AI-first approach across industries will transform us: Satya Nadella

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been "pretty stunning" but what the humanity is going to see soon will be even more profound across the spectrum, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has stressed.

Addressing thousands of partners at the 'Microsoft Inspire' event here on Wednesday, Nadella said that the potential is for us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, be it retail, healthcare or agriculture.

"Microsoft has been working on fundamental AI breakthroughs for over 20 years and some of the advances, especially as measured by our ability to have human parity in a lot of these perception and language capabilities is pretty stunning.

"It's happening because of the ability to provision lots of compute capability, to have lots of data, and these new techniques of algorithm promise around deep neural net in particular," Nadella said.

"For us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, whether it's retail or healthcare or agriculture, we want to be able to make sure that they can take their data, in a security-privacy preserving way, convert that into AI capability that they get the return on. That's really the objective," the Microsoft CEO emphasised.

Wherever there is data, compute will migrate to data.

"So we are going and taking Azure to Azure Stack, to Azure IoT Edge, to Azure Sphere. This is that one ubiquitous distributed computing fabric. One programming model that is event-driven, serverless, so you can write an application that truly works across all of this," Nadella explained.

"As we look forward, the opportunity for us to serve our customers in this new era of the Intelligent Cloud and the Intelligent Edge is far greater," he added.

According to him, Microsoft is going to infuse everything with AI.

"It's going to have perception capability, language capability and autonomy that's going to be built into the applications going forward.

"Autonomy is not just about a few self-driving projects. This is about autonomy everywhere," the Microsoft CEO added.

Walmart is using Azure as well as Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. The cash-and-carry major announced a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft on July 17.

Walmart will now embark on a broad set of Cloud innovation projects that leverage Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications.

"They are innovating in retail. They have an amazing presence in offline. And they have good momentum in their online efforts with Jeff and Walmart.com," Nadella told the gathering.

He said that Microsoft 365 will help customers have people-centred experiences rather than device-centred experiences.

The tech giant which has touched $800 billion valuation for the first time, was set to release its quarterly results late on Thursday.

--IANS

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