Connections

Microsoft continued its aggressive artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives Sept. 29, announcing the creation of the Microsoft AI and Research Group. The news came only one day after an announcement that it formed the Partnership on AI with Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook and IBM.

The new Microsoft business group combines its research organization with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI product efforts, it said in a news release. The new group is headed by Harry Shum, a 20-year Microsoft veteran whose resume includes leadership positions across Microsoft Research and Bing engineering. He is serving as EVP of the Microsoft AI and Research Group.

Microsoft said its goal is “democratizing AI for every person and organization, making it more accessible and valuable to everyone and ultimately enabling new ways to solve some of society’s toughest challenges.” The announcement builds on Microsoft’s deep focus on AI and will “accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to customers across agents, apps, services and infrastructure,” it said.

In addition to Shum’s existing leadership team, a few of Microsoft’s engineering leaders and teams are joining the new group, including Information Platform, Cortana, Bing, and Ambient Computing and Robotics teams led by David Ku, Derrick Connell and Vijay Mital, respectively.

Combined, the Microsoft AI and Research Group includes AI product engineering, basic and applied research labs, and New Experiences and Technologies (NExT).

Microsoft didn’t say when the various teams will be completely merged into the new business group. It didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Digital technology is transforming our lives, businesses and the world, but also generating an exponential growth in data and information,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the news release. As part of the company’s effort to “empower” people and organizations by “democratizing access to intelligence to help solve our most pressing challenges,” he said Microsoft is “infusing AI into everything we deliver across our computing platforms and experiences.”

Microsoft has been working on AI initiatives since the creation of Microsoft Research in 1991, but has “only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible,” Shum said. He added: “We will significantly expand our efforts to empower people and organizations to achieve more with our tools, our software and services, and our powerful, global-scale cloud computing capabilities.”

Microsoft said it is taking a four-pronged approach to its initiative to democratize AI: harnessing AI to “fundamentally change human and computer interaction” via agents including Cortana, its digital personal assistant; infusing each application, from the photo app on consumer phones to Skype and Office 365, with intelligence; through services by making the same intelligent capabilities in Microsoft’s apps —cognitive capabilities including vision and speech, as well as machine analytics — available to app developers globally; and through infrastructure by building the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer with Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and making it available to anyone.