• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella extols virtues of "frontier ecosystem" for AI
• AI can do great things for human workers, but there still needs to be some control
• Microsoft reveals new research showing a divide between bosses and employees over the future of AI in the workplace

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has urged businesses to embrace AI even further to push on and succeed, but urged caution around giving such systems too much control in everyday work tasks.

"When I think about what keeps us grounded every day at Microsoft, it's our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Nadella told the company’s Frontier Tour London event.

Looking at what he called the "frontier ecosystem", Nadella identified three key pillars which need to be tackled - including recapturing individual empowerment, as although AI is taking charge of the dullest parts of our jobs, there is still need for a human to have control.

Frontier AI

Nadella also highlighted "the reverse information paradox" - with a digital learning system which is constantly improving itself, the challenge is for organisations to "capture that knowledge and keep it locally to yourself...in other words, you have to own the knowledge that gets created, both with the human capital that you have, as well as the token capital that you generate"

The final challenge concerns trust, as Nadella noted, “our scaling laws are producing even more powerful models that are less and less trustworthy…you need to treat these models as new forms of insiders, and create a zero-trust architecture around it.”

The speech came as Microsoft unveiled new research revealing something of a divide between bosses and employees over the future of AI in the workplace.

It found the vast majority (84%) of business leaders believe the UK can become a world-leading AI economy within five years, compared with just 41% of employees.

But it also noted that workers are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact on jobs and opportunities for young people, with over half (57%) of employees using AI at work afraid it will reduce opportunities for young people, while 35% fear for their own job security.

For bosses, the future was a bit brighter, with 90% of leaders claiming they had a clear AI strategy in their business, while 84% of those in organisations already adopting AI say they’ve already experienced moderate or significant changes to how their work gets done.

“Bending the curve changes what the UK can achieve, increasing productivity, business growth, better public services, and the measure of that progress is the difference that people feel in their everyday lives,” noted Darren Hardman, Microsoft UK CEO.

“We will not bend the curve unless people see a place for themselves in what comes next…the question is no longer whether you have a strategy, it’s whether AI is actually changing how work gets done.”

“For organizations here, the challenge is to turn AI's potential into improvements that people can feel in the work they do, the services they use, and the opportunities that are open to them...our role at Microsoft to bring intelligence and trust together in AI that puts your organization's knowledge to work helping people achieve more while providing the safeguards and visibility to stay in control.”