Artificial intelligence has established a toehold on institutional fixed income trading desks, but the real action will be in coming years. "Data, data science and AI," BlackRock Head of Global Trading Supurna VedBrat said when asked what's next in fixed income. Speaking Thursday morning at WBR's Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Philadelphia, VedBrat said emerging technology has the potential to change trading strategies on the buy side as well as the sell side. "AI gives us the ability to truly augment human intelligence with computing power, and be able to do that at scale," VedBrat said in a conversation with Tradeweb President Billy Hult. BlackRock, which VedBrat likened to a microcosm of the buy side as a whole, is in the preliminary stages of deploying AI, with much of the focus so far on small, "low-touch" transactions.

Microsoft is using artificial intelligence and Windows Machine Learning (ML) to improve its products, including Office 365. During the third Build keynote, corporate vice president of the Windows Developer Platform Kevin Gallo used Microsoft Word as an example, stating that the company's goal is to make everyone a better writer. How? Through grammar checking powered by Windows ML and artificial intelligence. "Some areas are very, very hard to detect with traditional algorithms," he said. "For example, you get into a car, but onto a train. There is a shadow on the road versus there is fog on the road."

Ever since the debut of Cortana within Windows 10, Microsoft has tried to inject Windows with artificial intelligence. Now it's getting even more serious with a new API, called Windows ML, that will tap your CPU or GPU to make Windows and its apps even smarter. Windows ML will debut within the "next major update to Windows 10," presumably the "Redstone 4" update set to be released to hardware partners this month. Since it's an API, every developer who writes apps for Windows will be able to take advantage of the new AI capabilities. In the future, Microsoft said, Windows ML might even take advantage of an entirely new chip: a machine vision or visual processing chip designed by a subsidiary of Intel, called Movidius.