Trust in technology has to be earned, not claimed, says Microsoft chief

DISRUPTIONS from the pandemic could accelerate tech adoption by financial services, but trust in technology has to be "earned, not claimed", said Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella.

During a fireside chat at the annual Singapore FinTech Festival x Singapore Week of Innovation & Technology 2020, he told moderator Bill Winters, the group chief executive of Standard Chartered, that Microsoft looks at four core principles to build trust among its users.

"We think about privacy, cyber security, artificial intelligence (AI) ethics and Internet safety," said Mr Nadella, adding that these principles were what helped build trust for the US software maker.

Privacy is increasingly becoming a human right, he noted. "There is also regulation, so companies like Microsoft will need to embed privacy into their engineering process as well as practice."

In the new frontier of AI safety and AI ethics - image recognition, data provenance or language models need to be de-biased - Microsoft is ensuring that it is investing in all of the technology capabilities, so that it does not abdicate (responsibility), he said.

"Ultimately some person in some company is responsible... We have to make sure that we adhere to those principles.

BT in your inbox

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign Up

Sign Up

"The tech industry too ... has to (adhere to these principles) as well."

Tech companies will therefore need to strike a balance.

Data is now at the fingertips of tech firms, as rapid advancements in the space and the ubiquity of technology have paved the way for companies to harness more consumer data.

Firms have the ability to take data and turn it into "analytical power and predictive power" using techniques like AI, he said.

"At the end of the day, any organisation is only as good as being able to understand the past, or predict the future, and you want to be able to do these together."

Besides building up its tech prowess, Mr Nadella said that Microsoft has been trying to train itself to have a "deep sense of empathy" for its customers, in other words, to build a "customer obsession". It starts with deep listening skills - hearing what customers are saying beyond just the words they use, he said, adding that the company hopes that it can meet the unarticulated and unmet needs of its customers this way.

"Organisations that have good listening skills have been able to come out of this (pandemic), or at least are working through this crisis much better," he added.