Microsoft's Satya Nadella Shown Up By Confused Cortana Assistant

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was a little embarrassed at a Salesforce conference today when he tested the company's personal virtual assistant during a presentation. Slightly fluffing the question 'Show me my most at-risk opportunities', Nadella was dismayed to find Cortana offering him a Bing page with the search term 'Show me to buy milk at this opportunity'. Two further efforts to discover the exposure of his shares failed to achieve their aim, and eventually the CEO of Microsoft gave up. The fact that he stumbled over his first attempt at the question seemed to floor Cortana, which uses the 'Einstein' AI engine, and which has been more praised for its accurate speech recognition than its ability to understand what an array of interpreted words actually mean.

Comments

The Milk Was Most At Risk

[Greyfox]

The milk was past its use-by date and was very much at risk. Cortana correctly realized that it would be bad for meat creatures to try to consume it and was trying to direct him to get a fresh one.

Re:The Milk Was Most At Risk

[tnk1]

Well if you're in Salesforce, when you are working with a sales person, they open what is called an "Opportunity". It's a document used to track the progress of a potential sale through the pipeline.

If I was a sales guy, I might have a customer who has just decided to order the 1 TB storage upgrade to Application X, which the customer already owns. The sales rep opens a new opportunity for the prospective purchase, links the existing customer information to it and tracks that through to the end.

Someone like a CEO would run their own reports based on how all of the company's opportunities look on a regular basis, especially deals which are at-risk of not closing, so this all makes sense in context. Generally your sales forecasting is provided by creating reports based on your opportunities and the tracking information within. A percentage is assigned to an opportunity to show how far it has gone, with 100% being Closed Won.

tl;dr, it's a sales opportunity tracking ticket in Salesforce. Which is probably why he was using that lingo at a Salesforce conference. Presumably Cortana would have had access to his Salesforce accounts somehow. Or, more likely, a fake account with humorous "at-risk" customers like Apple and Google or something.

Re:What did the question even mean?

[Brett Buck]

Cortana finds gibberish double-talk incomprehensible - just like the rest of us!

Re:Cant see why this is a problem.

[lgw]

Still makes 0 sense to me. I would respond "could you ask the question a different way", as it doesn't even parse.