Who ever said operating systems were only for devices?

From the early trinity of floppy disks packaged in a cardboard box to the connectivity of today’s O365, Office has become the go-to productivity tool for the world. Now, Microsoft is bringing the power of artificial intelligence to Office.

The goal? To make Office the underlying operating system for people and organizations, anticipating and fulfilling needs seamlessly in the background.

“What we’re trying to do is have the tools understand the person, to help that person get their job done,” said Jeffrey Snover (pictured), architect for the Office 365 intelligent substrate platform at Microsoft Corp. “To have the computer understand you, understand your objectives.”

Snover spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed the new AI infrastructure in Office 365, AI and social responsibility, and the latest news on Microsoft’s open-source cross-platform automation and configuration tool PowerShell (see the full interview with transcript here).

A smarter Office

“Operating systems are complex, but at the end of the day they’re really, really simple,” Snover said. “They only do three things: They manage and protect resources, they provide services for developers, APIs, and common controls. And then they provide a base set of applications and a way to get additional applications.”

Applying this same formula to O365, Snover explained that the same three things apply to people as to devices. At the core is the substrate: “It is storage, and then a set of services to manage that. So, the storage is basically a planetary scale, NoSQL data store,” he said.

The intelligence substrate adds an AI layer to this basic substrate, Snover explained. This enables not only search and analysis, but also natural language processing that can pick out the key points and create a summary of a document. This makes finding and reviewing saved files much faster.

“You can say, ‘Show me the file card,’ and it’ll say, ‘Here’s this document. You don’t have to read the whole thing. Here are the three key points about it,’” Snover stated.

Ethical AI that helps rather than manipulates

Most companies look to use AI to manipulate people’s behavior for self-serving goals, according to Snover. Examples would be increasing sales by convincing people to buy a certain product or influencing actions, such as voting for a political candidate or supporting a cause.

Not Microsoft, Snover emphasized. “We want to understand you for exactly one reason — to make you successful,” he said. “Success will be when you end the day with more energy than you started.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE