After months of speculation, Microsoft on Thursday announced that a separate team has been formed inside the organization that will focus primarily on the company's AI product efforts. Microsoft also mentioned that over 5,000 of their engineers and computer scientists will be an exclusive part of this new team. The team leader for this new AI project will be Harry Shum, a 20-year Microsoft veteran who has worked previously in ventures like Microsoft Research and Bing Engineering. In addition to Shum's existing team, several of the company's top rankers and teams will join the newly formed group including Information Platform, Cortana and Bing, and Ambient Computing and Robotics teams led by David Ku, Derrick Connell and Vijay Mital, respectively. As written by us before, Microsoft's next step towards software leadership is via the artificial intelligence route.