2017: The year AI floated into the cloud

Cloud computing is already a huge business, and competition is stiff. But this year, tech firms opened a new front in the battle to win users over in the cloud: the large-scale introduction of cloud-based AI. For small and medium-size companies, building AI-capable systems at scale can be prohibitively expensive, largely because training algorithms takes a lot of computing power. Enter the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, each of which has vast stores of computing power and a big stake in the $40 billion cloud computing industry. For them, adding AI is simply a matter of keeping up with customers, who increasingly are looking for cost-effective ways of building machine learning into their software.