My Career Checkpoint in Microsoft

It’s already 18 months since I joined Microsoft. I was Account Technology Strategist Intern in Public Sector team for about 11 months before I converted to MACH (Microsoft Academy College Hire).

Before I joined Microsoft, I was offered a market analyst position in one of the top insurance company in Singapore. It was a tough decision, I could have just leverage on my strength (I have a degree in Mathematics and Economics), but I chose to pursue my career in Microsoft. Reason? I was convinced by the mission of Microsoft, to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. If you take a closer look, it’s not empowering “Microsoft” user, not empowering “wealthy” user, or not even just empowering people that can access technology, but empowering EVERY person, regardless of your social status, your technology ecosystem, or anything else.

Did we empower others?

Fast forward 18 months later, did I make a right decision? This could be one of the best decision I made. I was fortunate enough to truly experience what does it means by our mission statement. I was part of “Cities Unlocked” team before it moved to Microsoft Research. Cities Unlocked is a technology that leverage on spatial sound to assist vision-impaired people to navigate around the cities.

I am constantly inspired by Amos (top left photo, first guy on right hand side), how he overcome his challenges by leveraging technology!

Microsoft Singapore also supports President Challenge, Give Week etc, which allows employees to contribute back to this society. I was emotional when I watched this 2 videos, it truly demonstrates how Microsoft is creating technology to empower every person on the planet to achieve more.

Did we empower ourselves?

I spoke a lot on how Microsoft empower others, but how about ourselves as Microsoft employee? Just to recap, my role is Account Technology Strategist, it’s a technical pre-sales role under accounts team. The designation explains my role, focus on account and drive digital transformation. During customer engagement, we often leverages on the pre-built demo, but some customers catch the ideas quicker with demos that are relevant to them. What would you do if you go thru the whole intranet, and realized there’s no such demo that you wanted to present?

In "Hit Refresh", there's a short paragraph:

The key to the culture change was individual empowerment. We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen, and overestimate what others need to do for us. I became irritated once during an employee Q&A when someone asked me, "Why can't I print a document from my mobile phone?" I politely told him, "Make it happen. You have full authority."

Instead of asking “why don’t someone build it?”, why not ask this, “I know the customer best, why not I build something to show them based on the problem statement?”. Pre-sales sole doesn’t restrict me from being creative and create new things, if I need it, just do it. In one of the interview, Satya mentioned this:

… I’m not just working here, Microsoft is working for me, then you will achieve something.

Microsoft is working for me. Microsoft allows us to leverage on technology and improve people's life. With growth mindset, instead of "know-it-all", we are empowered to become "learn-it-all".

Artificial Intelligence to empower EVERY person

In one of my recent engagement with Land Transport Authority, the team is asked to present in an auditorium-setting, with 120+ attendees. We were given 45 minutes to impress the audience, and the topic is surrounding Microsoft Azure, AI and Bots. We showcased Bots, Custom Vision, Azure Machine Learning, Power BI, etc. 45 minutes to wow all attendees, so we decided to cut the slides, and focus on demo.

On slides 5, Microsoft is "Democratizing AI". What does it take for us to democratize Artificial Intelligence? The whole industry is talking about AI, how AI defeats human in various board games, and eventually, AI replaces us.

In Microsoft, we use AI to amplify human ingenuity, use AI to empower us to achieve more.

Take an example, with all these technology, it allows us to see things that we have never seen before. In part of the demo, we shown this dashboard. Essentially, sitting in front of your desk, you can view the traffic images around the island. Yes, this can be done in multiple ways, including showing in a website.

But guess what, to create this dashboard, we spent barely 4 minutes.

Believe it or not, you can check out the full tutorial below:

Let's take another example using chatbots. Since we can retrieve the images, how about getting a chatbot to help me monitor traffic? A chatbot that can notify me when it detects heavy traffic. This involves computer vision, and again, there's tons of way to create the intelligence. You can use machine learning to create your own algorithm, or some people even use deep learning tools like Cognitive Toolkit and Tensor Flow to create new algorithm. These tools require a special skill sets in data science, and not everyone can develop an algorithm overnight.

In Microsoft, we want to make AI accessible to everyone. There are tools cater for hardcore data scientists, but there are also AI tools that cater for new developer like me. Again, to create this algorithm, it's as simple as upload images and tag them. See it to believe it.

With this algorithm, and a few integration with chatbots, we created a chatbots that can help us monitor traffic within a week! Here's the sample conversation. Of course, several AI components are involved, such as sentiment analysis and language understanding intelligent services (LUIS).

Once we augment artificial intelligence on a single API that is published online, we can do so much more than just calling API, and consume it directly.

These are just part of it, there are more examples to illustrate how Microsoft is empowering everyone person, not just customer, but also we ourselves, as Microsoft employee.

So, what's next?

This is just the tip of an iceberg, and there are so much more for me to explore. In fact, I am compiling a list of samples on what the team has put together to show customer. The list is not completed yet, but I'm updating it weekly, to document my journey in Microsoft, and how we leveraging technology to improve people's life.

This is the new Microsoft, not the company that only sells Microsoft office and Windows. It's a company that strive to empower every person on that planet. I developed new perspectives on this society throughout the journey, but more importantly, the sense of purpose.