Microsoft UAE had brought its global – ‘Microsoft Build: AI Day’ tour to the UAE. The event, an AI-focused extension of Microsoft’s annual flagship developer event brand, Microsoft Build, united government officials, technologists, innovators, IT decision-makers, and business professionals under one roof to share ideas and insights on the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies.
‘Microsoft Build: AI Day’ in Dubai featured keynote addresses, breakout sessions, and fireside chats by esteemed officials and experts including Dr Mohammed Al Kuwaiti, Head of the UAE’s Cybersecurity Council; and Dr. Andrew Jackson, Executive Vice President, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at Core42, a G42 company.
Various Microsoft executives including Julien Bertin, Azure Lead for Microsoft CEMA; Hakki Ogretmen, Application Innovation Lead at Microsoft UAE; and Aysar Yousef, Azure Data & AI Lead, FSI & Aviation Industries, will also deep dive into topics such as integrating the power of cloud and AI into development workflows, and how to build and scale cloud-native, intelligent applications on Azure.
In a conversation with edge/, Naim Yazbeck, General Manager of Microsoft UAE spoke about Microsoft’s plans for the region.
What do you see the implications of AI for a region like MENA?
I think artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology and as an innovation is the biggest tech innovation that happened since the internet. It is going to impact every element of our life, our work, and our business. The good thing about AI is, we’re seeing for the first-time innovations that are being created from the region.
For example, there is the Falcon and Jais that have been created in the UAE that are going global. Today, any consumer can tap into AI models and use them, and the good thing is that it allows smaller countries and even smaller businesses to innovate at scale.
From organisations to governments, everyone is taking a strong stand and is looking at ways in which AI can be implemented. I am optimistic that there is a unique opportunity for the region to leverage the AI motion to lead into that space. If we move fast and act immediately, we will be the winners.
What are the next steps when it comes to Microsoft and AI? How are you planning to work around the competition?
First competition is always good because competition drives innovation. Yeah. And drives a better customer experience. Thus, competition is good. We’re happy with that competition. We’re happy that there are multiple players in the market. We do have a leadership position at this point of time and we will continue to push it forward.
We will continue to double down on our investment in the region. We’re expanding our data centre in the UAE, both in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We’ve brought open AI on Azure in the country which is unique to the region. So, we’re doubling down on the investment in the in region and both the UAE and the region will be big beneficiaries of our investment there.
From the World Governments Summit to everyday news AI is the hot topic. However, the technology is in its infancy. What do you see coming out from the region?
Yes, the technology is in its early days, but the results that we’re seeing are astonishing. I was at the World Government Summit, and I was happy that this was almost an AI Summit. And the reason is that it is a topic that is on the mind of every government. Every government leader is very clear. If they want their country to lead, they must look at AI.
If you look at the UAE vision, their vision is to be an AI-driven nation. And everything they’re doing is building towards that perspective. I hope the whole GCC region works that way, because reality as I s I said, countries that are going to be at the forefront of AI technology going to build a great nation. Countries that lag, are going to forego a lot of opportunity.
How can you make it easier for people to build large language models (LLMs)?
The reality is that currently, LLMs are expensive. GPUs are still expensive. They consume lots of power and LLMs need to be trained on a large amount of data that requires GPU.
Now with time cost of technology like anything else will go down. Having said that, the real innovation is not going to be in LLMs everyone can access that. The innovation is going to be – what do we do on top of the existing LLMs? What are the use cases that we develop on top of that? How can we leverage that technology to build something unique?
How do you work around these existing challenges that the LLM have already picked up in terms of biases?
This is where we are working to allow customers to do what we call fine-tuning of alarms, which means draining the LLM on their data. So that we reduce that bias as much as possible. But also, I think, there is an obligation for all diverse parties, whether gender, race etc, to try to digitise data related to them. So that LLM becomes less biased. We have some ways to go but I think there’s lots of work done there already.
What are the key sectors you see in this region specifically in the MENA region? Do you think AI can be a very powerful tool?
There are multiple sectors, but the biggest is going to be healthcare. I think AI is providing a unique opportunity to probably get precision medicine to levels never happened before.
So healthcare is at the top of the list, and then there are financial services and how we can combat cybercrime. I think it will get a lot of help through AI, and retail through how we rethink customer experience. But also, I think every sector is going to be impacted whether government energy every sector will have a positive impact.
How AI can positively and negatively like a double-edged sword impact, security, and cybersecurity? What is the kind of impact it’s going to have on the jobs in the region for people and how do you see it in terms of security for the future?
History tells us that every technology innovation from the day the electricity was created till today, provides a positive impact on both the economy and the jobs. I would expect AI is going to create more jobs and it will have a more positive impact on the world GDP or the regional GDP.
Now, it will create different kinds of jobs. There will be a requirement for many current roles to be retracted to be able to get those new jobs, but I am confident that there will be more jobs in the market just as a reference to the higher GDP that the technology will bring.
