Microsoft CEO says artificial intelligence is the 'ultimate breakthrough'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. SEE ALSO: Here's why those tech billionaires are throwing millions at ethical AI "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."