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Microsoft released a new protocol called the Coco Framework in August to more easily allow enterprise customers to adopt blockchain and allow the new technology into more hands. When it comes AI, the company has been more aggressively integrating an AI platform into its Azure cloud services so customers can make sense of large amounts of data being stored online.

“Microsoft is not about ‘here is one consumer service of ours and everyone uses it.’ That’s not us,” Nadella said. “We are really about making sure that we can have broad economic surplus that gets created… Hopefully as the economy itself becomes more digital, our ability to have that impact in the next five or 10 years is a quantum leap from what we have done in the last 40 years.”

We are going to democratize access to new technology. It can't be the high priests of new technology that make a real dent

From mining large amounts of data stored in the cloud to learning user behaviours and traits, artificial intelligence is quickly becoming the must-have tool of the tech industry.

In September, Microsoft opened an AI research lab in Montreal following its earlier acquisition of Canadian AI startup Maluuba, plus it made an investment in the Montreal incubator Element AI. Other tech giants such as Google, Apple and IBM have also been spending heavily in the space, whether it be acquisitions or datacentre expansions.

As all of these companies shift significant resources to cloud-based services with AI capabilities — an area that is predicted to hit US$130 billion in 2020, according to research company Statistic — it’s what they do with their technology and how they offer it to customers that will set them apart.