With soaring cloud revenues, plunging Windows and device revenues, and a few days into a substantial layoff, Microsoft's first-quarter results feel a bit like a quote from Dickens. The best of times: "The next major wave of computing is being born," as Microsoft reported 31 percent revenue growth in its Intelligent Cloud business, a day after Microsoft invested again in OpenAI and its chat service, ChatGPT. The worst of times: Windows OEM revenue sank 39 percent, thanks to a tanking PC market; Microsoft's Devices (Surface) revenue fell the same amount, thanks to issues launching products, reduced demand, and success a year ago. In the end, it all sort of came out in the wash, however, with net income down 12 percent to $16.4 billion and revenue sinking 2 percent to $52.7 billion. Microsoft reported $14.2 billion in revenue in More Personal Computing, its consumer business, down 19 percent, but 18 percent growth to $21.5 billion in Intelligent Cloud and 7 percent growth in Productivity and Business Processes, Microsoft's Office business.

Ever since I got curious and hooked on to the field of reinforcement learning and its numerous applications for the industry, my excitement for the field has only gotten stronger by the day. Here, I'd like to share some of my learnings about the potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) for consumer businesses. But, before I dive into the details, a quick introduction about RL for ML practitioners who are new to the subject. RL is a branch of Machine Learning involving the training of smart agent that can learn to perform a goal through trial & error in an environment and at the end of the training we have an agent that can perform the goal in real life independently. Now, if you are familiar with the other types of ML -- supervised & unsupervised learning techniques--this might sound very similar to the supervised learning approach.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Unless you've been living under a rock, you are sure to have heard of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): it is the current buzzword, and every technology company worth its salt talks about how AI is going to transform everything. The strange thing is that most business leaders, especially in consumer businesses, claim to be excited about AI, but they will be hard-pressed to give a tangible example of how AI has been used in their business, or what difference it has made to business performance. So, is this all just hype, or is there some real impact that AI is going to have on businesses? If you think about your everyday life, it is almost certain that AI-based technologies are an integral part of your everyday experience.

Donald Trump has hammered Amazon.com Inc.'s share price in recent weeks by trying to pick fights online with Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos. But the actual object of his Twitter onslaught is the domain of Jeff Wilke, Bezos' right-hand man for most of the past 18 years. Wilke runs Amazon's worldwide consumer division, meaning he's in charge of both selling people stuff and figuring out how to deliver the items as efficiently as possible. Often, the company uses the U.S. Postal Service.

Inc (AMZN.O) is cutting hundreds of jobs in its consumer business in Seattle, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday, as the company shifts resources into fast-growing areas like its work on voice assistant Alexa. The job cuts, rare for the world's largest online retailer, are in the low hundreds, the person said on condition of anonymity. Amazon determined through planning for 2018 that certain mature areas of its business no longer required as much staff for the results it was seeking, the person said. It was unclear which specific teams inside Amazon were affected. Amazon's consumer organization includes its retail and marketplace businesses, as well as programs like food delivery service Amazon Restaurants.

BT and Ticketmaster are more than just global leaders in their industries – they are example enterprise organisations already implementing artificial intelligence technology like Natural Language Process, Digital Assistants and Text Analytics into their strategies to improve customer support, experience and business growth. With the news of Google's DeepMind machine learning system and IBM's breakthrough artificial (AI) imitation of brain neurons, it's easy to assume that AI is still designated to hi-tech facilities with scientists in white lab coats and robots rolling past – and business leaders are not exempt from this belief. Although common rebuffs about artificial intelligence claim'there aren't many use cases in the space', AI within enterprise businesses is already available and being implemented – perhaps just not on the same scale or format of what we see in media today (ie the all-robot staff at the Henn-na Hotel in Japan). "We've identified 191 discrete use cases where artificial intelligence is being used today, or will be used in the near future," notes Clint Wheelock, CEO, managing director of Tractica, a market intelligence firm focused on human interaction with technology. "These use cases span 27 different industries and range from well-known applications like algorithmic trading or static image recognition to more specialized emerging areas such as emotion recognition or processing of healthcare patient data."

Artificial intelligence can find, map poverty, researchers ... Ai Weiwei exhibit extended until Sept. 11 at Warhol AI passenger carrying gold bars worth over Rs 2.5 crore held

BT and Ticketmaster are more than just global leaders in their industries – they are example enterprise organisations already implementing artificial intelligence technology like Natural Language Process, Digital Assistants and Text Analytics into their strategies to improve customer support, experience and business growth. With the news of Google's DeepMind machine learning system and IBM's breakthrough artificial (AI) imitation of brain neurons, it's easy to assume that AI is still designated to hi-tech facilities with scientists in white lab coats and robots rolling past – and business leaders are not exempt from this belief that AI. Although common rebuffs about artificial intelligence claim'there aren't many use cases in the space', AI within enterprise businesses is already available and being implemented – perhaps just not on the same scale or format of what we see in media today (ie the all-robot staff at the Henn-na Hotel in Japan). "We've identified 191 discrete use cases where artificial intelligence is being used today, or will be used in the near future," notes Clint Wheelock, CEO, managing director of Tractica, a market intelligence firm focused on human interaction with technology. "These use cases span 27 different industries and range from well-known applications like algorithmic trading or static image recognition to more specialized emerging areas such as emotion recognition or processing of healthcare patient data."