As the software giant has announced , its analysis solution Power BI will be equipped with artificial intelligence to facilitate the start of comprehensive data analysis for companies. Applications include predictive maintenance, tracking down market trends and optimizing production processes. Among other things, Power BI offers image recognition and text analysis, machine learning, and in-depth analysis of the drivers of key business figures. Power BI gets an interface to Microsoft's AI platform Azure Machine Learning.

IBM, with its AI platform Watson, is one of Microsoft's largest competitors in this sector. Watson is also designed for the in-depth analysis of structured and unstructured corporate data, based on which it is expected to learn and derive specific recommendations. Watson is presented to users as a set of open APIs and SaaS products, and has required extensive programming knowledge to date.