Microsoft: AI is 'the hill-climbing machine' of every company - just make sure you don't get locked in

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is great at generating valuable insights, but what companies end up doing with those insights - that’s where true achievement lies, and that’s what companies should be focusing on.

This is one of the core messages delivered by Ryan Waite, Director of Open Source Ecosystems and Incubations at Microsoft, during his keynote, “From Open Source to Agentic Systems: Building the AI Native Era” at the Open Source Summit.

Waite described the interaction between AI and human expertise as a learning loop, a kind of hill-climbing machine that helps businesses improve, and keep on improving.

The knowledge belongs to the business AI models are great at processing enormous amounts of information and generating insights at a scale humans cannot match (and sometimes cannot even fathom), but people bring something arguably more important to the table: context and judgement.

Putting insights into wider context, and using that to make conclusions, helps employees turn information into knowledge, and that knowledge later becomes part of the organization’s collective expertise.

And with every iteration the knowledge grows, helping businesses climb further up the proverbial mountain.

Sovereignty and ownership seem to be an underlying theme to most of the keynotes here at the Open Source Summit, and Waite’s presentation is no different.

As AI generates insight, and humans turn that insight to knowledge, it now becomes vital to secure that knowledge and make sure it remains under the organization’s control.

“It's based on your data,” he said.

“It's based on your people.

It shouldn't be given off to an AI model, that's separate.

And that's why we believe that for organizations to build their own hill-climbing machines, to build their own learning groups, they need to build control with the sort of learning loops and not be beholden to a single AI provider.” After all, everything AI generates is based (or at least, should be) on proprietary business information, and the decisions made based on those insights depend on employees and their understanding of the company.

So, businesses need to make sure ownership of the knowledge accumulated through these interactions are not handed over to an external AI provider - a challenge that will probably grow bigger and bigger as businesses become more dependent on AI tools.

The knowledge generated through these tools could become tied to a particular model, or provider.