Microsoft, Forget AI. Privacy is More Central to Your Mission (Premium)

You don’t need a seat on Microsoft’s Senior Leadership team to know that the entire company was given explicit directions to market their products’ artificial intelligence (AI) prowess. The software giant doesn’t miss a chance to tout these capabilities at events and in blog posts and press releases.

On the surface, this focus makes sense: AI, especially to the scale and scope of Microsoft’s operations, is a unique advantage. There are only a very few companies—Google, maybe IBM—that can even hope to effectively compete with Microsoft in this arena. And other erstwhile competitors like Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and whatever smaller players have a long, painful, and expensive road ahead of them if they intend to become serious contenders. In this market, consolidation is guaranteed.

But AI has a major downside, too, a negative reputation. It’s what’s behind those weird non-coincidences that occur with online advertising, where invisible trackers work in the background across sites and services to aggressively push products the hive mind thinks you want. This creepiness is the reason so many people fear and don’t trust Google, in particular: Its bizarre combination of AI prowess and ethical lapses.

Microsoft does see itself as the anti-Google. And it promotes the ethical use of AI, especially to governments. But the problem here is perception: Yes, I do believe that Microsoft can be trusted, and the firm has a certain integrity that I find lacking in other companies, like Apple and Google, an ethical center that is absolutely missing from Amazon. And, yes, Microsoft has a great reputation with enterprises, in particular, and I’m sure those relationships have resulted in their own forms of institutional trust.

But trust is easily lost, and it can be quickly victimized in this era of fake news and science-averse decision making. Worse, the intersection of trust and marketing can be hard to navigate. And with AI in particular, even Microsoft is guilty of overstating how much AI is infused in its products: For example, it’s now claiming that spell-checking in Microsoft Word was an early form of AI so that it can establish that it has decades of experience in this field.

This is silly. Back in the day, Bill Gates would have simply ascribed up these capabilities to the vaguer phrase “magic of software,” and in doing so he would establish the same basic messaging, which is that Microsoft is a superior software maker. Hence, its offerings should be trusted.

Today, however, there is a marketing tack that I think makes for Microsoft. In fact, it’s working great for Apple, and it is an unassailable point no matter what you think about that firm’s recent issues selling its newest iPhones.

Microsoft should promote the privacy of its offerings above all else.

In doing so, Microsoft could be to software and services what Apple is to hardware devices: The world’s trusted provider for offerings that protect your privacy.

This is brilliant for two reasons: It’s great theater—with the understanding that both AI and privacy are essentially theater—and it will play well with everyone. We may never really trust AI no matter which company is promoting it, may secretly feel that we’re heading down the path to the Skynet robot overlords from the Terminator movies. That’s the problem: When AI is fully realized, it’s so smart it no longer needs humans anymore. It is inherently untrustworthy and suspicious.

But promoting privacy will work because it’s so universally appealing. The firm could promise to meet and then exceed the requirements of Europe’s GDPR worldwide, for example. Make all data collection transparent and opt-out. Explain that you pay for Office because you don’t want Google tracking everything you do, every document you create. That the relationship it’s offering is based on trust. Privacy would be the thing that would be baked into all of Microsoft’s offerings, not AI.

Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft can and should continue to infuse its products with AI and AI-like capabilities. It’s just that the focus—the marketing—should always be on privacy. And that privacy—and related controls—should be the one thing that’s certified and available in each product before it goes out the door; a sort of privacy initiative, as it were. Then, instead of explicitly directing its employees to market their products’ artificial intelligence (AI) prowess, Microsoft could focus instead on fixing the one thing we all agree is wrong today: We’re tired of being used by big tech, and our private data should remain private. Even when there’s AI—real or imagined—involved.

Best of all, this is something Google could never promote without being ridiculed. And that’s why it’s such a great differentiator. Where Google can probably match Microsoft when it comes to AI, it can never match the software giant when it comes to trust.

Microsoft should market the hell out of that.