The parliamentary committee for internal market and consumer protection (IMCO) is working on one of the most fundamental principles of the European Union: the single market.

The entire Brexit saga shows once more how difficult it is to leave the single market once you have been a part of it. But also how beneficial it is to be a member of the EU.

After decades of living in a common internal market, many people seem to have forgotten how important it is, and how easy.

But when you travel to for example the United States, and you forget your adapter, you can’t even charge your mobile phone – a problem that never occurs when you travel on the European continent.

The internal market is not only about the free movement of goods and services. It’s also about standards, for products but also for consumer protection. That’s why worldwide people talk about “European standards”, as a label of global quality.

It is the task of the IMCO committee to make sure these European standards are upheld in every single space in Europe.

According to Petra De Sutter (Greens/EFA, Belgium), president of IMCO, “developing a long term strategy for better enforcement of Single Market rules” will be key for the committee’s agenda for the next five years.

Therefore, she says, it is “necessary to continue strengthening the internal market, in particular in a cross-border context, removing unjustified barriers and ensuring that the existing rules are properly and timely implemented and enforced.”

Next to the announced revision of the E-Commerce Directive or new Digital Services Act, the committee will need to have a lot of attention to what De Sutter calls “a single market fit for the digital age”.

“Since emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, are becoming key drivers for economic development and enhance the value of goods and services, we will be following with the utmost attention any developments in this area”, she said, adding that this is important for both business and consumers.

As a fourth major point for IMCO over the next five years, De Sutter mentions a “sustainable Single Market”. More concretely, she points out that “addressing the needs of a growing circular economy and the integration of environmental concerns into consumer policy will be a key priority.”

A politically-sensitive point that might interfere with the IMCO agenda is the free movement of people.

De Sutter fears that “member states may take disproportionate measures and apply administrative controls and procedures which make free movement more difficult and costly for SMEs going cross-border.”

But all in all, De Sutter thinks that the speedy growth of artificial intelligence will become the biggest challenge, needing “legislation linked to transparency, liability, safety and ethical rules for digital platforms, services and products”.

On the one hand, European companies need access to data for developing AI. On the other hand “consumer protection rules have to ensure that consumers have clear information on how to use AI-enabled products and services, that they have control over data generated by such products and services, and how that data is used”, she said.

IMCO coordinators are: Andreas Schwab (EPP, Germany), Christel Schaldemose (S&D, Denmark), Dita Charanzova (Renew, Czech Republic), Marcel Kolaja (Greens/EFA, Czech Republic), Virginie Joron (ID, France), Adam Bielan (ECR, Poland), Katerina Konecna (GUE/NGL, Czech Republic).

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Microsoft has a key ally in its fight for business as companies move more software to the cloud: the people who run corporate information-technology departments.

In a Thursday note, Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss reiterated his confidence in Microsoft’s (ticker: MSFT) future, based on the bank’s latest survey of companies’ IT heads. Although uncertainty about the economy has weighed on companies’ 2020 budgets for technology, according to the survey, Microsoft remains well positioned.

About 36% of the executives surveyed said that they prefer Microsoft for the management of their hybrid cloud environments. That puts the company ahead of the runner-up— Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services—by 9 percentage points.

A hybrid cloud system is one that combines software run on a company’s premises with whatever it operates in the cloud, whether via a firm’s own gear, or through a third party. Cloud management is the process of controlling all of that.

Microsoft’s machine-learning and artificial-intelligence business has also been growing head-to-head with Amazon over the past three years, taking market share from the previous leader, IBM’s (IBM) Watson, according to Weiss.

At the same time, Microsoft has been able to maintain its leadership in the productivity-software market via the dominant Microsoft Office suite. Many of its clients are planning to migrate to the cloud version—Office 365—over the next few years, he said.

Even for workplace collaboration systems, about 40% of the surveyed executives said they are currently using Microsoft Team as their standard tool, much higher than the 7% for Slack Technologies (WORK) and 6% for Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google Hangout Chat. All three tools are expected to see strong growth over the next three years.

“Amidst an increasingly unsettled IT spending environment, these data points bolster our confidence in the durability of Microsoft’s commercial business and the potential for further leverage in the model,” wrote Weiss. He believes Microsoft will be able to win a bigger share of enterprises’ tech budget and deliver durable double-digit revenue growth, as more companies shift their digital operations to the cloud.

Microsoft shares have rallied 37% this year—largely driven by investor optimism about the company’s Azure cloud business—and trade at $140 per share as of Thursday’s close, just slightly below their record high, reached in July. The software giant will report its September quarter earnings next week and Wall Street is upbeat, estimating earnings will jump by 11% from the year-ago period to reach $1.24 per share.

Weiss reiterated his Overweight rating for the stock with a $155 price target, saying Microsoft is his top pick in the software industry. He expects the Azure cloud business will grow by 63% in the September quarter as compared with last year, and that the company’s total earnings be in line with the Wall Street consensus.

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Just as cloud computing used to be, so now artificial intelligence is the term that pretty much every tech start-up is required to mention if it’s going to be considered a contender for the Next Big Thing. If you don’t include machine learning and neural networks in your pitch, prepare to be ignored.

But there is the increasingly visible downside to the AI hype. Not just the billionaires arguing about the far future of humanity, but the more pressing worry that AI may destroy more jobs than it creates.

Plenty of industries and roles are potentially at risk as a result of the rise of automation and AI, but the tech industry is in an odd position, in that it is both creating AI tools and is one of the industries that could see job losses from automation.

Some may, of course, consider it poetic justice that IT workers will be among the first to feel the impact of AI in the workplace.

And the IT industry has, in recent years, hardly had a great track record when it comes to thinking about the future of either staff or their skills.

The fashion for outsourcing and off-shoring in the last decade or so may have saved companies money in the short term but has also been blamed by many for doing away with the entry-level jobs that provided a gateway into the industry. The rise of cloud computing has also reduced the number of some application maintenance roles.

The rise of AI could have a similar impact. One of the most complained about features of outsourcing is staff being required to train their replacements. And one of the big secrets of AI is just how much training it requires by humans to be able to do its job. But of course, once that training is done the need for those trainers goes away again.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing; every new technology, from the wheel to the internal combustion engine, has created new and better jobs; the trick is to make sure that the self-driving car continues that trend.

A recent report by PWC on the future of work noted: “Automation and Artificial Intelligence will affect every level of the business and its people. It’s too important an issue to leave to IT (or HR) alone. A depth of understanding and keen insight into the changing technology landscape is a must.”

That’s true, but there’s also an opportunity here for the technology industry. IT understands how AI works and needs to show other industries how it can be incorporated without simply destroying jobs. By their own behaviour, IT companies and IT departments need to show that using AI and automation isn’t necessarily bad for jobs and skills: to show that harnessing this new technology can still create more jobs than it destroys. That means using AI for more than cutting costs and being willing to help workers adjust to the need for new and different skills. If the IT industry can’t balance the adoption of AI with the creation of decent jobs, then what hope is there for any other industry?

AI will certainly create huge benefits, but there are big challenges to consider; how to retrain people after the rise of automation; whether the working week or even the traditional career are still meaningful concepts, and what that means for how we organize society.

We won’t resolve all those questions for decades yet, but how companies behave today will have a bearing on those answers down the line. The real success of AI will not be down to technology, it will be down to how we treat people affected by it its arrival.

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