At Transform 2019 recently, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott sat down with Deepak Agarwal, LinkedIn’s VP of artificial intelligence, to discuss a range of topics. Kevin was amazing in how he described AI – we will paraphrase.

The industrial revolution began decades before the steam engine proliferated – it became something that dramatically changed productivity as it could do things that once required animal or human labor.

Kevin explained the early days of the steam engine benefitted people with capital who could invest in the technology or understand it. Eventually, it democratized.

He made the point we need to contract the time that AI becomes democratized.

In effect, we are – we detail in this blog Future of Work investments and breakthroughs from numerous companies looking to bring AI to various disciplines.

For example yesterday we broke the news about how Virtual Instruments is leveraging AI in their AIOps solution to one day allow ML to make decisions for the organization about where workloads should live and how they should be allocated. Last month we broke the news on Microstrategy and their federated analytics platform which brings hyperintelligence to the Future of Work.

We applaud Microsoft’s efforts – they want tens of millions of people using this “new bag of tricks” to do their job. Kevin wants all 40M developers in the world to be familiar with machine learning for example.

Imagine if the last 40 years or so of the PC revolution are roughly analogous to the early decades of the industrial revolution and AI becomes the equivalent to the steam engine. The leapfrog in technological advancement is not even fathomable.

Exciting times lie ahead.

Where do organizations go to learn more? The world’s only Future of Work Expo (collocated with the ITEXPO #TechSuperShow) of course. Feb 12-14, 2020 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.