Thinking About Microsoft and Its AI Future (Premium)

Microsoft this week announced new ways in which it is sprinkling artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across its many products and services.

And, yes, AI—like the nearly-interchangeable “machine learning”—is one of those recent trendy buzzwords that tech companies like to toss around with abandon. But it’s hard to argue with the usefulness of these advances. Or with the fact that Microsoft is one of the few technology companies that can make major strides in doing so.

What’s interesting about the announcements this week is that the improvements are spread across multiple Microsoft products and services, including Bing, Cortana, and Office 365.

As you may know, Microsoft is bringing Bing to the enterprise this year by integrating its long-lived enterprise search functionality into the web-based Bing user experience. The point is to provide a single and obvious search experience for all users, obviously, and to make it contextually and intelligently relevant.

Some of the advances we see in Bing will be familiar to anyone using Google services on mobile devices. For example, Bing is picking up a new feature that uses computer vision and object recognition to visually search the contents of a picture or other image for information.

But Bing is also stretching out in new directions, too. Another new feature will provide multiple viewpoints when the user asks a question for which there is no objective answer. Microsoft’s example of such a query—“is cholesterol bad?”—is timely, since I just wrote about nutrition and diet and mentioned, somewhat in passing, that LDL cholesterol is not a marker of heart disease or of anything else. What I didn’t write is that cholesterol has been wrongly demonized as the “cause” of heart disease and other issues. The real problem is inflammation. And cholesterol, as it turns out, isn’t just “good,” it’s necessary for life.

Point being, Bing will now provide links to analysis and even opinions for subjective queries. I’m not sold on that latter bit, to be honest: We live in a fact-averse world, and for topics like health and diet, providing anything but the truth is dangerous. And, in this case, the convention wisdom—cholesterol is “bad”—is not the truth. Maybe that’s the service that Bing could provide via AI: Filtering out fake news and faux facts.

Speaking of opinions, Microsoft will be adding information from Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) posts with famous luminaries to Bing search results. This seems spurious at first, but as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian notes, the site is a unique source of information and data that is not available anywhere else in the world. (It’s also the source of the most inane and pedantic commenters in the world, but whatever.)

Moving forward to Cortana, Microsoft’s digital personal assistant—which is powered largely by Bing, by the way—is being optimized for scenarios in which the user does not have a display or keyboard in front of them. For voice, in other words, where follow-ups to queries will lead to intelligent conversations.

At an AI event in San Francisco this week, Microsoft showed how Cortana is being adapted for work. It will be able to sort through your email and provide you with a spoken summary of the most important ones during your commute, in one example. And this will work across both personal and work emails, and including non-Microsoft services, such as those from Google.

Cortana will also pick up a trick that seems, at first, to be similar to a feature we see already in Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa: Skills chaining. But this isn’t about macros, or the combining of individual skills into a script. Instead, Cortana will intelligently follow-up on interactions using other skills. An example: You use Cortana to book event tickets, and it comes back and asks if you want to add that to your calendar too. This work is in early days, Microsoft admits.

Finally, we come to Office 365, which is, of course, a combination of products and services that span the cloud and end user devices like smartphones and PCs. And on that note, Microsoft can accurately claim that we’ve actually been using simple forms of AI for decades: Spelling and grammar checking, for example, emails that sort by important, or automatic presentation design and creation functionality.

But these little time savers are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. And the coming set of improvements that the firm is making fall into a space for which Microsoft is quite famous: It’s bringing skills that used to require experts to the mainstream.

A new feature called Insights for Excel, now in preview, uses machine learning to analyze data in Excel spreadsheets and create pivot tables and charts showing trends and other useful information, Microsoft explains.

A new Word feature called Acronyms will obvious find acronyms for words, but it will also search through the document libraries inside an organization to find definitions that are specific to your business.

Another new Office 365 feature, called Tap for Word, helps you find relevant documents, spreadsheets and presentations from within your organization from within the Office app you’re working in. So you no longer need to root through file libraries or emails to find a chart, graphic, or other piece of information.

Finally, Outlook is being updated with a new tool that highlights action items in email and then gives you options for responding quickly on the go.

None of these new features are, by themselves, particularly newsworthy. But the sum total of the advances that Microsoft is making here and elsewhere in integrating AI across the stack is incredibly compelling. We’ve long used digital tools to work smarter, but it seems like we’ve been stuck at the same general level of productivity for a long time. And it looks like AI is the boost we need to finally start moving forward again.