The Future of Business Applications in an AI-First World

Christine Calhoun:

What does the future look like for AI and business applications, both within the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond? Jared?

Jared Spataro:

Well, we're starting by simply adding our Copilot experience into all of our business applications. So as you get your work done within a biz app, you know, we will have Copilot right there always available to bring the context from every place else that you've been working to bring access to agents so that you can get work done more efficiently. In many ways you can think of it, bringing your team to work with you as you work in a CRM and ERP system, again, supply chain, you know, customer contact center, anything that is vital to the way that you get your work done. But the future won't stop there. We won't stop simply by augmenting what people do. We will increasingly provide you with resources that will go get the work done in an autonomous way. Sometimes people refer to these resources again as digital employees or a digital workforce. We hope that we can essentially mint or print digital employee likes, like lookalikes, that you would be able to use to scale your efforts without the same scaling function that today requires you to hire headcount. Adding additional capacity now through agents at a different economic value equation way so that you can really do things you haven't been able to do. Add resources to places that just economically weren't viable previously. Now that shift is going to happen over time, but that's the shift that we expect that we'll start to see in the market.

Christine Calhoun:

Shishank, what are your thoughts on that shift?

Shishank Gupta:

I think the way AI will transform the way we interact with business applications will transcend beyond any one specific technology or a landscape because none of our clients are pretty much on one technology. They have different technologies. Maybe there's a primary technology, but there really is a plethora of technology out there. So whatever we build, a platform that we build on, should have the ability to work and integrate with heterogeneous technologies. The agents that we build, and I think Jared touched upon it in one of his earlier responses, is something that can go off in the background and do it. So while there will be capabilities that will come inbuilt in each of the products that our clients and we use, I think the ability for agents to really cut across technologies, cut across different architecture layers, legacy and new-age technologies will be very critical in the way agents are built and AI is leveraged as we move forward. And I think that will be a big shift that we see, which is more integration across different types of technologies and platforms in the way we do things. I also think the way we envision and how we come up with newer business processes, AI will help us identify and reimagine businesses. As I said, it's not just about automating the things that we do before. We will also reimagine the way we do things before, because a lot of things will probably be done faster, but I do think it'll also give us an opportunity to do a few things differently and completely new out of the box. So areas or themes like why being in those things will also come in the way of how do you quickly reimagine, conceptualize an idea into something more prototype, something that people can feel and visualize something more. And AI will have a role to play in not just helping conceptualize an idea into a concept or a prototype, but also then build it through different ways through exponential engineering concepts of really developing and building code for different AI tools that are available in the market. So I would think one, it'll be an end-to-end view of the life cycle from an IT internal perspective. From a business perspective, we will reimagine business in different areas and the agents will not be limited to our technology. They will have the ability, they should have an ability to really cut across the ecosystem.