Wow, what a turbulent weekend and start into the new week. I am not sure if anyone outside OpenAI really knows what is going on there and I think no one knows how it will end. The surprising, shocking ousting of OpenAI Co-Founder Sam Altman last Friday sent waves through the tech valley. It might even mark the end of OpenAI – for sure as we know it, maybe even more. But it won’t mark the end of (Gen) AI. The brains and driving forces behind OpenAI have in a never before seen solidarity grouped behind its two ousted co-founders and will follow wherever they go. So, maybe we will not hear much about OpenAI anymore coming 2024, but the team will continue to play and bring its innovations to the industry. And maybe even under the umbrella of Microsoft which is more and more becoming almighty again.
Microsoft
The way Microsoft has seen and embraced the potential of Gen AI has been amazing and helped it to be first to market with consumer and enterprise products based on OpenAI innovations. And how Microsoft has woven the fabric of Gen AI into their products is remarkable as well – by now it is not even called Bing-Chat anymore, but they dropped it for Co-pilot which is their main branding of the Gen AI capability throughout their stack. I am not sure if there is any shirt in the MS universe where Gen AI is not woven in? None comes to my mind.
But after this hectic weekend it became clear that this is not where Microsoft will stop. Satya has basically offered all of OpenAI to work at Microsoft – under their old/ new boss Sam Altman. What a monster-move. Regardless how the OpenAI story will end, Microsoft will be the winner. And Microsoft will continue to push into a more and more dominating position in Gen AI, especially in the enterprise market. I have a few interesting ideas and reflections about it that I will finalize and publish next week. Stay tuned for that.
Workday Rising
But not only at Microsoft and OpenAI (Gen) AI are the dominating technologies. Workday has shown at Rising last week in Barcelona how they see the future of (Gen) AI – and I am really excited about it. And remembering the reactions of the audience during the keynote, they were as excited as I was (you can watch the keynote here). What I see there is a new branding and a new direction. This is speculation, but I believe this can go far with Workday AI, Workday Conversational AI but also with Workday being open to integrate with Microsoft Copilot. If they take it serious and continue down the avenue they have indicated, this could be a re-birth of Workday in the age of AI.
Of course, Workday has emphasized that AI is nothing new for them – and I agree, they have stepped into machine learning early on and are pushing AI-infused solutions into their product for a while now. But of course November 30th 2022 has changed everything – and as I have already alluded to in my earlier posts, Workday has understood and is pushing aggressively forward into the Gen AI space. And they do it in a deliberate, Workday-typical way. They focus on their core-strength that they have already established some years back on their so-called “innovation agreement” and have a valuable treasure of structured data from many of their clients as a foundation for their AI. And they will not focus on one LLM only but go for a kind of best of bread approach. And last but not least, they have spread their pilots across different ideas but prepared in a way that once successful, the solutions can be scaled quickly.
What we have seen at the conference was to a certain extend basic, e.g. Gen AI support in getting your Job Description written or Performance Feedback written. These are not new ideas, but if you consider the frame of reference that the AI from Workday will have (meaning all of your Workday data), it will be able to match the tone and wording and styling from your previous “handwritten” Job Descriptions. 3rd party Gen AI Models have to be first trained on your specific wording and tone – and if they are not learning this across different users, you will lose your specific company wording rather quick. I continue to believe that the integrated Gen AI will be more powerful and easier to get to the right outcome than a separate one.
Next to the official announcements I had the chance to have some meetings with their product teams around AI and what I have seen and learned there makes me even more excited. I cannot yet share but from what I have seen, 2024 will be a very exciting year for Gen AI at Workday. Stay tuned!
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