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.

What did the question even mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, "show me my most at-risk opportunities"? Show me your what now? I'm pretty sure I'm human, and I'm pretty sure I speak English and have a fair knowledge of "stuff", but I honestly have no idea what this sentence means. Opportunities that are at risk? Does that mean a chance to win a free lunch that is ending soon?

If someone said "show me my most at-risk opportunities" too me I would probably consider that I'd misheard and look for near-fit sentences that made sense too. At the very least I'd ask them to repeat themselves to confirm that they were, in fact, speaking gibberish.

Re:Cant see why this is a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't make silly! His Indian English is desiring no correction.

What did you mean to say?

[hackwrench]

You probably shouldn't use Cortana to dictate your Slashdot posts.

Re:Cant see why this is a problem.

[Darinbob]

All business related questions from executives tend to be nonsense or gibberish.

Re: Cant see why this is a problem.

[MrNaz]

Aah. So you've identified the missing feature in Cortana. It needs to add to its AI engine a list of all junkets and other commercial events, and cross match them with the user's current location. So next time a question is asked, it can process it using the appropriate vocabulary for the occasion.

Later, in an workshop for MBAs:
User: Cortana, tell me how to leverage synergies while focusing on our core competencies in a manner that maximizes shareholder value through enhancing business efficacy?
Cortana: By sitting in your office and formulating massive spreadsheets that don't really do anything other than create impressive charts that you will embed in your PowerPoint slide deck and present at the next stockholders' AGM.