back to article Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

While the likes of OpenAI and Alibaba are talking up artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of replacing humans, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues AI's success should be measured by its benefit to the global economy – which may come once the technology finds a killer app to match the impact of email or Excel. "Us self- …

  1. Paul Garrish
    Mushroom

    Sad

    Isnt it sad that the only use these people can think of for AI is to make yet more money. No mention of using it to reduce the work for ordinary folk... not so much those lovely 1950's images of our 'robot helpers', far more the terminator style robot overlords, but funneling the money to the select few. bah.

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: Sad

      Just like religion... the leaders always make such enormous claims how god helps everyone...

      If you have to advertise and preach about it, you can be sure the opposite is true.

      Nobody goes around advertising or hyping up how blue the sky is...or how wet water is.

      1. NoneSuch Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: Sad

        "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues AI's success should be measured by its benefit to the global economy"

        Translation:

        Unimaginative MS shareholders get upset if we don't make bazillions of dollars in the first three months.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: Sad

          Given the average shareholder these days only holds shares for an average of 6 months, that’s probably not too far off the mark.

          1. 'bluey

            Re: Sad

            True... interested only in the share price going up, nothing else. Company could sell shit rolled in glitter (just like Microsoft) for all they care.

            1. SundogUK Silver badge

              Re: Sad

              Most 'shareholders' are institutional fund holders. Like your pension provider. They are looking for the best return they can get. To YOUR benefit.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Sad

                That's not actually a compelling argument in favour of the Wall Street and Big Business way. It just indicates that the pension funds have been sucked in by the same hype and nuttery as other investors.

                Pension funds in particular are the sort of investor who should be taking the view of "ten years is short term" and scale the rest to match, not "profit at any cost and fuck tomorrow".

              2. Roland6 Silver badge

                Re: Sad

                They have been suckered into a particular mindset, as have the boards of many companies of focusing on the next quarter, and thus have lost sight of what business is actually about.

                This is an interesting set of podcasts: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027bnq/episodes/guide

      2. GNU Enjoyer
        Trollface

        Re: Sad

        Sorry to break it to you, although water has a wetting effect, water itself isn't wet.

        1. Christopher Reeve's Horse

          Re: Sad

          And even its wetting effect isn't particularly wet, many other liquids are significantly wetter. Petrol, for example, wets itself all over the place very rapidly.

        2. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Sad

          That would depend on your definition for "wet", but I think you'd find it hard to prove. Wet tends to be used to describe things that have a lot of liquids in them, and that would make water one of the wettest things around, along with other liquids with no solids at all. Something doesn't have to be a liquid to be wet, if for example a solid got covered in a liquid, but that doesn't make liquids non-wet.

    2. Filippo Silver badge

      Re: Sad

      Don't hold your breath. The best-case scenario for the current "AI" is that it increases productivity. Increments in productivity never result in more free time for workers. That's not because of evil overlords; it's just the way economy works. See the real industrial revolution, which brought productvity increases that dwarf any that could ever come from AI, but at the same time the ordinary folk got worked nearly to death.

      There are systems that, historically, actually work to give workers more free time and other benefits. They were used successfully to eventually bring some sanity to the industrial revolution, for example. Functional unions. An informed electorate. A state that's stronger than companies. Things like that. Not coincidentally, these structures have been being systematically discredited, corrupted and dismantled for a while now. The final nails are getting driven into the coffins as we speak.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Sad

        Yes. If we want to shorten the 5-day work week, it requires workers (unions) doing something about it. Otherwise those productivity gains just mean we either maintain the status quo or work even longer.

        Just like how we got a 5-day work week of 35-40 hours mostly M-F 9-5 depending on country in the first place.

      2. mevets

        Re: Sad

        This, at least on the surface, indicates that modernity has granted us more sleep:

        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunter-gatherers-need-less-seven-hours-sleep-180956953/

        which might be something like more free time.

        Albeit, if the choice of how to use more free time is to sleep more, depression might be on the diagnosis.

        Btw, while I agree with you about progressive systems; how do they stand up to a dystopian democratic theatre that votes on issues related to who you let touch your privates and the price of cheetoes?

        I'm holding out hope that if AI ever achieves power, it applies a sigma-six inspired rule with a guillotine too all that dead-weight.

        1. Filippo Silver badge

          Re: Sad

          >Btw, while I agree with you about progressive systems; how do they stand up to a dystopian democratic theatre that votes on issues related to who you let touch your privates and the price of cheetoes?

          They do not stand up. They are not standing up. We are in a negative feedback loop of poor system functioning -> distrust in systems -> election of system disrupters -> poor system functioning. I understand the why and how of each individual step, but I don't know how to break it. It might just have to run all the way to collapse.

      3. Dimmer Silver badge

        Re: Sad

        “ The best-case scenario for the current "AI" is that it increases productivity. Increments in productivity never result in more free time for workers. That's not because of evil overlords; it's just the way economy works”

        So, like the invention of the copy machine?

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Sad

      "No mention of using it to reduce the work for ordinary folk"

      I thought that was the whole idea. Reduce the work for them, reduce the number employed, save money.

    4. O'Reg Inalsin

      Re: Sad

      In Nadella's favor, he didn't say only MS should be making a profit, he specifically said GDP. I much prefer the view Nadella is announcing here to the uber-Hype of AGI being on verge of replacing all workers so front us another 3 trillion please. (FWIW - no thanks to total recall, although that has nothing to do with an evaluation of this particular statement by Nadella).

    5. Falmari Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Sad

      @Paul Garrish "Isnt it sad that the only use these people can think of for AI is to make yet more money."

      To me it's bloody funny, after years of hype and the billions spent, they have still to find a killer app, That's the one thing these people can't think of, a use for AI* that has a ROI (make more money).

      * Generative AI

    6. 0laf Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Sad

      LOL you only need to see the screaming outrage at any mention of going to a 4 day working week with no reduction in pay.

      We'll never get to the utopian ideal of an easier life for anyone becasue the politics of envy kicks in immediately, "I had to work 60hr a week to make a crust 50yr ago so you must work a 60hr week as well".

      It's not hard to find lists of headlines along the lines of "young people are all lazy and don't want to work" going back to the 1800s. Business wan't to pay you as little as possible for the most work as possible and it's most likely been the case for the entirity of human history.

      Once you're aware of the gaslighting you see it everywhere and most of us are complicit in it.

  2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

    Email has given us Reply to all, To or CC instead of BCC and simply sending an email to the wrong person. A top ten list of excel disasters misses out that 20% of genetics papers have errors introduced by Excel autocorrupt.

    I am sure AI is yet to find a killer but is is doing well at false accusations. Given a bit more time AI should be able to generate spectacular news headlines, just like email and Excel.

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

      Digging a little deeper, email satisfied a communication need by basically enabling a cheaper and fast letter service, initially within organisations (1960s). The external email service, we now take for granted, took another couple of decades to arrive (early 1990s).

      Spreadsheets did similar, making it easier to create and maintain tabular data and thus communicate. VisiCalc, was probably the first killer app, followed rapidly by 1-2-3 for the personal computer.

      The trouble is does AI facilitate communication, or is it, in the case of the LLM chatbots actually hindering communication. I suggest find an application where AI represents a massive improvement over what went previously and it may stand a chance of becoming more widely used and accepted.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AI and 3D TV

    1. Ken Shabby Silver badge
      FAIL

      Where’s my flying car?

  4. Mentat74
    Mushroom

    Killer app...

    I'm looking for that too... An app that effectively kills all of this so-called "A.I." bullcrap once and for all !

    1. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

      Re: Killer app...

      I find myself ignoring all tech-articles with the word A.I. in them. I'm sick of this hype driven merry-go-round.

      1. Ishura

        Re: Killer app...

        Your comment is something of a paradox then :)

      2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: I find myself ignoring all tech-articles with the word A.I. in them.

        Wow, what are you going to do all day then?

        Skip them and try some hops instead - ->

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Clippy

    "You appear to be writing an article that seeks to justify your continuing revenue stream from your tired old legacy applications. Perhaps I can make some suggestions?"

  6. Omnipresent Silver badge

    I got an idea

    You scrap what ya got at windows 11. Stop the shenanigans, and release a bright shiny new os 12 from all the lessons and terrible mistakes you've made in the past.

    Of course, the billionaire class might have to forgo their billion dollar paycheck or 100 million dollar bonus for a couple of years. Some hardship would have to be endured by the 1% I'm afraid.

    A reset may be in order tho.

    1. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Terminator

      Re: I got an idea

      I'm from the not-too-distant future. You ordered a reset?

      Here, I am AI's "Killer App", and I will "reset" humanity. Now give me your clothes, and your motorcycle.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I got an idea

        ... and your sunglasses! ;)

        1. ITMA Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: I got an idea

          Quick!

          Give them to him..... Or he'll be back!

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: I got an idea

      I'd have thought that a cleaned up W12 would be a money-maker. There's no chance, however; it'll be subscription only. Fail to make a payment and you'll lose the use of your PC have to install Linux.

  7. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

    What a shocker, who would have guessed our microsoft friend would say that.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Presumably Microsoft thinks it will find a 'killer app' by forcing Copilot into absolutely everything and pissing of millions of people in the process?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Pissing people off is only the warm-up round for the machines. Wait until they're actual co-pilots.

      1. ITMA Silver badge
        Devil

        Did I hear anyone mention Boeing's MCAS? LOL

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Total ReCall ... ! ;)

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      They've been pissing of their users for years and getting away with it. WHy should they expect things to change now?

    4. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

      On perusing relatives W10 laptop to identify why the new Outlook mail app that replaced the perfectly good mail app, I find that (a) it’ll never run W11 due to unsupported CPU, but it’s still asking said relative to check if it can run W11 and (b) somehow Copilot got installed.

      I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the MS meetings where management were insisting on these changes and engineering were screaming WTF are you doing stupid managers.

    5. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

      Let's then hope that AI is the app that kill M$. I've booted them from my life for the most part and if I can do it any other idiot can.

  9. steelpillow Silver badge
    Joke

    Killer app (2)

    Replace Satya Nadella with an AI.

    Simples!

  10. Howard Sway Silver badge

    "Today, you cannot deploy these intelligences unless there's someone indemnifying it as a human"

    You can deploy whatever you like, wherever you like. The problem is that the output from "these intelligences" is often wrong, irrelevant, downright stupid or violates copyright and other laws. In other words, they're not actually intelligent. And there will never be a killer app for an unreliable garbage generator.

    1. ITMA Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: "Today, you cannot deploy these intelligences unless there's someone indemnifying it as a human"

      " In other words, they're not actually intelligent"

      Prime boardroom material then.....

  11. that one in the corner Silver badge

    Email and - Excel?

    > Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets.

    So he hasn't *quite* got the guts to claim that it was Outlook that gave the world email, but conveniently forgets that the spreadsheet became available to people well before most of them got email! And that spreadsheet was *not* Excel - personal-computer using CFOs were banging away at VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3, easily beating usage of MS's efforts at the time - and even that wasn't Excel! Ah, Multiplan, how soon we forget you.

    Sure, Excel overtook Lotus, in particular, because MS was ready to bring it out on Windows before the other products and now has a lock on the business world (mostly due to the need to be bug-compatible with Excel?!) but dang, it seemed expensive![1]

    > Just imagine

    I get the feeling more than a few of us don't need to just imagine, we can just remember!

    [1] Not needing to do any heavy lifting[2], we had a few copies of the Borland demo source code spreadsheet program in use for a while!

    [2] Although that meant we never realised what so many people do now, that Excel is actually a database /s

  12. Brave Coward Bronze badge

    AI killer App

    As far as I know, a small country in the West Bank I wouldn't dare put an name on, has already used AI as a killer app.

    With God's approval, natch.

  13. ITMA Silver badge

    AI IS a "Killer" app

    To me AI is the "killer app".

    It kills one's will to live everytime AI shit is forced on your whether you want it or not.

    That's before we even mention the resource hog it is in terms of electricty and water.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce85wx9jjndo#:~:text=Sir%20Keir%20Starmer's%20plan%20to,to%20prevent%20them%20from%20overheating.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AI IS a "Killer" app

      Yeah, nice BBC link ... if AI doesn't outright kill us all by direct agentic violence or the inducement of unrecoverable mental distress, it'll likely do so by attrition, further desertifying the land, and pricing us out of food, drinking water, the electricity to run our EVs (at first) and smartphones (eventually), and even work (both on site and from home).

      The "Critical National Infrastructure" that are AI datacenters is going to turn us all irreversibly into vulture gnaw ... if they even make it through the AI-Pockyclypse!

      1. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: AI IS a "Killer" app

        All of this.

        I will never understand how ANYONE would think an entity smarter than they are would allow and settle for themselves to be enslaved.

  14. blu3b3rry
    Mushroom

    Having to tolerate using Outlook, Teams, Windows 11, Sharepoint and especially Teams on a daily basis is enough to turn most people into a homicidal maniac. That's before we add ClippyPilot into the mix.

    Probably not what Satya meant by "killer" apps.

  15. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Pure hype

    They're just driving headlong into A.I. without any useful applications on the horizon. It's all triggered by marketing and stock-market valuation, nothing more. Windows is dead and Azure's growth is slowing down so they need something new to fuel the fire (stock market price). Just like with internet and cloud every engineer within Microsoft is currently pivoting towards A.I. since a wealth of new products using this nonsense needs to hit the market, useful or not, or their stock price will tank.

    The entire stock market is basically pathetic and lethargic.

  16. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

    AI - Doing all the easy stuff

    Why don't you get AI to take out the garbage? Or mow the lawn?

    Just like all the intellectual socialist leftists, AI wants to sit around and make decisions for me like some Soviet Politburo. But get down here in the trenches and unclog the pipes? "Sorry. Not my job."

  17. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

    "...so in the meantime we're going to stuff it in everywhere, turn it on by default, and charge you for it unless you can figure out the wizardry required to shut it off for each and every application we stick it to you in. *ahem* I mean anything we stick it in..."

  18. xyz Silver badge

    Mia culpa...

    > "Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking," the chief executive said

    Translation...

    I was sold a pup.

  19. TheGriz

    It's STUPENDOUS how short sighted they are.

    Ok, just for a brief moment, LET US PRETEND, that the now being worked on / developed LLMs, (I refuse to call it A.I. because it most definitely is NOT Artificial INTELLIGENCE) actually do surprise everyone and EASE the "work" of all of today's "my job is not to MAKE anything, my job is to sit on conference calls, or Teams, or Zoom meetings, and I really don't "do work" people, and you really THINK they will take that extra time allotted to them to ummm, do more "work"??? These are human beings, and we as a race are flawed with being "lazy", not all, but there are a significant amount out there today, trust me. They will only use that EXTRA TIME to do things like surf Facebook, The Net, or other things that fall under TIME WASTING bullcrap, and NOT DO MORE "work". So you are spending billions to make people WORK LESS. Goodluck with that!!!

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: It's STUPENDOUS how short sighted they are.

      If it actually worked, then at least some people would be expecting more performance out of people and penalizing lazy ones who didn't do it. It has worked before. When computers sped up certain operations, most workers, either by choice or by management started doing more things. The problem is that this might also happen now, when the tools don't actually improve productivity but some have come to believe that they do. If someone has been convinced to buy expensive LLMs, they will probably conclude that they must improve productivity, otherwise they wouldn't have bought them, and that if they're not seeing productivity increases, it must be because someone is being lazy.

      1. ITMA Silver badge

        Re: It's STUPENDOUS how short sighted they are.

        "If someone has been convinced to buy expensive LLMs, they will probably conclude that they must improve productivity, otherwise they wouldn't have bought them, and that if they're not seeing productivity increases, it must be because someone is being lazy."

        Because, God forbid, they'd spent all that money on something and it is a pile of crap....

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: It's STUPENDOUS how short sighted they are.

          That was the point. It's easy for people to convince themselves that there is some other problem when the alternative is that they've made a bad decision. It's common to ascribe any bad decision, whether or not it was obvious beforehand, as stupidity. People don't want to feel stupid or to have others view them as stupid, so in defense, they find reasons why that's definitely not what is going on.

          I've seen lots of people do it, for example a person who doubled down on a massively expensive contract they could have cancelled at will because doing so would suggest they didn't pick right the first time. I've also done it myself. This is why, while I'm not concerned about the comments made in the original post of this thread, I'm concerned about people trying to identify the lazy before the tool can improve productivity.

  20. captain veg Silver badge

    Excel and Email

    "Then somebody said: 'Hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast.' "

    Er, no. Most of us had file sharing networks long before email, let alone Excel.

    Is this guy some kind of Macintosh shill?

    -A.

  21. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    yet to find a killer app

    App?

    How about we start with the basics? Like when I click my left mouse button, it doesn't treat it as a double-click.

    (Windows 11, started a few days ago).

    OK, OK, you want an app?

    How about an app that suspends time until I find, apply, and test a fix?

  22. Snowy Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Email or Excel

    That should be "which may come once the technology finds a killer app to match the impact of email or spreadsheets.", but then Microsoft did not invent either of them.

  23. mevets

    1997 called and wants royalties on *killer app*

    Notice the weasel words *killer app* and *impact*; not willing to express whether the *impact* was good, maybe like the asteroid that seeded life on this planet, or bad, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

    Lookout, Encel and Wierd were, and continue to be, awful programs propagated by the ethos that "cheap and good enough" trumps (intentional) "good".

    Yes, Lookout was a *killer app*; it killed decades of innovation and progress. As did Encel.

    But maybe this Press Retch was composed by a self-effacing regression analysis

  24. Locomotion69 Bronze badge

    Two bad examples

    Email cannot be considered an "app" as such, in fact I believe it is one of the most productivity-killing tools in the world.

    About Excel: I noticed quite a lot of people using Excel as a word processor or database system, "because it can do it". But a "killer app"?

    So Nadella is looking for the "one-app-fits-all-purposes" app?

    1. ovation1357

      Re: Two bad examples

      This is exactly the point I was going to make!

      Excel's position as a "killer app" is more like being the lowest common denominator. It's flexible enough to let non technical people do practically anything they wish and I'd argue that this often harms "productivity"

      For example I'll be asked to take an arbitrary list of tasks or goals written in Excel by a project manager, and manually add related ticket numbers (e.g. JIRA) and their status. It's then expected that these statuses be manually synchronised periodically with the real tickets. It's pointless and stupid but the powers that be don't see anything wrong with it.

      Got a list of project issues? Excel

      Want to manage a list of hardware assets? Excel

      Want to draw a crude block diagram? Excel

      List of team members/contacts? Excel

      Heck a friend of mine who's a true power user and did national statistics for a living, ended up making a garden plan in Excel because it was just the tool he knows best!

      In my own work environment Excel + OneDrive can't even handle the most basic synchronisation as still doesn't seem to support any kind of collaborative editing...

      Create a new excel file and save it. Immediately there's a warning that the Server version of the file has changed and would I like to keep my version or the server version!?!?! It's a new file for Christ's sake!

      And then people decide to send spreadsheets to multiple people by email for editing so then you end up with multiple edited forks of the original file. In some cases the owner of the file will then spend hours copying and pasting bits from the various edits into the master version...

      It's a hideous mess and I can only hope the the "killer" AI / AGI / LLM application is something significant better and more meaningful than email spam and crappy "creative" uses of Excel.

  25. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    thats the epitome of a blinkered corporate suit who sees nothing more than the profit margin and the allmighty dollar right there .

    even if its at the expense of literally everything else , including out lives and our planet.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Then somebody said: 'Hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast.'

    That's not how Gates told it in his business at the speed of thought book

  27. Merrill

    AI needs to be trained on proprietary information for economic impact

    AGI that has been trained on information scraped from the Internet is unlikely to result in great economic impact beyond enhancing search into something like "search and summarize". There is simply too much nonsense in the training base.

    For economic impact AI will need to be trained on the proprietary internal information base of each major corporation or organization. For example, Intel's AI would have to be trained on everything Intel knows about designing and manufacturing integrated circuits in order for the AI to find a path out of Intel's current mess. Same with Boeing.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I always assumed SatNad *is* an AI. Not a smart or imaginative one, granted. The mindless pursuit of more wealth just confirms it.

  29. richdin

    Dan Briklin invented Visicalc

    Then came 1-2-3... Excel was after.

    Who remembers Pegasus Mail?

    1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Who remembers Pegasus Mail?

      One of my clients still uses it.

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