Technology plays a significant role in helping firms unleash creative innovation. Artificial intelligence is a perfect example. But AI can also help humans be more creative and therefore represents a great opportunity for enterprises to scale more creativity throughout their organization. In 2014, I explored the potential new creative business capabilities that developers can build by leveraging AI technology. Since then, AI has matured considerably and its adoption has increased tremendously.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in the digital transformation. At Microsoft, we believe developers, data scientists and enterprises should have easy access to the power of AI so they can build systems that augment human ingenuity in unique and differentiated ways. Today, at Microsoft Build 2018, as we engage in conversations about digital transformation with over a million developers, customers and partners, I am pleased to share some of our latest and most exciting innovations in the Azure AI Platform. Cognitive Services are cloud hosted APIs for developers to easily add AI capabilities such as speech recognition, voice synthesis, vision, language understanding, translation, knowledge and Search. To date more than a million developers have already discovered and tried Cognitive Services, including the major auto insurance provider Progressive, British Telecom, Box.com, KPMG, and Big Fish Games.