The yearly report for the organization 2017 fiscal year, which closed on June 30, now holds six references to AI, up from nothing in the past annual report.
And the group has plunked AI into its corporate concept statement, too.
“Our strategic idea is to strive and grow by developing best-in-class programs and productivity services for an acute cloud and an intelligent edge inspired with AI,” the organization wrote in the annual report, which was published on Wednesday.
For the purpose of example, here’s last year’s version: “Our important vision is to strive and grow as a productivity and stage company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”
For Microsoft watchers, that old tagline should appear very familiar pretty much ever after he became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, Satya Nadella has frequently spoken of the “mobile-first and cloud-first world” that the organization was trying to target.
Mobile is gone not a surprise, given the company’s efforts with its Windows Phone operating system and its purchase of Nokia, which Microsoft actually declared worthless when it addressed down the total value of that acquisition in 2015.
Cloud computing, including fast-developing products like Office 365 and the Azure public cloud are still there. Now AI is there beside it, too.
Microsoft has got a few AI startups, like Maluuba and Swiftkey, since Nadella took over, and has built a formal AI and Research group. That group “centers on our AI development and other forward-looking analysis and development efforts crossing infrastructure, services, applications, and search,” the annual report says.
Microsoft’s idea reset occurs after Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet’sGoogle, started saying that the system is shifting from being mobile-first to AI-first. Facebook has also spent in both long-term AI research and AI product improvements alongside Microsoft and Alphabet.