The most recent change, he says, has involved a combination of cloud and mobile, with smartphones acting as the delivery mechanism for services in the cloud. But this is starting to evolve into the next thing. Mr Austin says this will be the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud. Microsoft currently offers more than 20 such “cognitive services”, such as analysing images, known as computer vision, and language comprehension. Cloud-delivered services like these are starting to proliferate. AWS, for example, has added predictive analytics — data mining to forecast trends — to its cloud services, opening up machine-learning algorithms first developed for internal use.

https://next.ft.com/content/106ada72-ef52-11e5-9f20-c3a047354386#axzz49CbLGsrv?ftcamp=engage/email/may2016/ozyaudience/partnershipemail/crm&utm_source=ozyaudience&utm_medium=email&utm_term=may2016&utm_campaign=partnershipemail