Microsoft and the push for AI tooling

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Editor's note: Let me start this edition of Oversize with a legendary quote by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. “Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” Hawking had said at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2017. Hawking had suggested cautious and effective management of the technology to avoid potential risks in the future. His apprehension was not unfounded. Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized technology and, by extension, almost all industries. And it has become part of our daily lives. But harness it well and it can shape the future and take humanity where it has never been before. Sample this: since its inception in October 2018, AskDISHA—the AI-powered chatbot by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC)—has handled over 10 billion interactions, and customer queries across other channels like social media, phone calls and emails have been reduced by …