Fifty years after the founding of Microsoft, the CEO of its artificial intelligence division has a big task: develop a new product line as integral to daily life as the software giant’s past innovations.

“We’re really trying to land this idea that everybody is going to have their own personalized AI companion,” said Mustafa Suleyman in an interview with The Associated Press. “It will, over time, have its own name, its own style. It will adapt to you. It may also have its own visual appearance and expressions.”

Suleyman laid out that vision on Microsoft’s 50th anniversary Friday. The celebration at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington featured the first public gathering in more than a decade of co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates with his two successors: Steve Ballmer, who led the company from 2000 to 2014, and the current chief executive, Satya Nadella.

Giving the mic to Suleyman, who joined the company and Nadella’s senior leadership team just over a year ago to head a newly formed Microsoft AI division, signals how important getting its AI right is to the company’s future — in the next five years if not the next 50.

The company’s flagship product of this AI era, Copilot, already combines a chatbot with Microsoft’s suite of workaday tools, from Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations to the Windows operating system that defines how most computers work. But Suleyman is striving for something that sounds a little more like science fiction — a technology that can form a “lasting, meaningful relationship” with its users.

“One that knows your name, gets to know you, has a memory of everything that you’ve shared with it and talked about and really comes to kind of live life alongside you,” he said. “It’s far more than just a piece of software or a tool. It is unlike anything we’ve really ever created.”

Some of those updates — such as new “visual memory” capabilities that keep track of a user’s digital activity, if they want that — roll out on mobile apps Friday. Other features are still in development, such as an animated avatar — a talking peacock in Suleyman’s demo Friday — that would embody a person’s AI companion.

Suleyman, 40, came to Microsoft last year with plenty of credentials in the AI business. In his 20s, the British entrepreneur cofounded the legendary DeepMind AI research lab in London, which Google later purchased in 2014. He worked there until 2022, when he left to set up the new company Inflection AI with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Microsoft then scooped up Suleyman and other Inflection leaders without formally acquiring the startup, attracting months of antitrust scrutiny.

He also cowrote a 2023 book, “The Coming Wave,” focused on AI’s promise and the need to limit its potential perils. But unlike DeepMind, or another famous AI research lab, San Francisco-based OpenAI, both of which have explicitly set out to build better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence, Suleyman is not too worried about such abstractions in his new job running Microsoft’s consumer AI business.

“My goal is really to create a true personal AI companion,” he said. “And the definition of AGI sort of feels very far out to me and sort of not what I’m focused on in the next few years.”

The race to build the best AI personal assistant that sticks with consumers is a competitive one. In recent weeks, rivals including Google and Meta Platforms have shaken up the teams in charge of AI research or products. ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is both Microsoft’s most important AI partner and a growing competitor, has also reorganized its leadership. Amazon is also looking to catch up by imbuing its already-ubiquitous digital assistant Alexa with more advanced AI capabilities.