Conversational AI will become the main way humans interact with technology, replacing traditional web browsers and search engines in the coming years, Mustafa Suleyman, executive director of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division, said in an interview.
Suleyman, who oversees Microsoft’s consumer AI products, including the Bing search engine and the Copilot assistant, called current search interfaces “completely flawed and a total pain”. Faced with them, the executive explains that voice-based artificial intelligence interactions will be «100 times easier» for any user.
Conversational AI search and navigation
It is not the first time we have heard similar arguments and some analysts believe that chatbots like ChatGPT have enormous potential when it comes to answering questions naturally, which would put an end to search engines as we know it. With the implementation of AI on personal computers, a question would be written, the answer automatically completed as it was written, and in a matter of milliseconds it would take users to a specific website or product.
Certainly, artificial intelligence models will completely transform current information search models. And perhaps also the navigation due to the improvements in the user interfaces as the person in charge of Microsoft says: “The user interface you experience will be automatically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that will be the default. And they will represent brands, companies, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists and organizations, just as each of those societal actors ended up acquiring a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe creating an app or using the phone in the past.
Suleyman assures that there will be a turning point to which we will have to adapt. It will be a much more efficient protocol because AIs will be able to talk to AIs in super real time. And, by the way, says the executive, «Let’s not fool ourselves. We already have this on the web open today. We have negotiation behind the scenes, in real time, between buyers and sellers of an advertising space, or between search ranking algorithms. So, there is already that kind of AI market. It just doesn’t manifest itself explicitly in language. It is operating in vector space..
As for the hardware capacity For global searches and web browsing to be done with conversational AI, Suleyman is not as optimistic as other analysts and believes it will take between two and ten years. And it will require a large investment. Additionally, most users do not want to pay more for hardware with AI capabilities, which can be a problem for deploying new generations of machines.
