Microsoft Is Using Blockchain to Help Firms Trust AI

Microsoft is pitching blockchain technology as a way to make artificial intelligence less scary for its corporate customers. Much like consumers who are wary of AI, enterprises are queasy about putting their full trust in a "black box" where machine learning algorithms are indiscriminately applied to vast data sets. But Microsoft, which helps thousands of firms manage their data, claims a blockchain can add trust and a degree of transparency, assuaging such concerns. Underpinning this is a new tool called Azure Blockchain Data Manager, which the software giant released at its annual Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, but was overshadowed by the announcement of a platform for creating enterprise tokens. Blockchain Data Manager takes on-chain data and connects it to other applications.