Microsoft Corp. has found a new use for the vast troves of audience data that it obtained through the acquisition of LinkedIn: display advertising.

The company today introduced the Microsoft Audience Network, an advertising platform that uses profile information from the social network to put promotions in front of the right users. The artificial intelligence models that do the targeting also ingest data from other Microsoft services including Skype, Outlook and, of course, Bing.

The search engine is at the heart of the new service. Although it’s dwarfed by Google Inc.’s search service, Bing generates several billion dollars in annual advertising revenue for Microsoft and has a fairly sizable user base, all things considered. Speaking to the trade publication Search Engine Land, Microsoft ad executive Steve Sirich said the new network can reach 63 million search users whom Google doesn’t.

In addition to Bing, ads distributed via the platform will appear on other Microsoft properties such as MSN, Outlook.com and its Edge browser. The company has also brought a number of undisclosed partner websites aboard.

Microsoft’s new AI-powered platform could further its efforts to chip away at Google Inc.’s and Facebook Inc.’s dominance of the online advertising market. Amazon.com Inc. is another tech firm that has been working to challenge the de facto duopoly, as the two companies are often referred to in marketing circles. In its first-quarter earnings call last week, the retail giant reported advertising sales jumped 132 percent year-over-year, to $2 billion.

That’s still a drop in the bucket next to the $51 billion in total revenues that Amazon recorded during the period, not to mention the figures posted by Facebook and Google. Microsoft’s ad business similarly only accounts for a small slice of its top line. But its launch of the new advertising platform shows that the competition here isn’t over.

Image: Microsoft