A cloud built for the next decade

The following is an excerpt from my keynote at Microsoft Ignite this morning.

The past year has brought the most significant change in our society and economy in modern history. And the cloud has been key to helping the world not only adapt but innovate. We have witnessed a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry. From healthcare, to digital twins in manufacturing, to remote work and learning, organizations in every industry are accelerating their digital initiatives to build resilience and transform.

The true test of technology has always been whether it can help organizations improve their time to value, increase agility, and reduce costs. But, as the world recovers, it will require much more from technology, and the cloud, in particular, to help address our most pressing challenges and ensure nobody is left behind.

Over a decade ago, we declared we were “all-in” on the cloud because we understood its transformational promise and the opportunity it would create for every organization. And today it’s time for us to reflect on how the cloud will change over the next decade and the innovation our changing world will require from the cloud.

We will need to fundamentally transform how the cloud can drive the next level of broad economic growth that everyone can participate in.

To accomplish this, there are five key attributes that will drive this next generation of innovation in the cloud: 

First, ubiquitous and decentralized computing. Every organization, small or large, in every industry, in every country, will require more ubiquitous and more decentralized compute power. We are going through radical changes in computing architecture, from materials, to semiconductors, to systems, across both the cloud and edge. The result of all this will be continued exponential growth in compute capacity.

However, we are at peak centralization right now. As computing becomes embedded everywhere in our world, transforming how we interact with people, places, and things, and as the physical and digital worlds converge, we will require more sovereignty and more decentralized control. Cloud and edge computing will evolve to meet these real-world needs.

Second, sovereign data and ambient intelligence. The volume, variety, and velocity of data will go through explosive growth in the cloud, and in particular, at the edge, driving the decentralization of the compute architecture I just talked about. In this world, data will be more private and more sovereign. Data governance and providence will take on new importance. Large-scale, multi-modal models will become first-class platforms onto themselves, creating ambient intelligence all around us.

We will develop new methods of federated machine learning to drive the next generation of personalized, and yet, privacy-preserving services. Business logic will move from being code that is written to being code that is learned from data, creating a completely new generation of business process and productivity systems.

We will also see this software 2.0 approach being foundational to tackling these massive unsolved challenges, from personalized medicine to carbon recapture. In the AI we create using the enormous power of the cloud, we will look for increasing levels of predictive and analytical power, common-sense reasoning, alignment with human preferences, and perhaps, most importantly, augmenting human capability.

Third, empowered creators and communities everywhere. Our economy will find a new balance between consumption and creation. In the last decade, we saw several tech advances that drove more consumption – more browsing, more shopping, more binge watching – and behind all of this is creation.

We believe the next decade will require technology advances that radically democratize creation. We will need to expand access to skills, tools, and platforms, as well as connections and collaboration across communities, so everyone can create, whether it’s building a virtual world, students working on an assignment with short-form videos, knowledge workers creating formulas and spreadsheets, pro-developers writing code, or domain experts using low-code tools to build applications.

This democratization of creation will drive new innovation in end-user computing. Form and function of our devices will be reimagined across the stack, from silicon to the operating system to the experiences themselves. And these computing experiences will be further amplified by communities that learn from each other, build on each other, and further amplify and accelerate creation.

Fourth, expanded economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. We need to create continuous feedback loops between the work, skills, learning, and credentials required both for the jobs of today and tomorrow. We need to define productivity much more broadly, inclusive of collaboration, learning, and wellbeing to drive career advancement for every worker, including frontline and knowledge workers, as well as for new graduates and those who are in the workforce today. All this needs to be done with flexibility in when, where, and how people work.

Fifth, trust by design. Fundamentally, a technology provider should succeed only when it helps the world around it succeed. No one wants to build technology that rapidly scales but breaks the world around us. And no customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other.

We need to have ethical principles govern the design, development, and deployment of AI. Our technology needs to be secure by design and promote Zero Trust architectural principles. We need to build technology with the design intent to protect the fundamental rights of all people, including privacy and strengthening the institutions we all depend on for our livelihoods and wellbeing. And we need tech advancements that protect our most finite resource, our planet. 

Every organization will need to harness these five attributes to build their own digital tech intensity so they can create the proprietary technology required to generate durable competitive advantage. They will need not only to adopt technology but build their own technology.

These cloud advances are what will enable every organization in every sector to create that broad economic surplus – a cloud that helps small businesses become more productive, multinationals more competitive, nonprofits more effective, and governments more efficient, that improves healthcare and educational outcomes, amplifies human ingenuity, and allows people everywhere to reach higher.

This is what the Microsoft cloud delivers, and it underlies everything we will show you this week. The Microsoft cloud is built to accelerate your transformation today and going forward.