It’s All About AI, Not Hardware (Premium)

Microsoft is hosting a special event this Thursday in which it will detail its “latest AI innovations across the company ... Microsoft 365, Surface, Windows, Bing, and more.” It’s not about announcing new hardware---some continue to insist this is a “Surface event”---but is instead something far more meaningful to both Microsoft and its customers, a chance to learn how the software giant intends to infuse AI capabilities into the client products and services that you and I care about the most.

And, um, Bing. But I kid.

Yes, the presence of Microsoft 365 and Bing bring with them some sense of the cloud. But don’t get distracted by that, I don’t think this is about Azure-powered services or giant corporate entities in any meaningful way, Microsoft has its Build and Ignite conferences for those audiences. I believe that this event is about the software and services that we all use as individuals. And I am very keen to learn how Microsoft intends for us to take advantage of the AI revolution that it kickstarted.

We learned about Microsoft’s strategy here at a high level at Build 2023 in May. Stevie Batiche’s appearance at the show was a master class in communication---in sharp contrast to his former boss---but the key takeaway for purposes of this discussion was his description of how three emerging new AI application structures are shaping how AI capabilities will be delivered to users. That is, AI will be beside applications, inside applications, or outside applications.

Microsoft will deliver new AI capabilities to existing applications and services using that first structure, “beside,” via what it calls copilots. This is a perfect name, as you, the content creator, is the pilot and these UIs are helpers.

“It's very appropriate that the first types of significant AI experiences are copilots because it enables us to get in the game quickly,” Batiche said at Build 2023. “It keeps the original app architecture definition and is minimally disruptive to what our customers already know. Yet, this new application structure delivers immensely capable tools and experiences that did not exist before.”

And with respect to the products that we know will be part of this coming event, that means the Microsoft 365 Copilot and the Windows Copilot explicitly, but also Bing Chat. Which, frankly, should be renamed to Bing Copilot.

So let’s start there. Bing’s AI capabilities are probably well-understood by this point, given the publicity. But the short version is that Bing Chat offers ChatGPT-based chat-based conversational capabilities, and can answer complex questions, and there are separate services for generating images and composing drafts of important documents, emails, and the like in a variety of tones and writing styles.

Less well known, Microsoft is integrating Bing Chat elsewhere throughout its emerging client-side ecosystem too. Bing AI capabilities first appeared in the Microsoft Edge ...