I’ve written for years about “the end of …” somethings a lot. The death of cards; the end of cash; the branchless future; the murder of the keyboard; and more … and they’ve all come true. We are cashless, cardless and branchless today, although I still love my keyboard. Sure, I can record voice memos that translate to text, but I still like the feel of the keyboard. OK, boomer!

But I realised the other day, as I watched a friend doing everything via their AI app, that the use of search engines and browsers is about to end. All the questions they wanted answered were completed via the AI app and then, instead of linking to websites, the links were all given in the app. Add to this that he wanted to give a summary of an idea to a client, and the AI wrote it, made me see why things are changing.

The positive in this may be that Microsoft has finally beaten Google. For years, Microsoft has been running behind Google with their search engine Bing; for years, Microsoft has been running behind Google with their browser Edge, previously Internet Explorer. No more.

The canny partnership Microsoft created with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, and investing billions to generate a new way of surfing and searching, has paid off. The relationship deepened last week as OpenAI became a for-profit company, 27% owned by Microsoft.

and it makes you realise that things really have changed as browsers and search engines become irrelevant. More than this is the regeneration of Microsoft as a tech giant under the brilliant leadership of Satya Nadella.

Since becoming CEO of the company in 2014, he’s led the charge to renovate Microsoft which, at the time, was a company that was fragile, to become a leader in cloud and AI. Admittedly, this week’s stumble with Azure was not a good thing, it is quite incredible how the company has evolved in the last decade under his leadership.

Microsoft’s share price was around $30 when he took over, and a market value of $315 billion. Now, shares are trading near $550 with a market capitalisation of $4 trillion. Sure, it’s not quite matching NVIDIA’s $5 trillion valuation, but it has been quite an amazing transformation.

Between Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, we are see the intelligent AI revolution breaking all records. Meanwhile, Google is doing fine but is sitting in the slipstream of their former weakest rival.

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