The AI boom may make Google and Microsoft stronger
Relying on the tech giants for answers and assistance, not just information, could bring them deeper into people's lives.
The past week’s tumultuous announcements from Microsoft Corp. ( MSFT ) and Google ( Google ) touting new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have led to two important takeaways. First of all, people have that “wow, this will definitely change everything” feeling. The second is realizing that for chat-based search and related artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to have an impact, we must place a great deal of trust in these technologies and the companies that create them.
If AI doesn’t just provide the information we need to make decisions, but directly solves problems, our trust in it will be deeper than before. A more apt description of this new generation of chat-based search engines is “answer engines,” in the sense that they “showcase their work” by linking to the web pages they provide and summarize. “. But for an answer engine to be really useful, most of the time we have to trust it enough to accept its answers wholeheartedly.
The same goes for the tools that help generate so much content, such as text, spreadsheets, code, images, and anything else we create on our devices—both Microsoft and Google have committed to building on their respective existing productivity services Microsoft…
