Microsoft's vision of enterprise mobility and how to improve employee engagement for digital transformation has long been mooted in this publication – yet at the Redmond giant's Envision conference today, CEO Satya Nadella discussed themes taking the collaboration element a step further. Building on the'conversation as a platform' concept discussed at Build last week, the Microsoft chief exec described how bots and artificial intelligence (AI) could transform business conversations by'taking the human language but applying it much more pervasively to computing'. "Think of bots that you will build as the new websites or mobile apps, and your customers will interact with your business through these bots," he told delegates. "We think it is going to be much more ubiquitous in terms of its deployment." These bots already exist in some contexts; New York-based startup x.ai offers an AI-powered personal assistant called Amy which schedules meetings.