At Build this year, you could see evidence of Microsoft's user-friendly push just about everywhere, even its Edge web browser. The company previously announced that it would be switching the browser's engine to the open source Chromium -- which notably powers Google Chrome -- rather than continue chipping away with its own proprietary engine.

"I think we took an opportunity to take a step back to say, how is our compatibility being achieved? How many resources are being spent on that, versus the resources being invested to make the web itself better?," Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of the Windows Development Platform, said in an interview. "We felt at some point it was a better investment for us to contribute to one engine, in the open... And then the value proposition is that all the browsers on Windows get better."

By moving to Chromium, Edge could be a much more compelling tool to developers, since they won't have to worry about dealing with Chrome incompatibilities. It also gives Microsoft room to innovate in other ways. The upcoming Collections feature will let you gather groups of websites, share them with friends, and export them as neatly formatted Word and Excel documents. The new Edge will also feature an Internet Explorer mode, giving people an easy way to access sites that still rely on that older browser (which is more common than you'd think for some office workers). That was also a move driven by customer feedback, Gallo says. Windows 10 still ships with Internet Explorer too, but the company quickly learned it was easier to keep people within a single browser.

Microsoft is also turning to more AI-driven features to make our lives easier. Ideas in Word is a huge leap beyond spell checking -- it can suggest grammar changes, more concise phrasing, and even more inclusive language. The goal is to make you a better writer over time by highlighting your common mistakes. And while that might sound like Clippy on steroids, the company is focused on ensuring Ideas and similar features are actually useful.

"For AI features, there has to be a minimum bar of quality for you to trust it," said Malavika Rewari, senior product marketing manager of Office Intelligence. "We don't release something unless it's meeting that bar. And we release it in phases: First we dogfood [test] internally within Microsoft and do a lot of usability studies. We then go to early adopters, Insider programs and early release programs, where we go to a more diverse data set. And then we go to consumers and then commercial users."

She credits improved algorithms and broader availability of user data as one reason we're seeing more AI-driven capabilities from Microsoft. And since Office products are connected to the cloud, the company gets much more detailed data about how people actually use those apps. So, for example, Microsoft knows that around 80 percent of users like to run spell check while they're writing, but the rest do it after the fact. For that 20 percent, there's a bin on the right side of the document that lets them quickly run through all of the corrections.

Looking ahead, Microsoft showed off some pie-in-the-sky products that could change the way people work. A brief demonstration of a smarter, more conversational Cortana, made interacting with the AI seem more like talking to an actual assistant. We watched as an executive strolled into work, all the while re-arranging meetings, booking lunch reservations and doing most of her morning tasks while chatting with Cortana naturally on her phone. While it's unclear when we'll actually see that upgrade, conceptually it's a huge leap beyond current virtual assistants, where we basically just shout commands and wait for a response. (It'll also have some competition from the next-generation Google Assistant, which isn't as much of a conversationalist, but seems incredibly fast.)