Much like consumers who are wary of AI, enterprises are queasy about putting their full trust in a “black box” where machine learning algorithms are indiscriminately applied to vast data sets. But Microsoft, which helps thousands of firms manage their data, claims a blockchain can add trust and a degree of transparency, assuaging such concerns.

Underpinning this is a new tool called Azure Blockchain Data Manager, which the software giant released at its annual Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, but was overshadowed by the announcement of a platform for creating enterprise tokens.

Blockchain Data Manager takes on-chain data and connects it to other applications. So transaction data from nodes or inside smart contracts can be sent to other databases or data stores. These are the sort of places where AI can be deployed, or in the case of supply-chain, where internet-of-things (IoT) information can be brought to bear.

......

......