Speaking at an event in Abu Dhabi, the CEO of Microsoft envisions a future where AI’s potential gets fully unlocked.
Microsoft officially released its Microsoft 365 Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) add-on to some of its enterprise customers on Wednesday. Today, the tech giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has joined an eager audience in a conference room in Abu Dhabi to share how he envisions the tool to disrupt the workplace.
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It is embedded in Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more — to enhance productivity. “It’s improving productivity by approximately 50 percent,” says Nadella. For example, you can give simple prompts in the sidebar of PowerPoint and ask it to make a 7-page slide on the marketing of single-origin coffee beans, and it will deliver well-organized work in a blink. It can also summarize documents, generate emails, and even improve Excel analysis.
It’s also integrated in the form of Business Chat, which works across the Microsoft 365 apps and users’ data — calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts. This allows it to respond to natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.
This feature will cost $30 per person per month for its Office app subscriptions targeting businesses.
An AI-powered future
Speaking in a keynote at the event titled AI — A New Era in Abu Dhabi today, Nadella points to a future where AI will unleash its immense potential. “AI builds on everything that’s come before but marks a real departure,” he says. “That’s why it’s very exciting for you all to be leaning into this particular age with renewed vigor. I think that there are going to be real nonlinear gains going forward as we apply this across all sections of our economy.”
Nadella says that the natural user interface has been central to the development of computing technology. With the advancement in machine learning, computers are able to understand natural human languages nowadays, not only written and spoken language but also visual information. This has given rise to multimodal interfaces, where users can interact with technology using a combination of text, speech, and images. “The software category, the user interface, and the way we, as humans, interact with computers will fundamentally be transformed going forward,” he adds.
Adopting and adapting to AI is crucial at our time, according to Nadella. In every business, the overall adoption of AI is key to the productivity of the whole company. “One of the things I believe is firm-level performance will matter. If you don’t adopt it, we will start seeing disparity across productivity at the firm level.” He also encourages businesses to build their own AI to create solutions tailored to their specific needs and further drive productivity and innovation.
He stresses the importance of considering safe and secure AI development and predicting unintended consequences before they happen. Building responsible AI is the responsibility of every big tech developer as well as policymakers, as Nadella points out. “It’s not just something you put on slides,” he says, mentioning one of the services that the company’s Azure studio provides is AI safety guardrails.
AI in the UAE
As the UAE is at the forefront of adopting and utilizing AI technologies, Nadella also shares his experience interacting with developers and government entities in the UAE who have been leveraging the power of AI to the fullest.” [There’s a] well-architected platform approach,” he remarks on the UAE’s adoption of AI. “They provision an Azure OpenAI landing zone, and on top of that, they have thousands of use cases—everything from check-in to self-service bots are being built. I had a chance to see what the Department of Health is doing. Their use of the data platform was fantastic to get the data house in order.”
Following the keynote, Nadella joins Peng Xiao, CEO of G42, in a fireside chat to discuss how to implement AI in multidomain development, notably in healthcare, education, and efficient governance.
“The UAE has the ability in the next two or three years for multidomain application of these large models,” Nadella says. “If we can crack the code on how to compose [a frontier model like], let’s say, Jais plus, and then apply it to healthcare and education. The outcomes [will change tremendously], from small business productivity to large multinationals becoming more competitive, and all the startups born here will go everywhere.”
The current generation of AI has opened up new possibilities for human-computer interaction, data analysis, and problem-solving. These breakthroughs are not isolated; they are part of a continuous journey toward creating more natural interfaces and leveraging the power of AI to drive economic growth and prosperity. As AI becomes an integral part of our daily lives, we must harness its potential to transform industries, enhance productivity, and empower humanity as never before.
Microsoft CEO in Abu Dhabi: AI improves your productivity by 50%
