In his near-decade as CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has driven growth in a myriad of segments. However, the company has found little success competing with Google’s wildly popular search engine. But Nadella now feels as liberated as ever as his company’s newly AI-powered Bing has the opportunity to shake up the search engine landscape. The company has already invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, and now, it hopes integrating chatbots into its search engine will give it a long-sought advantage over Alphabet.
The major AI-driven change to Bing comes with its answers to search queries, providing direct answers to queries rather than the standard list of SEO-enhanced links. Nadella hopes this will attract users to jump ship from Google to Bing. As the company plans on adding ChatGPT technology to its other products, such as its cloud division, Azure, Nadella also hopes to take on Amazon’s cloud business.
Nadella’s enthusiasm is well-founded; Google is on the defensive, and its proprietary AI bot, Bard, has yet to be publicly released, setting them behind Microsoft for the first time in ages. And as AI is bound for its biggest year yet, Nadella is ready to lead the disruption for a change.
