Microsoft for lasting bond between chatbots, their users

MATT O’BRIEN

Fifty years after the founding of Microsoft, the CEO of its artificial intelligence division has a big task: develop a new product line as integral to daily life as the software giant’s past innovations.

“We’re really trying to land this idea that everybody is going to have their own personalized AI companion,” said Mustafa Suleyman. “It will, over time, have its own name, its own style. It will adapt to you. It may also have its own visual appearance and expressions.”

Suleyman laid out that vision on Microsoft’s 50th anniversary Friday. The celebration at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, featured the first public gathering in more than a decade of co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates with his two successors: Steve Ballmer, who led the company from 2000 to 2014, and the current chief executive, Satya Nadella.

Giving the mic to Suleyman, who joined the company and Nadella’s senior leadership team just over a year ago to head a newly formed Microsoft AI division, signals how important getting its AI right is to the company’s future — in the next five years if not the next 50.

The company’s flagship product of this AI era, Copilot, already combines a chatbot with Microsoft’s suite of workaday tools, from Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations to the Windows operating system that defines how most computers work. But Suleyman is striving for something that sounds a little more like science fiction — a technology that can form a “lasting, meaningful relationship” with its users.

“One that knows your name, gets to know you, has a memory of everything that you’ve shared with it and talked about and really comes to kind of live life alongside you,” he said. “It’s far more than just a piece of software or a tool. It is unlike anything we’ve really ever created.”

Suleyman, 40, came to Microsoft last year with plenty of credentials in the AI business. In his 20s, the British entrepreneur cofounded the legendary DeepMind AI research lab in London, which Google later purchased in 2014. He worked there until 2022, when he left to set up the new company Inflection AI with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Microsoft then scooped up Suleyman and other Inflection leaders without formally acquiring the startup, attracting months of antitrust scrutiny. “My goal is really to create a true personal AI companion,” he said.

The race to build the best AI personal assistant that sticks with consumers is a competitive one. In recent weeks, rivals including Google and Meta Platforms have shaken up the teams in charge of AI research or products. ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is both Microsoft’s most important AI partner and a growing competitor, has also reorganized its leadership. Amazon is also looking to catch up by imbuing its already-ubiquitous digital assistant, Alexa with more advanced AI capabilities.

Microsoft’s own researchers, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, recently published a study that found that generative AI can inhibit critical thinking skills of human workers and lead to overreliance on the technology — a conclusion that Suleyman says he disagrees with.

Making chatbots fun, useful and personable might be key in winning over workers wary of the technology — especially when Gates, Suleyman and other tech leaders from Microsoft and elsewhere have loudly sounded the warning about their coming effects on employment.

“The truth is that the nature of work is going to change,” Suleyman said during a video interview on Microsoft’s Teams platform, a way of communicating he said would have been unimaginable 30 to 50 years ago.