Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice-President, Business Development of Microsoft, was the first person CEO Satya Nadella hired after he took over. Since then the Redmond-based giant has rebooted itself, by making its technology accessible on Android, iOS, acquired a social media company (LinkedIn) and is now making an effort to “democratise AI”. In an interview with BusinessLine , Johnson raises concerns around automation impacting jobs but also believes that it can address complex issues of our times.

With the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica issue, AI’s dystopian vision seems to be coming true...

We have had AI on campuses for more than 25 years, from the time Bill Gates started the company. In fact, Bill said then: “some day computers will see us, hear us and talk to us”. Then it seemed too far away. Now, there is massive compute power, cloud for analysis and have reasonably large pools of data where algos can be applied. We are at an inflection point in AI because of many factors. It will have a significant impact on society. A couple of years back, Satya came up with principles to ensure that we develop these technologies responsibly. It includes fairness, as we have to ensure that AI does not feed biases. Then we look at reliability and transparency. Right now, it is very opaque. Everybody needs to know what is going on with their data. If something goes wrong, we cannot blame machines and data privacy.

Are existing regulations enough? Should there be regulations for private and public entities separately?

The data is consumer’s data. If you look at our history, we have dealt with data from many enterprises. There is also the issue of transparency and the customer needs to know what’s happening with their data. That has to be followed. These are interesting times.

As this rapid technology shifts happen, is the industry cheer-leading soon without adequately thinking through the consequences on society, jobs?

If you look back in history, tech has always impacted lives and created opportunities — creative destruction. A new tech can impact both positively and negatively. If you put it in context of AI eliminating diseases, helping to alleviate poverty, climate changes, can be great benefits to society. Yes, it will impact jobs. What we should bear in mind is that we should go into this thoughtfully and be mindful of what the impact can be. Re-skilling programmes have to be undertaken. WEF said that elementary school children will have jobs, of which 65 per cent will be new ones and not existing at present. We cannot name these jobs as these are not yet there.

For AI to be effective, business processes have to be digitised. In such a scenario will it be effective here?

So, I think AI can help established markets and emerging markets. In fact, I have seen examples in both areas.

But right here in India, we are working and have developed a product called Farmbeats, and it essentially has taken the place of what used to be a very manual process. So, we know that if you collect data, about a piece of agriculture, you could actually increase the yield. So, things like weather data, soil, amount of sunshine, pictures, which can be done manually.

So, you can send out a bunch of people and collect data, its slow and costly, it takes quite a bit of time.

What we found is, when can do this in an AI fashion, the yields have gone up by about 30 per cent in these farms.

One of the things we are seeing is that you do a lot of work with start-ups in India and yet we have not seen Microsoft Ventures come into India in a big way. So, do you have any plans for Microsoft Ventures?

We launched Microsoft Ventures just two years ago and from Seattle and San Francisco and have expanded to New York, London and Israel. We intend to come to India.

We have a small team and we wanted to get the programme running.

First Microsoft didn’t have a venture fund two years ago and so I introduced the idea. What we didn’t wanted to do is rely on the engineers or someone you know in the product group to track the investment we have made.

So, I wanted to be thoughtful before I come into the market and wanted to identify someone who would be able to handle the investments.

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