During the course of a speech at Microsoft’s annual IT conference in Atlanta on Monday, the company’s CEO Satya Nadella described how artificial intelligence (AI) technology is being used by Microsoft, and how the company plans to increase the use of the technology in future.

At the conference, Nadella basically outlined his vision for how AI and deep learning will transform Microsoft in the coming years.

Nadella said that Microsoft’s overarching goal is to “democratize AI,” which he explained would involve the analyzing of huge amounts of data produced by consumers and businesses, and the subsequent presentation of the findings to people who have much less free time than they previously had.

According to Nadella, the AI approach being followed by Microsoft comprises four “core pillars” -- agents, applications, services, and infrastructure -- with each of the pillars fortified by a Microsoft service.

Nadella further added that Microsoft’s agent is its digital assistant Cortana, which he described as a “new organizing layer” that sits “across all the applications you will use in your life.” Further adding that AI will essentially enable Microsoft “to reason over large amounts of data and convert that into intelligence,” Nadella said: “AI is at the intersection of our ambitions.”