(Original title: AI again welcomes giants to enter the game Microsoft officially adds artificial intelligence to the company's strategic vision)
In its recent annual report, Microsoft officially listed artificial intelligence as one of its top priorities for future development.
According to CNBC, in the annual report released by Microsoft on Wednesday, there were up to six planned projects involving artificial intelligence, and before that number was zero.
Microsoft also officially added artificial intelligence to the company’s strategic development vision. In its annual report released on Wednesday, Microsoft stated: "Our strategic vision is to achieve development by providing platforms and production services for the smart cloud world and the frontier areas supported by AI."
Last year's version of Microsoft was: "Our strategic vision is to grow by providing productivity services and platform services for mobile priorities and the cloud world."
For those who are familiar with Microsoft, this old slogan should become more familiar. Since Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he has talked about the company several times. Will target mobile and the cloud market.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Microsoft has invested heavily in the Windows mobile operating system and hopes to develop mobile business through the acquisition of Nokia. However, many efforts cannot save Microsoft's mobile business. In fact, in the subsequent analysis report, Microsoft believes that the acquisition of Nokia in 2015 is almost worthless.
On the other hand, cloud computing services including Office 365 and Azure Public Cloud are still active in Microsoft's business landscape, and now the addition of artificial intelligence will also add more vitality to this part of the business.
In order to deploy artificial intelligence, Microsoft has acquired a group of start-up companies such as Maluuba and Swiftkey. Since Nadella took over management, he formally established an artificial intelligence research team. The annual report shows that the team focuses on the development of artificial intelligence and other forward-looking research covering several aspects of infrastructure, services, applications, and search.
Before Microsoft, other tech giants have already listed AI as one of their development goals. Earlier, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said in the 2017 first-quarter earnings conference call that people will rely more on artificial intelligence than smartphones. In China, Baidu has basically completed the transition to artificial intelligence. Baidu Group President and COO Lu Qi on the 5th of this year held the "Baidu AI Developer Conference" had clearly stated that Baidu is no longer an Internet company, but an artificial intelligence company.