Why Microsoft is asking startups to dance with it into the new year

Microsoft Accelerator CEO Bala Girisaballa in Bangalore. Photo credit: Microsoft Accelerator.

Microsoft is throwing the kitchen sink at artificial intelligence – and so are Google, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Apple. For Microsoft, this is neither a fad nor a new vertical: the tech giant believes AI has reached an inflection point and will soon become integral to every company’s business.

Bala Girisaballa, who took over as CEO of the Microsoft accelerator in Bangalore four months ago, likens it to the start of the dotcom era. “Time was when dotcom was a strategy – a slap on to your business model, not an integral part. Today, it’s bizarre to ask if you’re a dotcom.”

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Bala thinks AI will one day be just as ubiquitous. We will no longer have a category like AI startups because every company will have AI – just as we no longer talk of dotcom businesses as something esoteric.

“We are at the cusp of a new era where everything is about intelligence. It’s no longer about automation, it’s about tons and tons of data and what we do with it… Give it another ten years, I think artificial intelligence and data analytics will be in the DNA of every company,” he explains in a freewheeling interview with Tech in Asia on the road ahead for Microsoft and its engagement with startups.

See: Startups react with hope and fear to AI alliance of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon

Alignment with Microsoft vision

The new batch of 13 startups and their mentors at Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore. Photo credit: Microsoft Accelerator.

The AI theme manifests itself in multiple ways at Microsoft. It’s building an open-source natural language processing platform called Luis.ai that startups can plug into. And it recently got into an alliance with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and IBM to create a range of open source AI libraries and frameworks that startups can use.

More than half the startups in the latest batch of startups at Microsoft’s Bangalore accelerator are into AI or data analytics. Bala believes the analytics startups will also adopt the self-learning AI mode at some point.

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The accelerator’s mandate is to help the startup ecosystem grow in a tech-agnostic way, but Bala admits it is also aligned to Microsoft business. So, if a startup wants to move to the Azure cloud, Microsoft engineers will help it do the fork-lifting. Cloud credits and Azure’s linkages with Microsoft’s AI platform act as carrots for startups to make the move. But there’s more at stake here than the optional adoption of Microsoft tools and tech.

The tech giant’s preoccupation with its license game blindsided it to the internet and mobile wave. It lost its mojo; its stock declined. But there’s been a resurgence in the last couple of years under Satya Nadella.

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