Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. We go to India next, where the Artificial Intelligence Summit is underway. It brings together global leaders and tech CEOs, and it was there that we caught up with Microsoft President Brad Smith. Smith spoke with Bloomberg's Hustlin to Ahman, and their conversation began with a question about the growth in AI.
I do think we need to act with urgency today. About a quarter of the population in the global North has access to and is using generative AI, but only fourteen percent in the global South. And when you look at the rates of growth, it's almost double in the global North what we're seeing in the South. So just as electricity divided the world, the countries that had access to it for a century industrialized their grew their economies.
The countries that lacked access to electricity fell behind. We will turn this moment, and I believe, either into a moment where we will close this divide. We can use AI to really enable the global South to catch up in terms of economic growth, or we will continue and maybe risk even exacerbating the great economic divide that defines our world today. But what's most at risk for the global self.
Is it jobs? Is it jobs getting eliminated reshaped? What exactly is the biggest concern?
I think fundamentally it's economic development. It's prosperity because when you have a general purpose technology, meaning something like electricity, that reshapes the entire economy, what history tells us is that the countries that deploy it adopt it widely grow faster than those that do not. So it's about productivity growth, it is about job growth. It's about opportunities for a new and younger population. It's about opportunities to solve real
world local problems using the best technology available. Microsoft.
I'm meeting fifty billion dollars by the end of twenty thirty. What would be the priority for that kind of investment in funding?
Well, we at Microsoft made clear we're on pace to spend fifty billion dollars by twenty thirty to bring AI to the global South. If you think about what happened with electricity, private capital did not come to these countries, They didn't bring power plants to these countries. This starts, I think, actually with investment and capability. So when you see a company like Microsoft investing, and we're obviously not alone, that's encouraging, especially since the investment is all about world
leading technology. But it's just a start. I think it's going to require a massive amount of funding. It is really going to require getting the private markets moving. It's going to require governments using AI because they play key roles in generating demand and we need to scale the population. Requires schools, it requires government, it requires tech companies all working together. That's another big part of what we at Microsoftware announcing here this week.
All this happening at a time when a lot of people are getting skeptical when it comes to AI. We talk about how AI will take away the jobs. We talk about how AI is a technology that's actually enriching the tech titans. How do you reframe? How should we frame the AI story?
Well, fundamentally, I think we should recognize a few things. These kinds of technology waves typically take years and decades, not weeks or months. I think we should recognize that none of this is fundamentally ever about what technology does to people. It's about people making decisions about how to use technology. People who run businesses, people who run governments, people who run nonprofits. We have an opportunity, I believe,
to use AI to make jobs better for people. There will be some processes that are automated, there will be some jobs that are displaced, but new jobs will be created. But mostly I think many jobs will change. And the key is to give people access to AI tools, give them the skills that they need to use them, give people the opportunity to innovate in how they work. I think when you do that, you create a much better foundation for the future.
Given what you have just expressed, and just wondering how that's shaping the way you hire in the countries that you do business like India.
I had a fascinating conversation just the last few days in another country, and it was with people in a company that had a contest for employees to use AI to create new studies to create Let me go back to that if I could. I had a fascinating conversation earlier this week in another country. Somebody who works in a company was describing the contest they had so that employees could use AI and create more use cases to create uses of AI that advanced productivity or built better products.
But the most interesting thing this person said to me was it wasn't fundamentally about creating a better product it was about finding the people who wanted to lean in, who wanted to innovate, who had creativity and ambition. I think there's something that's important and even inspiring for all of us in that give people access to the tools to AI see what they can do. If you find an employee who wants to innovate, that says that that's
an innovative person. That's the kind of person you want to bet the future of your company on by investing in their development.
An AI future world. Would you be hiring more offer you a people?
I think I might be hiring the same number of people. I think they might be doing different things than in the past. I do think that entry level work inevitably is changing. Instead of coming in and just doing one thing and you know, it may be more of the basic research or checking of citations or sources. I think entry level work may become a little bit more like apprenticeships. It may become something where you want people to be exposed to multiple different tasks and skills for the first
year or two. I think this is a great time for employers that are far sighted. What do you really care about the most? If you're a great employer, when
you're hiring someone new. Is it somebody who's going to do something that needs to get done for the next six months but may not be all that demanding, Or are you hiring people who are going to be come the employees that will lead your firm into the future, the people who three and five and ten years from now are likely to be sparking the innovation you need. That I think is and often should be at the heart of what great employers are looking for right now.
We all know it's a tough job market for people graduating from universities, but flip that on its head, it's a great time for employers who are far sighted, who care about talent, who want to invest in people who are going to build the workforce not just for the next year, but for the next decade and beyond. I think that's what we want to be at Microsoft. I think that's what everybody who really has a long term
vision should aspire to do. And we need to make AI and AI tools and AI skills a fundamental ingredient for everybody that we hire in that way.
Brad, don't want to take a look at your Microsoft spownership with OpenAI. How do you see that evolving long a term.
Well, I think it remains a critically important partnership for Microsoft. We bet on each other, but it's not as exclusive as it was, say a few years ago. Open Ai uses our compute, they train models in our data centers, but they work with other companies as well. We critically rely on open AI's frontier models. They are among the best. Many days they are the best in the world. But
we have a relationship with Anthropic. We use open source models, we're developing our own models, so on both sides we work with more partners. But I think the partnership between the two of us remains an imperative. It's a huge priority for us at Microsoft.
The question is why is it a hedge? Is it a strategic pivot? How would you describe that move looking at alternative.
Partners Well, look, if you want to think about the partnership between open Ai and Microsoft, all you have to do is ask one question. Would any of this generative AI sector even exist if the two of us had not come together. Open Ai created something that no one else even understood was possible when they launched chat GPT, and open Ai could never have created that without Microsoft's compute and really frontier data centers on which to train
that we built something special. Will each do special things on our own, will each do special things with other companies? Will each do I think, very special things with each other.
Just one funnel question, because we're running out of time, apparently, copilot Is it losing traction?
I don't think so. It's gaining ground. It's getting better every week, it's getting better every month. I say this as a user not just of M three sixty five Copilot, but our consumer copilot, our researcher agent, our other agents. We're seeing usage grow. We will continue to add features and functionality. I personally think it is an important part not just a Microsoft's past and present. It is a key part of our future. It is a key part
of I think, making everyone more creative, more productive. I certainly find that in my own work each and every day,