We extend the construction of the normal cone of a closed embedding of schemes to any locally off finite type morphism of higher Artin stacks and show that in the Deligne-Mumford case our construction recovers the relative intrinsic normal cone of Behrend and Fantechi. We characterize our extension as the unique one satisfying a short list of axioms,and use it to construct the deformation to the normal cone. As an application of our methods, we associate to any morphism of Artin stacks equipped with a choice of a global perfect obstruction theory a relative virtual fundamental class in the Chow group of Kresch.
