Stringfield’s session provided a glimpse at technological developments and how it connects to innovation trends, gamer insights, and enhancing the user experience. He demonstrates how gaming has historically helped contextualize new technologies by creating emotional connections and meeting human needs for socialization. The presentation argues that successful AI innovation must prioritize human experience over technology itself, drawing parallels between how people relate to video games and how they now interact with AI assistants like Copilot.
Excerpts from Stringfield’s session are presented below:
Video Games as Technology Translators
I’m a fairly new entrant to Microsoft. I joined via the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Activision Blizzard’s a very large video game company and I worked there in monetization. Moving over to Microsoft, I still work in monetization but that’s now part of the Microsoft AI organization. When we think about Microsoft and the concept of innovation, what does tend to come to mind is AI. And I think a lot of us have struggled with what’s the right framework to think about how we develop with these new technologies and what bearing it has on the future.
What I found during my time in the video game sector is that video games actually serve as really interesting mechanisms through which we can incorporate human needs into understanding technologies. I’m going to talk a little bit about innovating the future in AI using things like looking on the history of contextualizing video games as our cognitive map for doing so.
When we think about how AI is going to influence how we’re continually looking through information, it’s on the basis of this being a more conversational and personalized relationship. So therefore, the ways in which we start to relate in terms of conversational, more emotive, and effective mechanisms to communication do tend to be rooted in things like video games.
We’ll show how this kind of starts to go towards this concept of this as a means through which we are connecting with technology, therefore understanding human intent and how we connect with technology will be important for understanding AI given that we’re looking at increasing levels of abstraction away from the computer level and more towards the human level of interface.
We are All Gamers to Some Degree
When we look at how consumers are starting to think about the Internet now, I think we are starting to see the future is this more AI-based agentic Internet. There’s a couple different ways we could articulate it.
But within there, you’ll see that I’ve changed the articulation of what differentiates these, less on value and how creation happened for users. If you think about Web 1.0, this required a high degree of technicality. Yes, platforms exist, but for you to really do anything on the Internet, you needed to know how to code. More specifically, you need to know how to use HTML. The technical requirement for using technology is pretty high.
In this light, the innovation of Web 2.0 wasn’t social networks per se, though they scaled them. To be clear, the real innovation is that it made stuff easier for consumers. So instead of me having to learn how to code HTML, I could create stuff, share about myself and things I care about through a login in a pretty easy interface.
It follows then that if you think about where we were potentially going towards an AI agentic conversational web, this is a further abstraction in terms of how we work with technology that is much easier.
How many people have a game on your phone? What I need you to understand is that the average gamer is not a teenage boy. They’re just as likely to identify as female as male. About 48% of game players are female. The average age is thirty-four. They’ve been playing games for 20 years. People play games and it’s the largest form of entertainment in the world. It’s about two hundred billion by 2027. That’s bigger than the box office, the music industry, most of streaming, and all three of those combined.
What’s also fun about it is that if we think about how we’ve related to gaming over the years, it’s helped us contextualize new technologies on a fairly regular basis. In fact, as long as there have been digital screens, there have been digital games.
Moving on to touchscreen phones, for those of you that are under the age of thirty five, you need to understand that phones used to have buttons and when we went from a world where we had buttons to not buttons, this wasn’t necessarily an easy jump. Understanding the controls of a touchscreen was done through swiping candies or pulling back slingshots or things like that. Again, here too, we learned about this technology through the lens of games. Games are a very human way for us to relate to technology because games solve very human needs for us to connect, to socialize, and to have fun.
Forming the Right Partnerships
My team did some research a few years back in terms of how game players really relate to the people that they care about. Almost everyone raised their hand when I asked whether or not you had a game on your phone, so you would be included in the sample. What we found is that as it pertained to how we really connect with people we care about, games are more popular than social media. In fact, it was the third most likely response. Only text and calls were above that and only marginally so.
What we’re finding is that we have large amounts of consumers increasingly interacting with various intelligences in ways that they are socializing and connecting on deeper effective levels.
By looking at these types of technologies and how they’ve basically been embedded in the history of tech and how users have oriented themselves towards them, it gives us an interesting road map to think about other technologies where in theory we’re supposed to have these deeper relationships with. In short, the idea is we can look at some of the lessons that we’ve learned from gaming and apply them to innovation at the forefront in things like AI.
On the AI side, we’ve been on a little bit of a journey with Copilot. Last year, it was really about streamlining the UX, getting rid of the clutter, making sure that the core user experience was preserved. This year, we’re going pretty deep on personalization both for the brands and the users. We want to make sure that whatever is coming out of these technologies is highly relevant to the user. Where Microsoft sees this going is the agentic web.
The idea is that we will have AI agents working on our behalf. And in terms of commerce, brands will have agents working on their behalf that are very familiar with the brand. And instead of me going to the web and going to a bunch of links and going in and looking through web pages and trying to compare all this stuff, these tools are going to negotiate that for us.
But what that means then is we think about what is embedded within these agents, there are some baseline stuff we want such as business insights, making sure it understands brand voice and empathy. We are trying to build trust and connection between these agents that are supposed to be working on behalf of the user, understanding that this is a different way that people are relating to technology that is more conversational and personalized.
To sum up, we need to make sure it’s non-intrusive, contextually relevant, and that there’s a reward or payout for the user. All based on human principles, all based on the fact that we understand that consumers have a deeper than superficial connection to their games and in theory, we want them to have a deeper than superficial connection to their agents via Copilot.
That’s the basic idea. I think what we found is that as we continue to look forward at how we might innovate in new fields of technology, how humans integrate with these technologies is going to be that much more important.
Video: “Using Innovation as a Differentiator,” featuring Jonathan Stringfield, VP, Global Revenue & Business Planning at Microsoft, courtesy of FEI25.
