Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave shareholders on their recent earnings call an inside view on his perception of the emerging digital age.
“Nadella’s presentation showed that digital is not just “Big Tech”. It is infiltrating and transforming every aspect of our lives, our work and play, our organizations, and our society,” reported Forbes.
We highlighted 5 key quotes from the report:
24/7 Digital
“We are living, said Nadella, “through a generational shift in our economy and society. Digital technology is the most malleable resource at the world’s disposal to overcome constraints and re-imagine everyday work and life. As every company becomes a digital company, they need a distributed computing fabric to build, manage, secure and deploy applications anywhere.”
Cohesive Worlds
“As the digital and physical worlds come together,” Nadella said, “we are seeing real enterprise metaverse usage, from smart factories to smart buildings to smart cities.” This means digitizing “people, places and things in order to visualize, simulate and analyze any business process,” such as “a platform to model and optimize water management,” he said according to the report.
Accessibility
The use of “low code/no-code technology” is now “rapidly becoming a priority for every organization’s digital capability building,” Nadella said. A No-Code tool is a piece of software which allows non-technical users to create their own software or apps, usually with a visual interface, a place to store information and the ability to create logical decisions. It is for instance enabling a retailer (H&M), with more than 30,000 employees to develop tools “for everything from managing office capacity to tracking team goals.”
Connecting Firms and People
“We are experiencing a Great Reshuffle across the labor market,” says Nadella, “as more people in more places than ever rethink how, where, and why they work” In this new economy, it has become “mission critical to connect creators with their communities, job seekers with employers, learners with skills, and sellers with buyers.”
People Working Together
“Every organization today,” Nadella said, “needs a digital fabric to connect and empower everyone inside and outside the organization, from knowledge and frontline workers to customers and partners.” Tools like Microsoft’s Teams can become “the center of this digital fabric.” A diverse array of organizations including retailers and airlines are using such tools “to run their business with collaborative applications that bring business process data right into the flow of work.”
“As hybrid work becomes the norm,” says Nadella, “every organization will need to rethink their approach to space. Collaborative tools can “help people stay connected and participate fully in meetings from anywhere.”
Nadella says that the metaverse is coming to such tools, “helping employees access a shared immersive experience where they can have water-cooler-type conversations, and even white-boarding sessions.”
Digital Security
“Cybercrime,” says Nadella, “is the number one threat facing every business today.”Microsoft’s aim is to help organizations implement a comprehensive Zero Trust architecture that protects people, devices, applications, and data holistically across their heterogeneous cloud and client environments.”