Microsoft is building an AI empire that caters to customers and businesses. The company has invested billions into OpenAI and some more in other promising AI ventures. But Microsoft is equally aware of its competition and wants to stop them from accessing data of its employees.
Ban on Use of AI Chatbot
New reports says that Microsoft has banned its employees from using the AI chatbot developed by Perplexity AI. Perplexity AI is a chatbot that offers a conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. It is powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which helps companies build generative AI into their operations and products. When you are competing with a host of tech giants and upcoming AI startups, these limitations are understandable and we have seen it happen regularly.
Microsoft also banned other AI tools
This is not the first time that Microsoft has banned employees’ access to AI tools offered by other companies. Microsoft briefly blocked OpenAI’s ChatGPT from employee devices last year but later said it was done by mistake. But the actual reason is internal security of company, data and employees.
These restrictions are forced on the employees to stop them from sharing data about exclusive projects that could be accessible to the rival AI chatbot if and when they decide to retrieve from their systems. Samsung had a similar order for its employees, Amazon also does not want its AI workforce to use third-party AI tools in the office which involves data that is not publicly available on the internet for people to consume.