In her talk, Care Barclay outlined the HUGE effect Generative AI was having on almost every aspect of our lives… from medicine to education, from retail to the public sector… and how quickly those changes were happening.

Over the last 12 months, AI has made headlines as it helped organisations across the public and private sectors transform their operations, whether detecting cancer, preparing lessons for teachers, helping students with learning difficulties, reducing fraud in financial services, or enabling retailers to manage their stock and supply chains more efficiently. We’ve seen demand for AI grow, creating market opportunity for tech companies and ecosystems across the UK.

The impact of this new technology had been “breathtaking.”

Clare Barclay – UK CEO, Microsoft

Economic Impact

She continued her speech by pointing out that the number of AI-based start-ups had risen significantly over the last 12 months, with the UK now home to a third of all Europe’s AI start-ups and now ranked third in the global 2023 AI readiness index.

With that in mind, Microsoft will be investing over £2.5bn in the UK alone on a new AI, datacentre infrastructure, as well as digital skills training.

That £2.5bn will be Microsoft’s largest ever investment in the UK and they predict that AI and cloud technology could add £550bn to the UK’s GDP by 2035. 

ROI

Those organisations that are at the forefront of implementing AI across their workforce are currently being rewarded for their investment, with every £1 spent on AI tech and skills seeing a £5 ROI, according to Microsoft research.

LinkedIn recently surveyed 30,000 globally, asking questions of people in 31 different countries, and found 75% were already using AI in some form at work, with 46% saying they’d only started using AI in the last six months. You can see more from the survey here >> 2024 Work Trend Index.

In fact, such is the demand for AI, that many employees, if not provided access to AI tools, will use their own.

Upcoming Developments In Generative AI

Mark Chaban also spoke at the event as Microsoft’s General Manager of Customer Success & Innovation, and showcases some of what we can look forward to soon in generative AI tech and AI infrastructure.

He showed the audience Copilot’s advanced reasoning abilities by asking it “the London Eye could take him to space?”

(Copilot responded by saying that would be ridiculous for those of you that were wondering).

He also showcased Microsoft’s text-to-video tool which hasn’t been released yet, called Sora, as well as their Image Creator which has been, powered by DALL.E3.

Wrapping Up

Clare Barclay finished her speech by acknowledging that Microsoft were aware some people had concerns on AI affecting their jobs but encouraged the audience to think of any job as “a series of tasks”, with AI being there in the background to improve efficiency and productivity.