Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has demonstrated clear intent of taking the lead in the ever-evolving AI race, by leading investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Implementation of AI throughout the Microsoft environment, including Bing and Azure, has been overseen by Nadella for several years, but has arguably intensified since the corporation’s partnership with OpenAI began.

Following the recent pricing of $30 per month for business GenAI features – a surge of over 50 per cent – Nadella defended the price increase by referring to the new features as “the third leg” alongside software such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel; and its cloud suite which includes Teams. Additionally, he cited a generational tech shift as a point of internal consideration.

According to Nadella, revolutionising the search space using AI is a key priority for Microsoft. Speaking to The Verve, the Microsoft CEO said: “We’ve had the best gain in relevance in the core ranking using some of these large models. Second, it’s not just a search engine; it’s an answer engine — because we’ve always had answers, but with these large models, the fidelity of the answers just gets so much better.”