A-I-A-I-IO (Premium)

During the Google I/O keynote this past week, CEO Sundar Pichai said "AI" almost 30 times, while other executives said the term over 110 times. That's more than one "AI" for every minute of the keynote, so I assume it's obvious that Google is all-in on AI.

But here's the thing: Google has been all-in on AI for years, and it's kind of amazing to me how the press so quickly picked up on internal Google complaints that the firm was caught flat-footed by Microsoft's sudden AI-based Bing chatbot announcement this past February. (Though I admit that its hastily assembled first response was poorly done.) It's not fair to pretend that Google is "behind" in AI when it is Microsoft, not Google, that is behind. After all, Google's AI prowess was all created internally, while the most impressive parts of Microsoft's work came from an outside company, OpenAI.

Regardless of your take on that, the logistics of this competition aren't all that important: there are only three tech firms that are big enough and have the right assets in place to make this kind of AI play, and Google and Microsoft are two of them. (The other, of course, is Amazon.) And an honest (if early) assessment of this market suggests two things. First, that AI will indeed change everything. And two, that it most likely will not upset any of the major players and their relative market positions.

The "AI will change everything bit" is not controversial: all you have to do is watch a Google or Microsoft demo to see how AI will fulfill the very promise of personal computing, which was that we would have these inexpensive and easy-to-use tools that would help us get work done more efficiently. This is an important distinction that gets lost in the arguments about whether AI (or any technology from any era) will result in a loss of jobs. Of course it will. But we will likewise look back on jobs people had in some bygone time and wonder why those were jobs at all. The real goal here isn't for AI or some other computer-based construct to replace us, it's to help us as people achieve our own goals more easily. This is the double-edged sword of progress.

I've told a few stories that illustrate the tension of progress.

The first you will surely have heard: I hosted a pre-con session at Microsoft TechEd years ago in which system administrators and IT pros were alarmed by the push to cloud computing. "Do you mean to tell me that my last job as an Exchange administrator will be to migrate my company's email over to [what is now Microsoft 365]?" one frustrated person asked me. And the answer is as obvious now as it was then: "Yes." That company didn't exist to manage an email infrastructure, the email infrastructure existed to serve the needs of the company, and if there is a cheaper, better, and more efficient way to do that, the responsible thing to do as an employee of that company is to recommend doing so and then assist in the transition. (And with regards to that gentleman's job,...