Microsoft CEO Sees Generative AI as Transformative as Relational Databases

At Epic’s 2023 Person Group Assembly (#epicugm), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Sumit Rana, Senior Vice President at Epic sat down for a one-on-one dialog about generative AI. Their dialog was fascinating on two ranges. First, it was shocking that they didn’t communicate to the deeper partnership between the 2 corporations that was introduced within the hours forward of their time on stage. Second, was the blink-and-you-missed-it distinction between how the 2 males view generative AI.

Deeper Partnership Between Epic and Microsoft

Early on Tuesday morning an announcement was made concerning the expanded collaboration between Epic and Microsoft for synthetic intelligence in healthcare. In that written assertion, Eric Boyd, Company Vice President – AI Platform at Microsoft had this to say:

“Right now, we’re saying the growth of our strategic initiative to deliver AI to healthcare at scale, integrating conversational, ambient and generative AI applied sciences throughout the Epic digital well being report (EHR) ecosystem. Meant to hurry growth of options for healthcare’s most important wants, the initiative will broaden safe entry to AI-powered medical insights and administrative instruments inside a variety of Epic modules to boost affected person care, improve operational effectivity, enhance healthcare experiences, and assist the monetary integrity of well being techniques globally.”

Utilizing its Azure OpenAI Service and Nuance DAX Express options, Microsoft can be working to:

• Improve clinician productiveness with word summarization
• Enchancing clinician productiveness with embedded ambient medical documentatino
• Driving administrative efficiencies by way of discount in handbook, labor intesive course of
• Advancing medicin for higher affected person outcomes

The character of the expanded partnership was talked about in Epic CEO Judy Faulkner’s opening keynote, however throughout their on stage one-on-one dialog, neither Satya nor Rana took the chance to showcase the announcement. This truthfully made their dialog higher. The 2 males explored the subject of AI with out turning their time collectively right into a promo.

How Transformative will Generative AI Be?

One quick change between Satya and Rana was actually fascinating.

In his opening, Rana shared the story of how he was enjoying with ChatGPT over the vacations and was instantly struck by the probabilities of the know-how. He spoke about having a “intestine punch” second – much like how he felt when he first obtained his palms on a SmartPhone. Rana then introduced the next slide the place he acknowledged that generative AI could be as transformative and paradigm-shifting as private computer systems, GPS, the Web, and a lot of different applied sciences.

Whereas in dialog with Rana, Satya had a distinct tackle generative AI. He likened generative AI to relational databases and the graphical consumer interface. Whereas each these developments have been transformative in their very own proper, I don’t imagine anybody would put GUIs in the identical world-changing class as GPS or the Web.

What I gleaned from this temporary change is that Satya sees generative AI as a robust instrument that can complement different applied sciences however will finally fade into the background (how many people truly take into consideration the relational database that underpins an answer?). That is in distinction to Rana who believes generative AI as a catalyst for fully new methods of doing issues.

I agree with each gents. I really feel that generative AI can be transformative, permitting us to do issues we by no means would have thought doable, BUT it is going to at some point simply be a part of the underlying know-how stack and won’t occupy any extra thoughtspace than GUIs do at present.

Will probably be attention-grabbing to look again 5 years from now and gauge how transformative generative AI ended up being.