Microsoft Is Using Blockchain to Help Firms Trust AI

Microsoft is pitching blockchain technology as a way to make artificial intelligence less scary for its corporate customers.

Which helps thousands of firms manage their data, claims a blockchain can add trust and a degree of transparency, assuaging such concerns.

Blockchain Data Manager takes on-chain data and connects it to other applications.

"From manufacturing to energy to public sector to retail, AI is digitally transforming businesses in every vertical," said Marc Mercuri, principal program manager for blockchain engineering for Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud computing business.

Acting as a trust anchor for downstream data analytics might sound like a rather abstract and modest innovation for blockchain.

A distributed ledger can be used to look at the provenance of data before AI parses it, Mercuri said.

"Now, you could do that without blockchain," said Litan, "But with blockchain you get a shared, single version of truth and an immutable audit trail so it's a much better source of data to feed your AI models."

One of Microsoft's customers, Icertis, a cloud-based platform for contract management, tried out Blockchain Data Manager "In preview," prior to the release at Ignite, and built use cases involving ethical supply chain contracts and the way certain subsidized pharmaceutical drugs are used.

Icertis used Quorum for the Data Manager builds, but the firm has used R3's Corda as its main blockchain previous to that.

Arun Ghosh, U.S. Blockchain Leader at KPMG, said a large part of machine learning is not data science but data engineering.