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.