Sam George: The State of IoT, Cloud, Edge, and AI - Connected World

Peggy Smedley: For you, what are the most interesting trends that you see? You and I have talked in the past about the IoT (Internet of Things) and I know that you have a lot of vision, a lot of examples that you look at when you think about cloud and edge and we talk about manufacturing and all these things in vertical markets, but for listeners right now, based on investments you guys [Microsoft] are making, what do you see are the most interesting trends? Sam George: Well, I think if you zoom the telescope way back out and look at the very big picture, what we're seeing across all of these vertical markets, whether it's manufacturing or agriculture, smart cites, smart energy. If you take a look at what's happening with all of these, there's a set of disruptive technologies that are fundamentally transforming how those industries function. Cloud was a big catalyst for that and I'd say, very well established at this point. And then IoT, a couple of years ago, really started hitting the scene, building on top of cloud and giving these businesses unprecedented visibility if they were able to take advantage of it back in the early days. Virtually all aspects of their business are able to sense things in the physical world, in realtime, that they weren't able to before. And then while the IoT was happening, edge computing started happening too, which was a normal and natural optimization, where as I connect and start collecting data from these billions of devices that are sensing across all of these different industries that are sensing things that are happening, it's natural to start taking some of the computing that you were doing in the cloud and some of the services that you were taking advantage of and pushing those right out and distributing those right out to the devices themselves for a variety of reasons, whether that's latency concerns or security concerns or anything else. We see this wonderful trend of AI that is powering really new breakthrough capabilities across all of these industries. AI is a great example, where as it takes advantage of those proceeding waves, edge computing and the IoT and cloud. AI can now run in a distributed fashion as well.