AI opportunity
This is a new and exciting moment for AI, but there’s been a lot building up to this. AI is a broad term which covers many different technologies, developed over decades. It may seem as if we are entering a new era in AI, but several momentous milestones in the field have brought us to the inflection point we see today for the transformative potential of AI.
In the 1950s, Alan Turing invented the Turing Test to determine if a computer could pass for a human in written linguistic fluency. In 1959, Arthur Samuel (from IBM) coined the term “machine learning”, the origins of which are rooted in theories of artificial intelligence. In 2006, Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto) invented fast-learning algorithms and came up with the term “Deep Learning” to explain how AI-based on ML can learn like a human. However, the concept of deep learning existed far earlier.
Generative AI burst into our cultural consciousness with ChatGPT’s introduction and has brought us to this inflection point.
Generative AI has fundamentally changed what we can accomplish with software and changed our expectations of software.
It’s driving tremendous adoption of services, it’s reshaping industries, and it’s prompting organizations to consider how they can use AI and what new digital products, services, and experiences they can create.
AI has forever changed what software makes possible
1OpenAI public statements
2Global Artificial Intelligence Study: Exploiting the AI Revolution, PwC
3AI Global Executive Study and Research Project, MIT Sloan and BCG
New era for Apps
And through the broad adoption of AI (and especially generative AI), we’ll see massive changes in apps. Apps are both the business-critical, digital front for many businesses, and what powers so much of our businesses. In many ways, almost every company is a software company. And now almost every company will be an AI company, too. 83% of decision-makers plan to increase their AI spend this year. And this matters for your apps, because it is in apps that the power of AI is truly realized.
Intelligent apps
Intelligent apps are software solutions and applications built with modern appdev principles and architectures (microservices based, etc) that use AI and leverage data and analytics to offer responsive, personalized and highly-differentiated user experiences. Intelligent apps are applicable to any industry or sector and can be internal, “line of business” or external “customer-facing” application.
AI has brought intelligence to apps for many years, and now generative AI is radically changing the possibilities for intelligent apps.
That includes:
- User interactions based on natural language. We can now interact with apps more naturally than ever before.
- Hyper-personalized experiences based on real-time data, and apps that can understand our context based on richer and more immediate data.
- And with the cloud, app design can be more flexible and adaptable—again, responding to user needs.
How intelligent apps drive business?
There are many benefits that intelligent apps can offer to your business. First, it means you can outpace competition, right by delivering, you know, innovative new applications. You can also amplify employee capabilities and you can increase developer productivity. You can also scale your business and future proof. And being able to future proof is possible whether you’re leveraging AI right now or not.
4The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure AI, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting (May 2023). Results are for a composite organization representative of interviewed customers.
5The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure App Innovation, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting (June 2023). Results are for a composite organization representative of interviewed customers.
How do you get started?
You can modernize existing applications and integrate new capabilities into those, or you can build new applications that are leveraging some of these AI capabilities. Doing either of these things, requires a cloud app platform, data at scale, and pretrained and responsible AI. Microsoft can help you identify how you can leverage AI solutions to solve current challenges, empower developer talent, and get to market faster with differentiated and modern experiences to stay ahead of their competitors.
Summary
We just talked about being future-ready. Whether your modernizing or building apps, it’s important to think about the future. Because even if you’re not leveraging AI now, you will want to be able to do that effectively in the future.
And for that, you’re going to need to have modern, cloud-native applications built with sound principles. Cloud app platform, data at scale, and pretrained and responsible AI: these are the building blocks of intelligent apps. You need an app platform that enables continuous innovation and delivery, supports microservices architectures, and can scale as the app grows. For data, you’ll need to deliver exceptional performance, meet any demand (from low traffic to massive spikes) and handle unpredictable traffic patterns, and be able to manage a variety of data types, including unstructured data like rich media, sensor data, documents, and more.
The last building block is Pre-trained and responsible AI. That means having access to foundation models which you can customize, along with responsible AI tooling and standards from Microsoft, and the ability to deploy these models and capabilities flexibly.
These three elements – when deployed together, correctly – are the essential foundation for building and modernizing intelligent apps.
