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Extending the power of Azure AI to business users

Today, Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Industry, announced several new AI-driven insights applications for Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Today, Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Industry, announced several new AI-driven insights applications for Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Powered by Azure AI, these tightly integrated AI capabilities will empower every employee in an organization to make AI real for their business today. Millions of developers and data scientists around the world are already using Azure AI to build innovative applications and machine learning models for their organizations. Now business users will also be able to directly harness the power of Azure AI in their line of business applications.

What is Azure AI?

Azure AI is a set of AI services built on Microsoft’s breakthrough innovation from decades of world-class research in vision, speech, language processing, and custom machine learning. What I find particularly exciting is that Azure AI provides our customers with access to the same proven AI capabilities that power Xbox, HoloLens, Bing, and Office 365.

Azure AI helps organizations:

  • Develop machine learning models that can help with scenarios such as demand forecasting, recommendations, or fraud detection using Azure Machine Learning.
  • Incorporate vision, speech, and language understanding capabilities into AI applications and bots, with Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service.
  • Build knowledge-mining solutions to make better use of untapped information in their content and documents using Azure Search.

Bringing the power of AI to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform

The release of the new Dynamics 365 insights apps, powered by Azure AI, will enable Dynamics 365 users to apply AI in their line of business workflows. Specifically, they benefit from the following built-in Azure AI services:

  • Azure Machine Learning which powers personalized customer recommendations in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, analyzes product telemetry in Dynamics 365 Product Insights, and predicts potential failures in business-critical equipment in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
  • Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service that enable natural interactions with customers across multiple touchpoints with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service.
  • Azure Search which allows users to quickly find critical information in records such as accounts, contacts, and even in documents and attachments such as invoices and faxes in all Dynamics 365 insights apps.

Furthermore, since Dynamics 365 insights apps are built on top of Azure AI, business users can now work with their development teams using Azure AI to add custom AI capabilities to their Dynamics 365 apps.

The Power Platform, comprised of three services – Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow, also benefits from Azure AI innovations. While each of these services is best-of-breed individually, their combination as the Power Platform is a game-changer for our customers.

Azure AI enables Power Platform users to uncover insights, develop AI applications, and automate workflows through low-code, point-and-click experiences. Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning empower Power Platform users to:

  • Extract key phrases in documents, detect sentiment in content such as customer reviews, and build custom machine learning models in Power BI.
  • Build custom AI applications that can predict customer churn, automatically route customer requests, and simplify inventory management through advanced image processing with PowerApps.
  • Automate tedious tasks such as invoice processing with Microsoft Flow.

The tight integration between Azure AI, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform will enable business users to collaborate effortlessly with data scientists and developers on a common AI platform that not only has industry leading AI capabilities but is also built on a strong foundation of trust. Microsoft is the only company that is truly democratizing AI for businesses today.

And we’re just getting started. You can expect even deeper integration and more great apps and experiences that are built on Azure AI as we continue this journey.

We’re excited to bring those to market and eager to tell you all about them!