Microsoft is all set to kickstart Build 2017, its annual developer's conference, with CEO Satya Nadella spearheading important announcements for the developer community. The conference taking place in between May and 12, will set the tone for what Microsoft aims to achieve with its core products. As usual, the conference will not focus much on hardware products. Microsoft had recently launched its Surface Laptop along with Windows 10S operating system which aims to deliver better performance with low-end hardware. It had also showcased the Cortana voice assistant powered Invoke speaker by Harman Kardon.

Microsoft showed off its latest developments and projects for developers early Wednesday as it kicked off day one of its Build conference in Seattle. Here are several of the biggest takeaways from the conference's inaugural day: Artificial intelligence has been popularized with consumers through products like Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa home assistants, but Microsoft showcased a more in-depth and commercial application for the technology with a live demo. During the demo, Microsoft set up a mock construction workplace onstage to demonstrate how AI could be used to help encourage workplace safety. Using AI and augmented cameras, the system automatically detected where people and individual power tools were within the workspace. Microsoft said instances where the technology could be used include helping employees find tools and ensuring workers aren't using tools for which they haven't been trained.

A few years ago, it was hard to think of a commonly used technology tool that used AI. In a few years, it will be hard to imagine any technology that doesn't tap into the power of AI. Thanks to the convergence of three major forces -- increased computing power in the cloud, powerful algorithms that run on deep neural networks and access to massive amounts of data -- we're finally able to realize the dream of AI. AI now has the potential to disrupt every single vertical industry, like banking or retail, and every single business process, from sales and marketing to HR and recruiting. Along the way, AI also promises to amplify our endless reserves of human ingenuity -- to augment our capabilities as people and help us be more productive.

It's been a few years since Microsoft's then-CEO Steve Ballmer danced across the stage screaming "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS," but those are still the three words you'd use to explain this week's Build conference. Like Google's I/O or Apple's WWDC, the annual event is partly a state of the union, partly product unveiling, but mostly a time to bring the developer community together and pitch them on a vision of the future. The conference lasts two days, with keynote addresses starting at 8am on both Wednesday and Thursday. You can watch on Microsoft's site, and you should definitely hang out with us while we liveblog. Microsoft seemingly hasn't left itself much to unveil this time.

The Microsoft Build 2017 conference starts tomorrow in Seattle! You can watch the conference live starting at 8:00AM Pacific Time and get the scoop. Only a few days to go before we reach zero bugs. Great progress has been made, but we are still 163 bugs away from zero. In February we took a camera crew to the Microsoft Alumni Network's big .NET 15th birthday bash and caught up with team members past and present.

The elite movers of the technology industry are about to set the 2017 agenda. The next few weeks will be some of the most exciting in the technosphere. What changes are coming to the operating systems that just about everybody in the world use? What are the next steps in the foundations of machine learning and artificial intelligence? Is there a future for bots?