Satya Nadella: It’s time to get intense about your tech

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has revealed his plan to help every business in the world embrace digital technology quicker than ever before.

Speaking at the Microsoft Future Decoded event in London today, Nadella revealed how “tech intensity” can help individuals and businesses alike to embrace technology in every facet of their lives.

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Referencing the company’s goal to empower everyone and every organisation in the world to do more with technology, Nadella laid out how “tech intensity” can do just that.

“We must adopt technology in ways that are much faster than what we have done in the past,” he said. “We don’t stop there. Each one of us, in our organisations, will have to build our own digital capability on top of the technology we have adopted. Tech Intensity is one of the key considerations you have to get right.”

Nadella highlighted the major role that artificial intelligence can play in this development, noting that nearly all technology breakthroughs in the future will be linked to AI in some way.

Describing AI as “the defining technology of our times”, Nadella ran through many of Microsoft’s latest advancements in the area, with services from Azure to Teams to Microsoft 365 being greatly improved.

However he also highlighted the possible issues that AI could raise concerning privacy and security, and the need to ensure the technology helps benefit humanity.

“Privacy is a human right,” he declared. “All of us will have to think about the digital experiences we create to treat privacy as a human right. This is what we are building all our tools around.”

“The challenge of cybersecurity is the damage it causes most impacts citizens and small business and we need to protect them...One of the challenges of AI is that it's only as good as the data on which its been trained (so) we need to be mindful of the use cases."

Nadella noted that computing power is now embedded within many facets of our everyday lives, and that the impetus is now with companies such as Microsoft to continue encouraging innovation in many industries.

“Technology for technology’s sake is not going to do anything,” he said, “it’s about how you empower your own employees, how you transform your operations, products and services. That’s the goal.”

"We only succeed if our customers and our partners succeed,” he noted, “we want to build technology so that each one of you can go on to build more technology...that was true in 1975, and it's more true in 2018 as you capitalise on the tremendous opportunity of digital transformation.” 

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