Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

I'm the BBC's technology editor Zoe Kleinman,

and today we're in Seattle in the United States

to take you behind the seats at Microsoft.

It's not a place for the fate of heart.

That's one of the things that I learned right away.

As the tech giant marks 50 years since its founding, we look at how it became one of the world's

biggest companies.

What got us here is not to be obsessed about longevity, but to be more obsessed about relevance.

And ask what the firm's focus on AI means for its future.

This is something that historically, highly manual, very boring, not exciting part of the job,

but the agent's able to go do that for me automatically.

That's all coming up on today's program.

Welcome to Building 87.

This is a group of a bunch of different labs, all focused on hardware.

We're on a tour of one of the most important tech headquarters in the world. Our building was built to support Surface, Xbox and Quantum, but it's primarily surface.

We're here because 50 years ago, in a now legendary startup story, two school friends

dropped out of university and founded a company.

It's only because we'd read about the computer properly, were we able to take the program

and have it run.

And so Paul was very excited and called me up when that worked.

And that's really when I dropped out of school and started Microsoft.

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