{"id":78153,"date":"2019-01-25T18:17:31","date_gmt":"2019-01-25T18:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.microsoft.com\/?p=430967"},"modified":"2019-01-25T18:17:31","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T18:17:31","slug":"fortune-microsofts-tech-chief-kevin-scott-talks-artificial-intelligence-mixed-reality-and-sod-farming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/01\/25\/fortune-microsofts-tech-chief-kevin-scott-talks-artificial-intelligence-mixed-reality-and-sod-farming\/","title":{"rendered":"Fortune: Microsoft\u2019s tech chief Kevin Scott talks artificial intelligence, mixed reality and sod farming"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As Microsoft\u2019s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott has the challenging job of keeping his company atop all of the tech trends.<\/p>\n

Scott became Microsoft\u2019s CTO two years ago after six years directing software engineering at LinkedIn, which Microsoft<\/a> bought in 2016 for $26 billion<\/a>. One of his first jobs at Microsoft was to identify all the technologies used by the company\u2019s sprawling business units\u2014to gauge their usefulness\u2014and then make sure that the popular ones were available to every division.<\/p>\n

The exercise reflects the philosophy of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Scott says. Nadella not only spends a lot of time thinking about what to do, but also \u201cwhat are we not doing that we\u2019re going to regret.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft missed out on a few tech revolutions, in particular the rise of smartphones<\/a>, which rivals Apple<\/a> and Google<\/a> ended up capitalizing on. Nadella wants Scott to make sure that nothing similar happens again.<\/p>\n

In this edited interview with Fortune,<\/em> Scott talks about artificial intelligence<\/a>, Microsoft\u2019s continued push into mixed reality<\/a> [Microsoft lingo for both virtual<\/a> and augmented reality<\/a> tech], and the challenges of deep learning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fortune<\/strong><\/em>: How do you distinguish Microsoft\u2019s AI from other companies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kevin Scott: We\u2019re a platform company by DNA. If you listen to how Bill Gates has always defined what a platform company is, it\u2019s one that builds technology that creates all of this opportunity in which you don\u2019t have all of the economic value concentrated in one company. We\u2019re increasing the overall size of the pie. The PC, for instance, created an enormous economic opportunity. We see AI as essentially the same thing.<\/p>\n

When I think of platforms, I think of things like Windows, which other companies can build apps on top of. Is this how you see AI?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The thing that we\u2019re pushing hard on is that a lot of AI right now is still unnecessarily difficult for many people to get up to speed on. There are maybe in the high tens of thousands of developers out there who are hardcore machine learning\/data science folks. Almost every customer we interact with is thinking about using AI to help its business run better. And you can\u2019t expect each and every one of them to hire a bunch of Ph.Ds and machine learning engineers. At the rate AI is unfolding, not enough of those people exist.<\/p>\n

One of our challenges is to build technologies that lower the barriers to entry so a much larger pool of developers can use machine learning in their products and services. Microsoft itself is a microcosm for this because we have about 55,000 developers in the company and not all of them are machine learning\/data science experts.<\/p>\n

I imagine it\u2019s a challenge for companies exploring the AI technique of deep learning to get used to the idea that a lot of their experiments will fail.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s incumbent upon us as platform providers to give people better tools\u2014to guide you in better ways toward paths that get you to success.<\/p>\n

I think you do have to expect some of this stuff not to work. You have to get into it with this experimental mindset. It\u2019s not like you\u2019re proving a theorem and you walk through the steps and it\u2019s done and predictable. It\u2019s more like lab science.<\/p>\n

The most technologically-savvy companies are used to this trial-and-error process. We just know through our own efforts that the first thing is not going to work, and you have to push and push. When you get the win, it totally covers all of the costs of the experimentation.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your background in AI?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing a book on AI right now. It\u2019s about why we should be optimistic about a future that includes AI. The contrarian thing is that I think it\u2019s net beneficial even to people in rural parts of the country.<\/p>\n

I was a poor kid from rural central Virginia\u2014Campbell County, a little town called Gladys. I went back there a year ago for the book. All the industry there evaporated years ago. Tobacco, textiles, furniture manufacturing all went poof. But some interesting things are emerging there now, some of which is powered by AI and advanced automation.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on in Gladys?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I went to school with people whose families\u2019 have been tobacco farmers for five generations. Their business basically went sideways when the tobacco markets collapsed, and they had to figure out what to do. They were fairly entrepreneurial and they knew technology would play a role in what they were doing.<\/p>\n

All the land that they used to plant tobacco on is sod now, and the unit economics is about as good as tobacco. Part of the reason is that they use a bunch of advanced automation\u2014tractors, and fairly sophisticated technology to let them grow sod on these very large tracks of land. It\u2019s more labor intensive than tobacco was, but with the technology they have about the same number of employees. So technology hasn\u2019t reduced jobs.<\/p>\n

On the horizon are things like drones that can fly over crops to do aerial inspections. It\u2019s not that you don\u2019t need a human being, but you can fly over it more frequently and get more data about what\u2019s going on in your field so you can better adjust fertilizers and water.<\/p>\n

Because of the technology, you don\u2019t need a giant factory with thousands of people in order to just get your unit economics right. You can start a business and have 30 people working in this place and have that 30-person business in Campbell County, Va. be a global business. Some people believe you won\u2019t have jobs coming back where there are 100 companies with 10,000 jobs a piece, but you\u2019ll have 100,000 companies with 100 higher-skilled jobs each.<\/p>\n

Will those jobs pay more?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah. I know for sure.<\/p>\n

Some people are concerned that while automation will make companies more efficient, only management will benefit and not the workers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think both can happen and I think we should be cautious. What I\u2019ve seen working on this book and talking with customers the size of Walmart<\/a> all the way down to small and medium sized businesses is that there\u2019s lots of things to be hopeful about.<\/p>\n

Virtual reality and augmented reality seemed really big three years ago, and now many venture capital investors aren\u2019t as focused on it because they couldn\u2019t get returns fast enough. How do you plan for and adjust when a technology hasn\u2019t caught on as fast as hoped<\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part of my job is making sure that we maintain our focus and our commitment to some of these investments over long periods. The thing I can say is we have not reduced our investments in mixed reality [Microsoft makes the HoloLens augmented reality headset<\/a>]. If anything, we increased things\u2014not dramatically up, but it\u2019s growing.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re thinking of yourself as a platform company, you have to be thinking about what the future platforms are going to be. We have three things that we believe are going to be important platforms that are in different stages of development.<\/p>\n

Get Data Sheet<\/a>, Fortune\u2019s technology newsletter.<\/em><\/p>\n

One is quantum computing<\/a>, which at some point is going to be very important. There\u2019s mixed reality, which we think is probably in a shorter time horizon is going to be a very important platform. And on a shorter time horizon than that, this notion of an intelligent edge, which you can think of as a mashup of IOT [Internet-connected devices], sensors, and AI.<\/p>\n

We believe all three of those will be extremely important platforms in the future. And to make a global scale platform work, you have to invest and believe it\u2019s real. It\u2019s a question of when and not if.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Microsoft\u2019s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott has the challenging job of keeping his company atop all of the tech trends. Scott became Microsoft\u2019s CTO two years ago after six years directing software engineering at LinkedIn, which Microsoft bought in 2016 for $26 billion. One of his first jobs at Microsoft was to identify all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[246,50],"class_list":["post-78153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-kevin-scott","tag-recent-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}