Nadella’s Ignite 2024 Keynote Sticks to Now-Familiar Hyperscaler Script

MICROSOFT IGNITE — Satya Nadella delivered few new or strategic insights on the Ignite 2024 main stage Tuesday morning in a keynote-speech formula that has grown all too familiar within the hyperscaler sector.

Rather, the CEO of Microsoft, which is holding its annual customer and partner event this week in Chicago, reviewed the litany of announcements Redmond unveiled earlier in the morning via the internet — though with some vendor-partner names, quick-take product demonstrations and customer testimonials tossed in along the way, as has become the standard among the cloud computing providers.

Once upon a time, heads of companies used their keynote time to talk about overarching vision, trends and strategy. Yet, especially, it seems, since the advent of the AI craze, the major cloud vendors’ top leaders, in particular, seem only to be tasked with discussing what comes out of the public relations department. 

Perhaps that’s because the hyperscalers are fixated on the race to AI supremacy. Indeed, the winners are reaping billions of dollars in rewards. It’s a revenue stream that shows little sign of slowing, and the providers want to keep it that way. In era of ongoing inflation and greater customer attention to streamlined cloud computing spending, the hyperscalers have sought to find the magic bullet that ensures end-user outlay for their cloud computing platforms. 

Related:Microsoft Ignite 2024 Overflowing with AI News

They see AI as that bullet. Cloud computing infrastructure serves as the foundation of AI. Thus, the hyperscalers have locked themselves into a competition for AI, more so than cloud, differentiation. And, according to a new report from IoT Analytics, published in late October, Microsoft holds the overall AI lead — for now. 

“Helping boost Microsoft into this spot is its significant lead in cloud gen AI, driven by its close relationship with OpenAI,” analysts wrote. 

Much of that came from Microsoft’s decision to back OpenAI back in 2019 and 2023, which fueled the availability of Azure OpenAI service to global organizations before Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud started to play catch-up. (Even so, Google Cloud, it should be noted, now boasts the most AI customers, per IoT Analytics and other indicators.)

“Many large enterprises have initiated their first gen AI projects on top of a Microsoft AI stack,” IoT Analytics observed. “However, with several LLMs closing the performance gap with OpenAI models, it remains to be seen if Microsoft’s early mover advantage fades or remains.”

Nadella at Ignite 2024: 'Underlying Forces'

Listening to Nadella at Ignite 2024 on Nov. 19, though, one wouldn’t think Microsoft might face any AI competition — nor does he expect AI itself to lose traction in the modern era.

“With every platform shift, it's always perhaps good to build a deep context and understanding of the underlying forces, and today we talk about them as scaling laws,” Nadella said, inserting observations he made this past May at Microsoft Build. “Just like Moore's Law, we saw the doubling in performance every 18 months. With AI, we have now started to seeing the doubling every six months or so. … [T]he thing to remember at the end of the day is, these are not physical laws. These are just empirical observations that hold true, just like Moore's Law did for a long period of time. And so therefore, it's actually good to have some skepticism, some debate, because that, I think, will motivate ... more innovation on whether it's model architectures or whether it's data regimes or even systems architecture.”

From there, Nadella launched into discussion of Microsoft’s capabilities, noting, just as he did earlier this year at Microsoft Build, that AI is “not about tech for tech's sake, but it's about translating it into real outcomes.”

As such, while there might be new AI features coming out of Microsoft and Ignite 2024, the messaging sounds the same.