Microsoft's Copilot chief opens up about the AI future he fears most
· Business Insider
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
- The tech industry has been debating the existential risks of artificial intelligence.
- Microsoft's biggest concern is whether AI's benefits will be shared broadly, its Copilot boss says.
- Microsoft has increasingly adopted "diffusion" as a central theme in its public AI messaging.
As the technology industry debates the existential risks of artificial intelligence, Microsoft's Copilot boss says the biggest concern is making sure the technology's benefits spread broadly rather than consolidating into a handful of companies.
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Jacob Andreou, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, told Business Insider in an interview the AI risk that Microsoft spends most of its time thinking about is what it calls "diffusion," or making AI widely available to people and businesses throughout the economy.
"How do we take raw intelligence and turn it into something that can be a true rising-tide benefit to people in their personal lives, and then certainly to the people that make up all of these corporations, and the broad economy?" Andreou said. "In a world where we fail to accomplish that diffusion, I do worry about what it looks like as value and as the economy centralizes into, like, a couple companies."
A polarizing debate over AI's long-term impact has erupted lately. Optimists argue the technology could dramatically increase productivity and create new industries, while critics warn that the companies controlling the most advanced models could capture an outsized share of the economic gains, widening inequality and concentrating corporate power, or worse.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently weighed in on the debate in a memo viewed by Business Insider.
Microsoft has increasingly adopted "diffusion" as a central theme in its public AI messaging. President Brad Smith has argued that winning the AI race depends not only on building the most advanced models but also on ensuring their widespread adoption. The company recently released a "Global AI diffusion" report.
This message also aligns with Microsoft's commercial interests, and its evolving strategy for its Copilot AI tools.
Unlike AI labs whose businesses center primarily on selling frontier models, Microsoft generates revenue by selling cloud services, workplace software, developer tools, and other business applications. The more people and companies that adopt AI across those products, the better for Microsoft.
Microsoft recently has shifted its Copilot toward combining chat, Cowork, coding, and autonomous "Autopilot" AI agent capabilities in a single flagship Copilot "super app" spanning both consumer and commercial users.
"We definitely believe in this technology to be for the empowerment of people," Andreou said. "That diffusion is not just existential for us in many ways, but actually that is the way that the whole economy gets to benefit."
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