The Future Is Nigh

Microsoft Singapore CTO Richard Koh talks to Augustman about leadership and innovation in technology and answers that question which has been bugging us since Arnold Schwarzenegger first played a robot: Will artificial intelligence destroy us all?

- Suffian Hakim

THE TECH WORLD was abuzz in late March when Microsoft announced a brand new Teams, revamped, rebuilt from the ground up, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to elevate its offerings. It is the latest in a slate of buzz around AI in the past months. We’ve seen the rise of ChatGPT, and image-based generative pre-trained transformer AI win awards for art.

It is safe to say that our relationship with technology has evolved dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, post-COVID, we live in strange, new normals, far out of our comfort zone when it comes to new technology. But changes in technology and how it is used are a deeply entrenched phenomenon in our lives.

To make sense of all of this, we turn to a steady voice of reason in the choppy waters of the tech world: Microsoft Singapore Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Richard Koh.

Koh began his journey in Microsoft in 2006, for the Microsoft office in Redmond, Washington. The Singaporean-born engineer had studied in the States, and worked for Hewlett-Packard before getting his gig in Redmond. At Microsoft, he was placed in a team that was central to how Microsoft was restructuring, and found himself in the founding team for a suite of products that you might have heard of – Microsoft Office.

First things first, what exactly does the CTO in Singapore do? How are you set apart from the other CTOs in other Microsoft markets?