AI is Our Copilot (Premium)

You're going to hear the word "copilot" today a lot. You're going to wonder, repeatedly, why Microsoft is pushing this term so hard. But don't get distracted by the branding. What we're witnessing right now is history in the making.

And it's fair to say that in writing about Microsoft and the technology industry in which it competes for almost 30 years, I have witnessed a lot of history. But what's happening with AI at the software giant right now threatens to eclipse anything it has accomplished to date. This transformation will result in a new Microsoft and a new technology industry, neither of which will much resemble that which came before.

Previous eras are well understood in hindsight. There was the early Microsoft, with its focus on software development tools. The scrappy young Microsoft that answered IBM's call and entered the operating system market with MS-DOS. The dominant Microsoft that ruled the industry with Windows and Office. The also-ran Microsoft, handcuffed with antitrust woes when Amazon, Apple, and Google expanded personal computing well beyond the PC. And the resurgent Microsoft that rode its cloud computing pivot to new levels of success.

It's too early in this new era to fully appreciate or even understand how much is about to change. But it is indeed a new era for Microsoft, and for us all: With its aggressive embrace of AI, Microsoft is reimagining not just its products and services, but itself, and it is doing so proactively, voluntarily, and with purpose. This isn't something it fell into, or something that was forced on it from the outside. This company saw an opportunity and decided to bet the farm.

There are, of course, parallels with the past. Microsoft's use of the term copilot everywhere and anywhere today reminds me of the beginning of its .NET push over 20 years ago, when it planned to rebrand all its core products and services with the .NET name. And the technical sophistication of AI is as impressive in this day as was the original Azure push or quantum computing, a computer science problem that Microsoft still hasn't cracked. Indeed, these technologies---.NET, Azure, quantum computing, and now AI---all share a personal similarity in that I found understanding each to be daunting, just beyond my reach, in the beginning.

But AI is unique in Microsoft's history too. The speed at which this era suddenly unfolded still astonishes, and looking back at all the milestones and new products that appeared between February's Bing event and this month's Ignite, it feels like years have passed. But it’s the speed combined with the rapid pace of change that really rattles the brain: AI has already transformed the way we create and consume information, and it's only been a few months. What will next year look like? And the next?

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