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Artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all significant trends in the technology industry, but it’s the first that stands to have the most dramatic impact on society, according to Steve Clayton, Microsoft chief storyteller and GM of its Image & Culture team. Microsoft has been around for about 40 years and those years have been “punctuated by key changes at certain times that shift the industry, shift the landscape, sometimes even shift society,” he said during the Microsoft Emerging Tech Virtual Summit in Redmond, Wash. on Sept. 13.

Some of those shifts included the change from command-line computing to graphical computing, and then the shift to network computing and later the Internet, he said. More recently, there’s been a “huge shift” in which the worlds of mobile computing on multiple types of devices and cloud computing have come together, he said.

“Now, I think, we’re on the cusp of another change around a big trend that we’re spending a lot of time talking about inside the company and increasingly outside, and the industry frankly is talking about,” he said. And that is the “shift towards intelligence and artificial intelligence,” which he predicted will “have a dramatic change on industries, on society, on how we do business, on how we use technology personally.”

Cloud computing and IoT right now are creating a “groundswell around artificial intelligence,” he said. That’s because we now have sensors “on all kinds of devices that are generating huge amounts of data” all around the world, he pointed out. Along with the huge amounts of data and computing capability that’s available on demand in the cloud, recent breakthroughs in technology that enable us to train computers have combined to make AI possible, he said.

Microsoft’s Skype Translator is an example of an application using AI that can have a major impact on users, he said, adding that it’s allowed him to have natural language conversations with Chinese members of his families that he could never have before.

Moving on to AR, he said it, along with virtual reality and Microsoft HoloLens, can all be used for entertainment, but can be used for other applications as well. Japan Airlines is one of several companies, for example, that is using HoloLens and its holographic functionality, he said. Using a holographic environment, among other things, makes it easier to teach people how to service an aircraft engine without taking the engine out of the aircraft, he said.

It’s “very rare” in the technology industry to see “something completely new that’s never ever been done before,” he went on to say. In the past, updates to Microsoft’s Windows operating system would come every two years “on a stack of CDS, and that was pretty slow innovation,” he pointed out, adding that the cloud and the Internet, however, have allowed Microsoft and other companies to “deliver innovation overnight.”

Clayton concluded his presentation by saying we are in the middle of an “invisible revolution” in the technology sector. “Lots of the technologies that you will see and that will transform our world over the next few years will be things that are invisible,” he said. Devices will “continue to evolve, but I think the real magic is starting to come to life in the software that sits inside of those things and that’s the invisible revolution,” he said.

AI can one day “save many lives” via use in the healthcare and car industries, Eric Horvitz, managing director at Microsoft Research, said later during the Summit.

But there are also fears about AI. The idea of technology that man has created running amok and becoming a threat to us, after all, has become popular through such stories as “Frankenstein,” Horvitz said. Hollywood also creates movies that dwell on such concerns and journalists have raised fears about AI in the future also, he said.

But “there are some valid concerns,” including privacy ones, and we should “respect folks that bring up concerns — both the long-term concerns about runaway AI, as well as shorter-term concerns” such as ethical issues, he said. As an example of the latter, he pointed to the possible concern about what a car equipped with AI might do when it comes to a situation where a decision on whose life is more important between the driver and somebody outside of the car comes into play, he said.