‘We developed an AI-powered bot to help people self-diagnose’: Microsoft CTO on COVID-19

Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President Kevin Scott joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel to share how AI will eventually impact the coronavirus and create a shift in the health care industry.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: The gain on the Dow is back above 1,000 points in this trading session as we head towards 12:00 noon here at Yahoo Finance. I want to talk to you about the steps that major technology companies are taking to help us deal with COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic.

Joining us to talk about that is Kevin Scott. He's Microsoft's chief technology officer and an executive vice president. He's also, by the way, author of the book "Reprogramming the American Dream." I want to talk to you first, though, about the global nightmare we're all living through, and that's COVID-19, and this bot. I guess it's a kind of AI COVID-19 assessment bot that Microsoft has been working on. Where does that stand in conjunction with the CDC?

KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, so we developed a AI-powered bot to help people self-diagnose whether or not they should go seek medical attention if they have symptoms that may indicate they have COVID-19. That bot is deployed on the CDC's a website and is reachable by a couple of search engines.

JULIE HYMAN: Hi, sorry about that. This is Julie Hyman here. Nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. I want to ask you about Microsoft Teams as well because, obviously, we have all seen a big uptick in demand for remote meetings right now.

One of your competitors, Zoom, has faced some challenges in terms of privacy. For example, my kids who are in New York City schools, the DOE just announced they're not going to let them use Zoom anymore. What are you guys doing on the security front when it comes to Teams, and are you trying to maybe lure away some of those Zoom customers?

KEVIN SCOTT: Well, we, with all of our productivity and collaboration software security and confidentiality, has been one of our core engineering investments for several years now. We realize how important it is for customers, and we also realize that issues like data sovereignty, like where data resides and, like, where network traffic flows are very important things as well.

So we have a solid foundation there. And we also are taking extra measures to ensure that we can provide a strong foundation of security for everyone who's using these products. And, like, the need for them now is greater than it ever has been before. It's really, really been a great thing for us to be able to have these tools just for ourselves in order to be able to run our business during the shelter in place orders that are in effect in most places where we're operating.

DAN HOWLEY: Hey, Kevin. This is Dan Howley. Talking about AI, I know Microsoft has been doing a lot of work in health care prior to the coronavirus outbreak. Can you just kind elaborate on that and where that's going now, if you're seeing any kind of turns toward maybe focusing more on global pandemics than where you were focusing before?

KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, there are a bunch of things that we're doing. Like, one of the partnerships that we had in place before the pandemic is with a company called Adaptive Biotechnologies.

And what we've been doing with them is trying to build a immune system profiling a set of tools that uses the best of biotechnology, so PCR-based analysis that builds a profile of the T-cells that are active in people's immune systems, and then using machine learning to try to figure out what diseases that immune system profile maps to so that we can do better diagnostics, better recommendations for therapies for folks.

And, like, we were very quickly able to pivot our efforts there where, hopefully, we will very soon have, in collaboration with Adaptive, a set of diagnostic tools that will tell whether or not you've been exposed to the COVID-19 virus.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Kevin, I'm curious-- and I'm stepping back to a much broader picture because you are the chief technology officer at Microsoft-- how is the internet in the United States, even globally, handling what has been an historic surge of all of us now online and what permanent changes, after the crisis passes, are going to be coming to fruition?

KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. So I think it's obvious to us all that the internet traffic is surging in a bunch of different ways as people move more and more of their lives online. One of the things that I write about in the book and that I think is something that we have to really concentrate on going forward is here, the United States, we still have 25 million people who don't have adequate access to broadband, 19 million of those in rural communities.

And so when more and more of the day-to-day life of the country moves into this digital domain, like we have to make sure that everyone has a good connection to the internet. I think that's going to be one of these important things. And some of the shifts that we're seeing right now, like you can well imagine, are going to become not necessarily permanent, but you know, just sort of pushing us in particular directions, like more work from home, for instance.

DAN HOWLEY: Kevin, I just wanted to ask you, you know, as far as Microsoft goes with Teams, and you know, we talk about the Zoom security issues and we're all using video chat now, what kind of uptick are you guys seeing as far as Teams goes in recent weeks? I know that there was a huge burst of, you know, more than 10 million people that signed up in the earlier half of the month as the outbreak started, but are you still seeing those kinds of increases for numbers towards Teams?

KEVIN SCOTT: Yeah, demand still is very high. So I can't say exactly what the numbers are, but, like, we continue to see really, really solid demand and really amazing growth.

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right, Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer and executive vice president, also the author of "Reprogramming the American Dream." I think there's some irony in the fact that we're talking to you, the chief technology officer, and I'm in front of a Studebaker poster, which is from another century. But, sir, all the best to--