Forward-looking: What will Windows look like in five years? Unsurprisingly, Microsoft believes that AI will play an integral role. The company has published a video called Windows 2030 Vision in which it foresees the default interaction method with the OS being natural language. Microsoft says this will make "mousing around and keyboarding around and typing" in 2030 feel as alien as using DOS does to Gen Z today.
David Weston, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Enterprise & Security, is interviewed for what looks like the first in a series of Windows 2030 Vision videos.
Weston's first prediction is that in five years, companies will be able to hire AI agents to act as security experts. These will behave like real people, with co-workers talking to them on Teams, joining meetings, etc.
As we hear every time that an AI looks set to replace a person's job, Weston says the agentic AI will take over the "toil" work and allow humans to focus on other tasks – hopefully, not looking for a new job.
"I think we will do less with our eyes and more talking to our computers," Weston says.
"I truly believe the future version of Windows and other Microsoft operating systems will interact in a multimodal way. The computer will be able to see what we see, hear what we hear, and we can talk to it and ask it to do much more sophisticated things." The exec claimed this is a much more natural form of communication.
Microsoft has invested more into AI than most companies, from the $13 billion+ it has poured into OpenAI, to the $650 million Inflection AI deal. It's why Redmond continues to ram more and more AI features into every product under its roof, regardless of whether people want them.
The thought of an agentic AI Windows OS that carries out voice instructions will likely make many people groan – the video currently has more dislikes than likes – but whether it really does happen by 2030 is debatable.
Microsoft made a lot of lofty promises ahead of Copilot's arrival, but, like Copilot+ laptops, it hasn't lived up to some of these early claims.
Microsoft also has a history of boasting about how amazing an AI feature will be only to find it receives so much backlash that the company has to pull or alter it – the screenshot-capturing Recall saga, for example, is still ongoing.
The idea that mouse and keyboard inputs will become as archaic as altering batch files in DOS by 2030 seems highly unlikely. Maybe one day it will happen, but five years is a stretch.