Yusuf Mehdi is Microsoft’s executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer. Q: Why did it take so long to roll this out to everyone? Were there technical hurdles, or scale hurdles on the server side? A: All of the above. We wanted to start focusing clearly on where we could add value. We wanted to prove the technology out, make sure that we understood the highest use case for enterprise customers. These are obviously costly services to use, too, because of the GPUs. We’ve learned a lot about how to do that, too. We’re at a point now where we can scale more. We’ve added more GPUs. We’re ready to service more customers. So all of that has come to bear to allow us to get to this point. Q: And the cost is $20 a month for consumers and $33 per user, per month for enterprise customers. At that price, how much room do you have in the margins and what kind of tricks do you have to manage the costs? A: We’ve priced it out in such a way that we feel good about the fact that we’re scaling now to a broader audience. And we’re feeling great about the Copilot Pro and what we think we can accomplish with that rollout, too. There’s a lot of stuff we’re doing to reduce costs. Everything from different technology optimizations, new approaches to how we run things on the backend server. There’s a wide variety of things we do to continue to reduce the cost so that we can bring that value to more people and give them more benefits. Q: Is there anything that’s not generally available? A: There’ll be things that will fast follow, like GPT Builder. So the ability to build GPTs will come very quickly. Q: Tell me about GPT Builder. A: Our intention is to make these interoperable with OpenAI. You’ll be able to use them from within the OpenAI app or call on OpenAI GPTs created with the OpenAI app. MicrosoftQ: How much is this product going to get to know you and learn your habits? Will I know if I missed an important email? A: You will. We’ve been working on doing things more in your voice. So it’ll understand how you write. Do you use punctuation? Do you put in exclamation points? Getting the email to understand your voice and write more in your voice. And then your chat history is a way to start remembering things you’ve done. This is ripe for personalization to get more out of it. Q: How do you see the competition with Amazon, which is offering enterprise products that work on all Microsoft products. How interoperable will you be across products that compete with Microsoft ones? A: You should think of us as also having very similar platform agnosticism. We want to have our technology run everywhere. That is the plan. That’s why Office runs on Mac, runs on Android, runs everywhere. We’re going to do the same thing here. The Copilot app runs on iOS, it runs on Android, it’ll run anywhere you can get access to it. So that’s a value prop today. And then we will build more of that capability. The differentiation we have is the apps that people use to create and be productive, plus AI. The work graph, the knowledge graph. You can say, ‘who said this in a meeting?’ Or it’s hard for me to keep track of all the new terms. This came up with retrieval-augmented generation. In a meeting, they are using the RAG acronym. I can ask, ‘what is RAG?’ and it comes back that this has been referenced in these three documents that were reviewed with the senior leadership team. Here’s the PowerPoint, you can go right here. But the summary is that it’s a new theory about how to get more relevant AI answers. I was in a meeting and I did that five times. That was just my ability to catch up on things that I had missed, and then get right to the point of the document. All that happens because we have that data graph. Q: What’s your favorite thing to do with this? A: I use it for so many things. My son hurt his shoulder and he has to get surgery on it. So he got an MRI. And we were trying to make heads or tails of the MRI. It was very hard. So I took that whole report and put it in and said, ‘tell me in plain English what this is saying.’ It came back and said, ‘There are five things apparently potentially up with your son’s shoulder. He’s got a torn labrum, he’s got a chip in the bone.’ And then it had a great paragraph for each thing. We went from not understanding anything to ‘Oh, wow, I have a sense of it.’ |