• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 3, 2024

Microsoft Vice President Vik Singh, corporate vice president, generative AI and enterprise apps, believes AI models need to learn how to admit when they don’t know what to do.

"Just to be really frank, the thing that's really missing today is that a model doesn't raise its hands and say 'Hey, I'm not sure, I need help'," Singh told the Agence France-Presse, (AFP) a French international news agency headquartered in Paris.

He said “really smart people” were trying to find ways for chatbots to admit "when it doesn't know the right answer and to ask for help."

Singh came to Microsoft in January from Infer, a company that he co-founded. Infer, acquired by Ignite, provides a predictive platform. He also spent a few years at Google. This summer he took the lead for the teams developing Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.

The ability to identify when an AI engine does not have the answer will move these models to the next level of services.

Asking for more specific data is one way an AI engine could ask for help to support everything from advertising to business process, although it's not something that Singh reported in the interview. 

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, this week said that he saw many of his customers increasingly frustrated with the meanderings of Microsoft's Copilot.

During Salesforce’s earnings call last week, Benioff spoke about its company’s new Agentforce AI sales assistant, comparing it to Microsoft's Copilot.

"This is not Copilots," Benioff said. "So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilots because they're not getting the accuracy and the response that they want."

Microsoft pushed back, telling CNBC that “every customer is at a different place in their journey, but overall we are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers.”

Jared Spataro, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement provided to CNBC, that “last quarter alone, we saw a customer increase of over 60%, and daily users have more than doubled, a clear indicator of Copilot’s value in the market.”