Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently revealed that company will be working with a range of local organizations to push the next stage of Australia’s investment in artificial intelligence (AI). The Australian Government will be among the first in the world to deploy artificial intelligence “bots” to deal with inquiries from citizens.
Among the world’s first users of Microsoft’s new high performance virtual and intelligent machines are the Australian Government, Cricket Australia, and Webjet. Nadella told developers Microsoft intends to give them the building blocks they need to make intelligent applications through the Cortana Intelligence Suite and cognitive APIs. Nadella said,
We want to put into your hands as developers the richest toolkit to be able to store large amounts of data of any type, to be able to process that data, and to be able to create intelligence out of it.
Nadella said that machine learning and artificial intelligence are not just for consumer internet companies but are broadly being deployed in the context of healthcare, retail and industrial companies.
Nadella also spoke about Cricket Australia’s plan to use machine learning. The sporting organization will use Microsoft’s Sports Management Platform, machine learning, predictive analytics and rich visualization to manage and analyze its performance and player data.
Cricket is perhaps one of the richest sports when it comes to data, but how could you harness the power of data to start having a more intelligent, informed conversation about performance of teams, performance of players? The idea that developers can bend the curve of cricket performance is perhaps one of the most empowering things I’ve seen in my life.
During his keynote, Nadella announced the public preview of a new Azure Bot services which lets developers build, deploy and manage bots on the Azure cloud. He also announced that OpenAI, the non-profit AI research organization associated with Elon Musk, has chosen Microsoft Azure as its primary cloud platform.
Nadella will be also be meeting with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to discuss issues on cyber security and how technology can improve prevention, detection and response rates.
