responsibly adopt AI.
The inflow of data, emails, meetings and notifications has exceeded our capacity to process it all – resulting in a digital debt. 64% of people don’t have enough time and energy to get their work done, and those people are 3.5x more likely to say they struggle with being innovative. And 60% of leaders are worried about lack of innovation. 68% of people say they don’t have enough focus time, and the #1 productivity disruptor is inefficient meetings.
Despite concerns of AI replacing jobs, the report revealed employees are more eager for AI to lift the weight of work than they are afraid of AI job loss. 49% of people say they’re worried AI will replace their jobs, even more – 70% would delegate as much work as possible to AI in order to lessen their workloads. Managers are looking to empower their people with AI – not replace them. Leaders are 2x more likely to say that AI would be most valuable in their workplace by boosting productivity rather than cutting headcount. In fact, reducing headcount was last on their list.
AI will introduce a whole new way of working—and cause a ripple effect across everything from resumes to job postings. The share of job postings on LinkedIn in the U.S. mentioning “GPT” have increased by 79% year over year. 82% of leaders anticipate employees will need new skills in the AI era.
AI is poised to lift the weight of work—and has great potential to free people from digital debt and fuel innovation. And for both overwhelmed employees and leaders looking to bolster productivity, that promise is overdue. But AI won’t simply “fix” work—it will create a whole new way of working. Leaders will need to help employees learn to work responsibly alongside AI to reap the rewards of the AI-employee alliance: more value creation for businesses and a brighter, more fulfilling future of work for everyone.
With these advances in AI, there is even greater responsibility for those building and deploying AI. The era of AI is here, and Microsoft is helping to power it.
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