But while his peer scientists Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton have signed on to Facebook and Google, respectively, Bengio, 53, has chosen to continue working from his small third-floor office on the hilltop campus of the University of Montreal. Shum, who is in charge of all of AI and research at Microsoft, has just finished a dress rehearsal for next week's Build developers conference, and he wants to show me demos. Shum has spent the past several years helping his boss, CEO Satya Nadella, make good on his promise to remake Microsoft around artificial intelligence. Bill Gates showed off a mapping technology in 1998, for example, but it never came to market; Google launched Maps in 2005.

The deal, announced Tuesday, will bring the Genee team into the Microsoft fold and put them to work on bringing intelligence into Office 365. Acquiring Genee is part of Microsoft's ongoing crusade to build intelligent productivity software and services using AI. It's unclear whether the functionality from the assistant will be making its way directly into Office 365, or if the team behind Genee will just be put to work improving a variety of Microsoft's products. This all plays into Satya Nadella's ongoing strategy of aggressively acquiring companies to shore up Microsoft's capabilities and growth areas.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has written an editorial about how humanity can create artificial intelligence that will help people in the future, rather than harm them either directly or indirectly.

Microsoft made clear that it is betting big on the future of bots, after making two major AI announcements at the Microsoft Build 2016 conference. CEO Satya Nadella personally introduced a cleverer Cortana (Windows' AI desktop assistant) at the developer's conference in San Francisco, and a Bot Framework that'll allow developers to build bots of their own. The framework will allow developers to build AI bots that can work within apps like Skype, Telegram or Slack to help users out when they talk about ordering a pizza or similar tasks. It was also announced that the Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality goggles are now being shipped to developers in the US and Canada.