Chief Architect Ulrich Homann Shares Insights About His Work at Microsoft on CAF Podcast
For the Chief Architect Forum Podcast, an excerpt follows from an interview with Ulrich Homann, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President in the Cloud and AI Business. Homann, a member of the CAF, was interviewed by Brice Ominski, global chief technology officer at DeepDive World. The full interview can be heard here.
Homann is part of Microsoft’s senior engineering leadership team. He is responsible for customer-led innovation efforts across the cloud and enterprise platform portfolio, engaging with some of the most complex and innovative customers and partners worldwide.
Question: When we look at something like generative AI coming on board, that’s disruptive as far as technology is concerned. However, it also holds immense potential for significant positive changes. Many companies are currently experimenting with these tools, and while they may not be fully prepared to utilize them, the future looks promising. I think that’s a little bit of an obstacle, and I’m wondering if you can also relate your answer to a statement you made in one of your earlier sessions where you said, “It’s essential to look at the business architecture and understand how that fits into this change.” How would we move forward with getting companies that may not feel ready? What would your advice to them be?
Answer: Well, again, if you think about it, I’m sure when we had this discussion, it was in 2023. 2023 was effectively the year of experimentation with Gen AI. Everybody was looking at it, either playing with ChatGPT as an application or using large language models like open AI Azure Open AI to build their own ChatGPT effectively. Everybody was doing that and experimenting, and when you experiment, you go wherever the technology takes you. That’s the right thing to do in this early phase. But in parallel, you should start by saying once you have insight into what’s going on, how this technology will impact you, or what you see as an impact. It would help if you started by saying how I go and how I can use it for business benefit. And then, you need to look into what I need to build to drive business benefits. If we don’t look for business benefits, this technology will ultimately not be helpful for the customer in question.
2024 has shifted this a little bit. Nothing of the basics I just shared changes because they are always relevant. 2024 is the year of the product. In 2023, it was mostly about models, infrastructure, GPUs, etc. That doesn’t change. However, we now have a co-pilot from Microsoft, a new AI tool that assists in various tasks and decision-making processes. You see efforts from SAP, ServiceNow, and many other folks that are effectively coming out with AI capabilities tailored to their application capabilities.
That enables us to do two things.
First, it enables us to expose AI to a larger group inside the environment, which means we can now start the change process inside a company to say, “Hey, if you use the Microsoft 365 Co-pilot as an example, you can now get all of your productivity and knowledge workers to effectively use AI in their daily lives, which means you start to change process of how AI can help me do my job.
The second part is that because you’re now starting the change process, you see more intuition and more ideas flow into the environment. This drives the work: “How do I not just use out-of-the-box product which helps me change my environment.” Now I say, “What makes sense for me is to build custom so that I can uniquely represent the data, the processes and the values that a given customer given customer wants to present to their customer base.” Combining this change management plus thinking through how you must build the stack and the value proposition you want to extract from your AI investments will be critical.