AI-enabled technologies produce and rely on vast troves of personal data, most of which is unregulated and vulnerable to theft and misuse.

These technologies include:

• Facial recognition: It helps users unlock their smartphones. It also helps police in China track criminal suspects and monitor members of the Uyghur ethnic minority.
• Personalization: It helps consumers make necessary purchases and discover entertainment, but also encourages developers to collect personal data from increasingly far-flung sources.
• Voice assistants: They help users answer questions, create calendar events, and set alarms. They also record audio accidentally, and until recently relied on human reviewers to listen to private audio to improve their responses.
• Smart home products: Similar to voice assistants, these products allow users to remotely operate appliances, set temperatures and access security footage. They also collect a vast amount of private information about the home life of their users.

Deepfakes and bots target society's vulnerabilities. But it also goes the other way. Governments, political groups and online communities manipulate the algorithms that organize our digital world, too.

Since taking over as CEO in 2014, Satya Nadella has steered Microsoft's priorities toward the ultra competitive cloud computing market.

A large portion of Microsoft's customer base are other businesses. In the past, those clients purchased or licensed Microsoft Office and Windows. Today, they increasingly sign contracts with Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud platform.

Azure offers traditional web and data hosting alongside a growing swath of AI-enabled services, like personalized product recommendations for e-commerce and image- and audio-recognition for supply chain and manufacturing.

To continue to attract high value clients, Microsoft is investing heavily in AI, and forming partnerships with AI companies to build technology on top of Azure.

This section is currently under development.