Microsoft's vision for AI in the enterprise

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Microsoft’s vision for

AI in the enterprise

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Contents 
The promise of AI is holistic transformation ................................................................... 3 
Redefining the enterprise  through AI .............................................................................. 4 
Every application ................................................................................................................... 4 
Comprehensive AI platform ........................................................................................ 4 
Trusted AI services .......................................................................................................... 5 
Conversational AI ............................................................................................................. 5 
Every business process ....................................................................................................... 7 
Transformation across industries .............................................................................. 7 
Transformation within industries ............................................................................... 8 
Transformation at Microsoft ..................................................................................... 10 
Every employee ................................................................................................................... 11 
Turn disparate data into knowledge ...................................................................... 11 
Enrich employee experiences with searchable knowledge ........................... 12 
Drive innovation with democratised AI ................................................................ 13 
Accelerate enterprise transformation with Microsoft ............................................... 14 
Principles driving Microsoft AI innovation in the enterprise ............................. 14 
Innovation ......................................................................................................................... 14 
Empowerment ................................................................................................................. 15 
Ethics ................................................................................................................................... 15 
AI for Good ............................................................................................................................ 16 
AI for Accessibility ......................................................................................................... 16 
AI for Humanitarian Action ........................................................................................ 17 
AI for Earth ....................................................................................................................... 17 
Get started today ................................................................................................................ 17 
 
   

The promise of AI is holistic

transformation

AI technology is changing the way the world does business. A study by PwC

calculated that global GDP will increase by 14% by 2030 as a result of AI

adoption, contributing an additional $15.7T to the global economy (PwC,

2017).

In the next five years, business executives across the globe expect AI

to have a positive impact on growth (90%), productivity (86%) and job

creation (69%) in their country and industry (Economist Intelligence Unit,

2018).

And this growth isn’t limited to specific industries. According to

Gartner, “Any organisation in any industry, especially those with very large

amounts of data, can use AI for business value.” (Gartner, 2018).

With such enormous potential, it’s no wonder that enterprises are ramping

up their AI spend. The majority of enterprises surveyed by Constellation

Research are planning to increase their AI investment by more than 50% in

2018 (Constellation Research, 2018).

But, there’s a problem. While everyone knows AI has broad transformative

potential, enterprises struggle to translate this potential into tangible

advantages. Some of the key obstacles to organisations’ progress with AI

include “the requirements to establish a strategy and goals, justify projects

and secure formal funding” (Gartner, 2018).

Without a comprehensive

strategy, enterprises often utilise AI only for limited use cases.

However, these single-use cases only scratch the surface of the potential of

AI. We believe the real power of AI rests in its ability to holistically transform

enterprises and redefine business in ways that move beyond our imagination.

To make this happen, organisations need a long-term strategy and a

technology partner that goes beyond providing run-of-the-mill solutions and

acts as a strategic thought partner. As AI implementation continues to

expand, this partnership must be capable of meeting the needs and concerns

of the enterprise, such as security and scalability. It must also ensure that all

employees, regardless of technical expertise, are able to benefit.

We want to pursue democratising

AI just like we pursued

information at your fingertips

Satya Nadella

Redefining the enterprise

through AI

At Microsoft, we believe that enterprises can achieve far more with a

comprehensive AI strategy rather than incremental changes through isolated

use cases. Our vision for the enterprise is to enable every company to

transform by bringing AI to every application, every business process and

every employee – and as a result, achieve more than it ever thought

possible.

Every application

Quickly and easily develop intelligent applications to create

engaging user experiences and surface unprecedented insights.

One of the clearest use cases of AI is creating business applications with

intelligent capabilities. Use of AI in applications is rapidly increasing; by 2021,

75% of commercial enterprise apps will use AI (IDC, 2017).

AI offers

tremendous opportunity to increase the functionality of existing business

applications and turn them into tools for more effective customer

engagement and employee productivity. However, most organisations’ app

developers do not have the AI expertise needed to make this a reality.

To help developers integrate AI into every application, we are giving them

the tools needed to build the next generation of smart applications where

their enterprise data lives – in the intelligent cloud, on-premises and on the

intelligent edge. By putting the reins of innovation in the hands of each

developer, they can then build intelligent apps that can see, hear, speak,

understand and interpret user needs.

To that end, Microsoft provides a comprehensive set of offerings to

developers in the enterprise – ranging from flexible tools for those that want

to build from the ground up, to plug-and-play APIs that integrate AI

capabilities into apps with minimal coding requirements.

Comprehensive AI platform

To help developers and data scientists build intelligent apps, we are creating

tools and services that make AI integration faster and easier. For example, we

developed PowerApps for Dynamics 365, a powerful tool that enables faster

innovation with a point-and-click approach to app design.

The Azure AI platform is no different. It features modern AI tools and services

designed to help developers and data scientists create AI solutions easily,

while maximising productivity. Users can choose from a large selection of

templates, or start from a blank canvas, to build a custom app based on the

Common Data Model. Popular deep-learning frameworks enable developers

to harness intelligence with massive datasets on a platform with

Transform your organisation

by bringing AI to…

Every application

Quickly and easily develop

intelligent applications to

create engaging user

experiences and surface

unprecedented insights.

Every business process

Enhance every business

process with intelligence to

expand customer

engagement, optimise

operations and improve

offerings.

Every employee

Foster innovation and

collaboration across the

enterprise by placing AI in the

hands of every employee.

comprehensive support. And our enterprise-grade AI infrastructure runs AI

workloads anywhere at scale.

To further simplify the creation of AI solutions, Microsoft also offers a

comprehensive set of flexible and trusted AI services.

Trusted AI services

Our trusted AI services accelerate the development of AI solutions – from

pre-built APIs, such as Cognitive Services and Conversational AI with bot

tools, to platforms for building custom models such as Azure Machine

Learning Studio.

Pre-built services (Cognitive Services) enable developers to make their apps

more intelligent and engaging by infusing them with cognitive capabilities.

These services are high-quality RESTful intelligent APIs for Vision, Speech,

Language, Knowledge and Search. With just a few lines of code, developers

that are new to AI can infuse their applications with cognitive capabilities to

communicate with users in natural language, identify relevant content in

images and recognise users by voice.

Custom models built on Azure Machine Learning Studio enable

organisations to make better decisions, at any scale, when it matters. Azure

Machine Learning Studio is a fully managed cloud service for data scientists

and developers that helps them to easily prepare data and build and train

custom models. Spanning from the edge to the cloud, users can access the

service from any device – going from idea to deployment in a matter of

clicks.

Data Science VMs save developers time by providing a ready-to-use image

that can be provisioned on Azure. The image comes preinstalled, configured

and tested with several popular tools that are commonly used for data

analytics, machine learning and AI training. DSVMs offer on-demand elastic

capacity for large-scale projects and a pay-as-you-go structure.

Knowledge Mining helps manage the chaos of data and tackles the

challenges that distract developers from finding the information they need.

is an AI-first approach to content understanding. It pulls data from a variety

of Azure data sources and applies a set of composable cognitive skills that

extract knowledge. This knowledge is then organised and stored in a search

index, enabling new experiences when exploring data.

Conversational AI

One of the most compelling use cases for AI in the enterprise is creating

chatbots or virtual agents. These solutions meet customer demand for

intuitive, personalised, accessible touchpoints across all channels – as well as

supporting employees by helping them connect to resources more quickly.

Gartner estimates that “25% of all customer service and support operations

will integrate virtual customer assistant or chatbot technology across

engagement channels by 2020, up from less than 2% in 2017” (Gartner,

Adobe integrated

Microsoft Translator into their Adobe

Experience Manager (AEM), an enterprise

content management platform for

managing web content, digital assets,

online communities, mobile applications

and forms. With Microsoft Translator, users

can dynamically translate their content into

more than 50 languages to extend their

reach around the world.

To protect against fraud

and ensure both driver and passenger

safety, Uber used face recognition APIs in

Microsoft Cognitive Services to enhance

their mobile applications. They needed a

visual verification solution that was fast,

easy, scalable and functional across a

variety of smartphones. With the Face API,

Uber was able to add photo-matching

technology to their platform to help ensure

the driver using the app matches the

account on file.

Progressive used

Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Cognitive

Services to quickly and easily build the Flo

Chatbot – currently available on Facebook

Messenger – which answers customer

questions, provides quotes and even offers a

bit of witty banter in the well-known style of

the company spokesperson, Flo.

2018).

As chatbots and virtual agents become more ubiquitous, developers

must ensure their conversational interfaces rise above the competition.

Most of today’s chatbots are designed to respond to simple commands and

queries, such as giving a weather report, playing a song or sharing a

reminder. These simple chatbots are efficient when the user’s need aligns

with the chatbot’s specific purpose. But for complex communication,

intelligent assistants need to be able to understand meaning, learn from

interactions and have natural dialogues that move beyond simply responding

to commands.

Microsoft offers a wide array of Conversational AI technologies to support

the creation of intelligent bots: from a simple QnA bot, to a robust virtual

agent that can learn continually and maintain a seamless, personalised

conversation across channels. Regardless of their needs, Microsoft is helping

enterprises build conversational interfaces that interact with users in more

natural ways, enabling them to create outstanding customer experiences and

help employees maximise their time.

For developers that want to create their own conversational bots, we offer

industry-leading NLP capabilities through the Azure Bot Service and

Cognitive Services Language APIs. These language services help ensure apps

understand the meaning of a speaker’s query and reply using natural

language. For instance, developers with varying levels of AI experience can

experiment with the Text Analytics API to identify sentiment and key phrases

or leverage Language Understanding for contextual understanding.

In addition to providing tools for developers to build their own bots,

Microsoft is investing in the next generation of enterprise-ready virtual

assistants, so organisations can start reaping the benefits of a conversational

AI experience immediately. Using industry-leading AI technology, Microsoft

virtual assistants are able to better serve the needs of both enterprise

customers and employees. For customers, they understand user intent and

navigate complex multi-turn dialogues in a natural, conversational style – all

while maintaining consistency with the customer across channels and over

time. These assistants also support customer service agents, for example, by

providing context on the issue at hand and making recommendations to

expedite optimal outcomes.

AI-infused applications like chatbots are one of the top ways enterprises are

driving value from AI capabilities, but they are only one piece of a larger AI

strategy. Next, we want to talk about the ways Microsoft can integrate AI in

every business process and transform the enterprise along the way.

The multinational

telco Telefónica used Microsoft Azure Bot

Service and Cognitive Services to build and

support Aura, an intelligent conversational

agent for multiple services. With Aura,

Telefónica customers can manage their

products and services with the company,

get real-time support or just change the TV

channel – all through natural voice

interaction and a personalised user

experience.

Every business process

Enhance every business process with intelligence to expand

customer engagement, optimise operations and improve products

and services.

Over the last several decades, the advent of the internet has completely

redefined business processes. From sales and marketing to customer support,

the way we do business today would be nearly unrecognisable to the

enterprises of a few decades past – and the result has been dramatic

increases in productivity and output. To say that AI will have a similar impact

is no overstatement.

AI enables organisations to make better-informed decisions by making it

easy to derive insights from data, helping to expand customer engagement,

optimise operations and improve offerings. Reimagining business processes

with AI also makes work more efficient, saving employees time so they can

focus on higher priorities.

Microsoft’s vision is to accelerate business process transformation with

enterprise-ready, AI-infused experiences. Here, we’ll take a look at a few of

the most powerful scenarios where AI is already having a proven impact –

horizontally, in specific industries, and right here at Microsoft.

Transformation across industries

Across industries, there is a pressing need for increased efficiency and

improved decision-making capabilities. We are working to provide solutions

that address common business problems with AI out-of-the-box. To

accomplish this, we are infusing intelligence into the products and services

that organisations use every day.

Thousands of enterprises rely on Dynamics 365 to help them move their

business forward. To give our customers the most powerful experiences,

we’ve included AI layers within Dynamics 365 products to provide AI

experiences out-of-the-box with immediate time to value. For example,

Dynamics 365 for Field Service uses AI to detect, troubleshoot and resolve

equipment issues remotely with self-healing commands. Enterprises can

extend these capabilities further and connect them to other Microsoft

services such as Azure, Office, Skype or even augmented reality.

To further help our customers integrate intelligence into their organisation,

Dynamics 365 has announced a new class of AI applications that deliver out-

of-the-box insights by unifying data and infusing it with advanced

intelligence.

Infusing intelligence into our commonly used applications helps ensure that

AI is more accessible and easier to utilise for enterprises in any industry. But

cross-industry solutions are only the beginning.

New Dynamics 365 AI Applications:

Dynamics 365 AI for Sales enables sellers

to build relationships and increase revenue

by providing actionable insights to drive

personalised engagement and proactive

decision-making.

Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service

improves customer service and lowers

support costs by surfacing automated

customer insights and leveraging virtual

agents.

Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights

helps users monitor their brand and

respond faster to trends by using AI models

to identify what people are saying about

products.

Learn more about Dynamics 365

The business value of AI for your

organisation will be proportional

to how thoroughly you reinvent

your business in light of AI

capabilities. AI will enable you to

reduce costs. But, its greater

impact will be in answering

questions such as, “How do I

change the nature of the customer

experience?” or “How can I initiate

AI-driven insights to alter all

levels of decision-making?”

Gartner, 2018

Transformation within industries

Microsoft is also partnering with technology innovators within industries to

create AI solutions that meet vertical-specific needs.

Financial Services

This is a time of transformation for the financial services industry. With

technological advances, cultural shifts, cybersecurity threats and regulatory

changes, there’s a pressing need for banks to rethink the way they work.

Banks are now competing with a growing number of cloud-native industry

disruptors and, as a result, customer expectations are shifting. Today, only

24% of customers report that they believe their bank understands their

current goals (NIIT, 2017).

This is compounded by the risk of financial crime:

in the last 24 months, 56% of financial institutions have experienced

consumer fraud and 41% have experienced cybercrime (PwC, 2018).

Innovative new capabilities, enabled by the financial services-ready cloud, are

helping banks to meet these challenges and transform their business for the

better. Such capabilities include:

Next Best Action (NBA) – AI-powered NBA solutions use sophisticated

rules, analytics and algorithms to better predict customer needs and, in

turn, offer more relevant actions and promotions, leading to improved

wallet share and loyalty.

Risk analytics and fraud prevention – Machine learning makes more

accurate risk, fraud and customer models possible, enabling financial

services institutions to spot more hidden risks and decrease

operating costs.

Manufacturing

The rise of digital technology and the IoT has provided manufacturers with

vast stores of data that reflect operational efficiency and business

performance. More than half of manufacturers with revenues exceeding $1

billion have invested over $100M towards smart factories, and they are

seeing an average productivity gain of nearly 20% (Capgemini, 2017).

Gleaning useful insights from this data is essential for manufacturers who

often operate on thin margins and are increasingly looking for value-added

services – especially field services – to differentiate themselves. AI is

empowering manufacturers to create more with their data, leading to

advancements in:

Predictive maintenance – Estimate the remaining useful life for

machines and their components, enabling maintenance technicians to be

proactive about repairs and reduce costly downtime.

Performance improvements – Anticipate the risk of production

disruptions, bottlenecks and safety risks in real time, highlighting

problems before they occur.

Jabil, one of the

world’s largest manufacturing services

companies, needed a solution that would

combine the IoT and deep learning to

reduce errors and improve quality in the

production process. Jabil collaborated with

Microsoft on a project that connected an

electronics manufacturing production line

to the cloud and collected more than one

million data points from a 32-step

manufacturing process. The result was a

program that anticipated nearly every error

in the production process by step six –

meaning that errors could be corrected

prior to adding expensive electronic units

and costly mistakes.

QuarterSpot, a

startup online lender, makes credit more

available and affordable to credit-starved

small businesses. With the goal of

connecting small businesses with the

capital they need, QuarterSpot created a

marketplace for investors to purchase

portions of approved loans in small

increments. The company’s lending

platform uses sophisticated risk models that

incorporate real-time data from various

sources – including business bank accounts

– to calculate the probability of whether an

applicant will default on the loan. By

leveraging automatic updates to

operationalised models, QuarterSpot can

continually approve scoring and approval

terms, helping lower default rates by over

50% and increasing borrower approval

rates by over 15%.

Retail

In retail, customers have an increasing expectation of personalised

experiences that demonstrate an understanding of the customer as an

individual. 79% of consumers aged 18–65 in the US say brands must actively

demonstrate that “they understand and care about me” before they consider

purchasing (Wunderman, 2017).

AI is enabling retailers to tailor their

offerings more precisely to customer demand with services such as:

Sales personalisation – Intelligence applied to customer history enables

retailers to deliver customised experiences, offerings, pricing and

planning – modernising the online and physical buying experience.

Dynamic pricing & planning – Forecasting models predict demand for

different products, providing greater confidence for pricing and stocking

decisions and reducing losses from overstocks and OOS.

Public sector

Governments are under pressure to create more effective citizen services. In

particular, there is a lot of room for growth in providing citizens with digital

government services. Studies have shown that citizens are 58% more likely to

trust a government institution if they provide a modern and excellent digital

experience (Foresee, 2017).

And increasingly, citizens want to use mobile

devices to access government services (Accenture, 2016).

At the same time,

governments are fighting to control costs and ensure security and privacy. As

a result, AI tools enable governments to connect with their citizens more

effectively, eliminate waste and protect sensitive information. Two key areas

for these innovative AI initiatives are:

Smart cities – Intelligent technology designed to tackle common

challenges such as fee and toll management, traffic optimisation and

sustainability.

Citizen services – Tools designed to provide citizens with easier access

to consolidated government services through tracking, search and

conversational bots.

Healthcare

Clinician shortages, time and cost pressures, and increased patient needs

create a number of challenges for health organisations as they try to improve

patient experiences and outcomes. According to the Association of American

Medical Colleges, there will be a shortfall of between 42,600 and 121,300

physicians by 2030 (AAMC, March 2018).

Because of the tremendous

potential that AI has to address these challenges and help clinicians save

lives, Microsoft is focusing heavily on paving the way to a transformed

healthcare industry. We’ve set up an extensive research team that is

pioneering new AI-led approaches to patient care, and we’re working with a

dynamic partner ecosystem to bring solutions to market. Here are some ways

we are integrating AI into healthcare:

The City of LA worked with

Microsoft to create Chip the chatbot, a

digital personal assistant that helps

residents more easily navigate government

resources and procedures and frees up

employees to focus on higher-value

activities.

ASOS, a leading online

fashion retailer, transformed its platform

from a monolithic, on-premises e-

commerce system to a microservices

platform running on Microsoft Azure. As

part of their transformation, the company

launched a natively running mobile app

that includes a built-in recommendation

engine, to ensure that the right subset of

their 85,000 products is in front of the right

consumers. In 2016, the new platform

handled more than double the volume of

Black Friday orders compared to the

previous year.

A new artificial

intelligence tool launched by Ochsner

Health System enables doctors to focus on

the right patient at the right time by

analysing thousands of data points to

predict which patients will deteriorate in the

near future.

Other areas we have experimented with

include:

• Credit and collections chatbot

• Machine learning revenue forecasting

• Intelligent supply chain management

• Compliance predictive analytics

• Contract setup automation

Personalised medicine – Analytics-driven individualised treatment plans

based on a patient’s genetic makeup, medical history, lifestyle and more

– made possible through advances in genomics and intelligent analysis of

massive amounts of healthcare data.

Healthcare Bot service – A cloud-based solution that enables healthcare

organisations to build and deploy compliant, virtual health assistants that

can provide users with conversational and engaging access to the most

relevant and accurate healthcare services and information.

Inner eye – A Microsoft research project that is exploring state of the art

machine learning technology to build innovative tools that automatically

analyse 3D radiological images.

Learn more about how Microsoft is democratising AI in health.

Education

Technology is creating unprecedented opportunities to connect students to

the world around them and help them realise their full potential. Teachers,

administrators and technology innovators are collaborating to solve some of

the most pressing challenges in education through AI. These collaborations

have produced:

Accessibility in the classroom – AI-powered tools, such as real-time

lesson translation for students that speak a different language and

narration of surroundings for students who are blind, enable teachers to

make the classroom more accessible.

School-wide AI insights – Deep analytic insights into student success

and risk across entire schools or school districts help educators make

informed decisions on how to improve student outcomes.

Transformation at Microsoft

The first place we build and test our AI capabilities is in our own internal

processes, so we can get a better grasp on how to make the most useful

tools for our customers across industries. These are just a few of the internal

Microsoft projects that are leveraging AI to create better outcomes:

Customer support virtual agent – We created a conversational virtual

agent to support customer queries on a variety of Microsoft products,

including Windows, Office, Xbox and more. The agent resulted in a 2×

increase in self-help success and a massive decrease in agent-to-agent

transfers.

Revamped sales processes – We simplified our complex sales processes,

increased the accuracy of sales data and enabled an individualised

customer experience by creating a new sales process built on Dynamics

365 and Azure Cloud Services.

Smart buildings powered by data analytics – We leveraged data

analytics, IoT and Azure Machine Learning for predictive maintenance,

The Tacoma Public

School District utilised AI-powered analytics

to assess student success across the district.

They were able to gain deep insights into

their students and identify in real time any

“at-risk” students or groups that required

immediate intervention and support. Their

analysis provided an evidence-based

backbone for a programme to strengthen

the school district – and the result was an

increase in graduation rates from 55% to

86.2% over the course of six years.

climate control and HVAC optimisation – keeping our buildings

comfortable while minimising our environmental footprint.

Every employee

Foster innovation and collaboration across the enterprise by

placing AI in the hands of every employee.

AI has the capacity to empower all people to achieve more, not just highly

skilled technical workers. “In 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9T in

business value and recover 6.2B hours of worker productivity” (Gartner,

2018).

This human-AI partnership combines the strengths of both

computers and humans to drive unprecedented value across every industry.

Microsoft is a technology company, but people have always been at the core

of our mission. Our vision for AI is to amplify human ingenuity with intelligent

technology.

Enabling every employee to become a citizen data scientist is crucial to

realise the full potential of AI. Only then can the whole organisation glean

new insights, make better decisions and perform complex analysis using AI.

Gartner predicts that “by 2019, citizen data scientists will surpass data

scientists in terms of the amount of advanced analysis they produce.”

(Gartner, 2018).

We believe there are three imperatives to provide any

employee with the ability to explore, derive insights and create new

knowledge from vast amounts of data: turning disparate data into

knowledge, enriching employee experiences with searchable knowledge and

driving innovation with democratised AI.

Turn disparate data into knowledge

First, we need to convert an enterprise’s siloed and chaotic data into

information they can easily access.

AI is only as powerful as the data it’s built on. While most enterprises have

amassed huge quantities of data, it often resides in siloed systems, like

marketing and finance systems. Moreover, the majority of this data is either

Cortana uses AI capabilities to

take care of everyday meeting tasks, such

as scheduling meetings and transcribing

notes. With Cortana, members can manage

meetings through voice commands such as

directing Cortana to present the meeting

deck or add someone new.

unstructured, like video files, images and PDFs, or redundant, obsolete or

trivial (ROT). Without usable data across the enterprise, most organisations

are limited to employing AI on specific siloes of structured information.

Instead of developing AI applications that can only perform niche tasks,

Microsoft is helping enterprises organise their structured and unstructured

data into a single, searchable knowledge base enriched with relevant external

data. AI deep learning capabilities run on top of data to understand the

content and infer relationships, turning data into knowledge and ensuring

that the user receives the most relevant information. Serving as a strategic

foundation for current and future AI initiatives, this knowledge base is also

understandable, consumable and searchable by AI models and can enable

enterprises to integrate AI into every aspect of their business.

From this centralised resource, employees can search, find and explore

previously unavailable enterprise information, enabling them to be more

efficient and impactful.

Enrich employee experiences with searchable

knowledge

Moreover, we are providing more user-friendly ways to democratise access

to this enterprise knowledge. With Microsoft AI, enterprises can build AI

experiences on top of their enterprise knowledge, either by infusing it with

existing productivity and business applications or by creating new

applications powered by AI, like conversational agents. For example, the next

generation of conversational agents can pull from customer knowledge and

world knowledge to answer questions specific to businesses like “Which

customers are within a 10-mile radius of the airport?” This knowledge base

democratises AI experiences and provides powerful new connections to

employees.

Consider the following illustration of the searchable knowledge base in

action: Lisa, a marketer, needs to find an advertising agency to use for an

upcoming campaign. Typically, identifying an agency with the right

capabilities would require relying on colleagues for recommendations and

spending hours reviewing past records, agency websites, web results and the

agency’s previous work. Lisa would have struggled to piece together this

information, manually combing through countless sources of data, never

certain if she had all the right information.

With an AI-infused knowledge base, Lisa can search “Find me advertising

agencies” and a ranked list of agencies her company used in the past will

be populated. Curious about her colleagues’ experiences, she selects two

agencies that her company has previously used and types a new query into

the search bar: “Find me Teams threads that mention these agencies.” Her

search yields dozens of Teams threads. Keen to quickly identify which agency

her colleagues have had the most positive sentiment about, she applies a

sentiment analysis AI model. She can now use more advanced queries like

“Show me Teams threads with negative sentiment for Agency A” or “Show

me the trend of sentiment for Agency B.”

Partnering with

Microsoft, Centrica was able to combine

their disparate data into searchable

knowledge, helping them improve

customer experiences, provide their

employees with more actionable customer

insights and expand the capabilities of their

AI-powered digital assistant, Wilbur.

In Dynamics 365 applications, the

Common Data Model (CDM) provides a

built-in shared data repository across all

applications – from Sales and Marketing, to

Customer Service and Field Service – as well

as external data sources, like SAP. Capturing

and synthesising data from across the

business makes it possible for enterprises to

drive deeper insights.

Instead of searching for hours with potentially less informed results, users like

Lisa can now easily perform complex analysis with AI tools and quickly find

the information that matters most to them. However, creating knowledge

bases is just one way we are revolutionising how employees search, find and

explore information.

To further help employees find the information they need, we developed

Microsoft Search, an intelligent search experience embedded within over nine

familiar Microsoft products, including Excel, Word, Bing and Outlook. Our

solution uses AI to index content across an organisation’s data sources and

provide employees with the most relevant answers. For instance, say you

wanted to search for a colleague that goes by the nickname, Chuck. If you

search for Chuck in the global address list, Microsoft Search reasons with AI

to understand that the nickname Chuck is short for Charles and, due to

contextual clues, is able to pinpoint the exact Charles you are referring to at

the company.

Drive innovation with democratised AI

To truly enable employees to become citizen data scientists, we are providing

them with an easy way to run AI models on top of enterprise knowledge.

When employees are empowered with these AI capabilities, not only can they

ask the important questions, they can also very quickly extract relevant

insights applicable to the task they are trying to complete. From highly

technical employees to non-technical business users, we are placing AI in the

hands of every employee and giving them the power to transform how they

work and think in more innovative ways than ever before.

To provide employees with even greater access to AI capabilities, we are

infusing intelligence into the products and services that employees use every

day like Dynamics, Bing and Microsoft 365 – which includes Office 365,

Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility and Security. Employees can leverage AI

in existing workflows to make them more efficient and ultimately save time.

In Word and PowerPoint, employees can develop documents and

presentations in less time with automated design capabilities like PowerPoint

Designer and Editor, which provide design tips and digital writing assistance.

In Outlook, employees can streamline emails and calendars with features that

help filter out the noise and surface the most relevant information, so they

don’t miss what’s important. In Excel, intelligent capabilities have been a part

of the experience for years. Features like advanced data transformation and

flash fill have helped organisations perform and derive value from their data.

With continued advancements in our AI technology, Excel is introducing

more advanced AI features that help employees unlock new insights from

raw data sets in just a few clicks by highlighting relevant patterns.

Not only are we building up our AI capabilities in existing workflows, but we

are also using AI to power new productivity experiences. Workplace Analytics,

for instance, surfaces insights on how effectively an organisation is working

together by identifying collaboration patterns and helping identify areas to

increase productivity, workforce effectiveness and employee engagement.

With more than 80,000 people

spanning 200 specialties, Publicis Groupe

worked with Microsoft to create the Marcel

AI platform to help employees connect with

each other, find examples of great work and

spark new ways to innovate and boost

creativity.

Accelerate enterprise

transformation with Microsoft

AI isn’t new and it isn’t new to Microsoft. Our computer scientists have been

working on AI and machine learning technologies for decades. Today, we

have over 1,000 researchers across 11 labs who are focusing on over 55 areas

of computing and collaborating with leading academic, government and

industry researchers. Plus, our AI innovation is backed by the security,

scalability and reliability that the enterprise needs. Regardless of where

enterprises start or want to grow to, Microsoft is the technology partner that

can support their transformation.

Our AI capabilities are built on top of Azure, Microsoft’s leading Enterprise

cloud platform. Azure has 50+ regions worldwide – more than any other

cloud provider – and comes with robust uptime SLAs, ensuring enterprises

can deploy and scale with confidence. We also provide access to a global

ecosystem of thousands of qualified partners with deep AI expertise.

Principles driving Microsoft AI innovation

in the enterprise

For decades, we’ve been empowering enterprises around the globe with

innovation in productivity software, business applications and cloud

technology. Now, we want to bring the groundbreaking capabilities of AI out

of the lab and into every organisation. At Microsoft, AI is playing a central

role in our company narrative and is driving our thought leadership agenda.

To that end, we’ve focused our AI investments for the enterprise around

three core principles: innovation, empowerment and ethics.

Innovation

We have a continuous and ambitious focus on innovation. We’re pushing the

boundaries of AI to create fast, agile and powerful tools for the enterprise.

With 25+ years of investment, and some of the best AI researchers on the

planet (including winners of the Turing Award, Fields Medal and Dijkstra

Prize), Microsoft is a proven leader in AI innovation. That’s why over one

million developers are currently accessing our pre-built and customisable AI

services. Every year, Microsoft’s AI capabilities are reaching new milestones:

2016: Object recognition human parity

2017: Speech recognition human parity

2017: Machine translation human parity

2018: Machine reading comprehension human parity

Our advancements in vision, speech, machine reading and translation have

achieved historic milestones in just the last two years. However, our focus is

not on celebrating the breakthroughs we achieved; what matters to us is how

we translate those breakthroughs into platforms and experiences. By doing

so, we can put innovation into the hands of every developer and every

organisation, empowering them to leverage AI and have a positive impact on

every industry and every application.

Empowerment

At Microsoft, we are focused on developing AI in such a way that it is

human-centric and augments human abilities, especially humankind’s innate

ingenuity.

Our first priority is to develop AI technology that leverages the unique

strengths of computers – such as probabilistic reasoning and pattern

recognition – with the creativity, ingenuity and capacity for meaning-making

of humans. That’s why we’re innovating AI to enable better decision-making

across organisations, amplify the tools and processes employees already use

and tear down knowledge siloes – so people can do more, together.

Ethics

As we look to a future powered by a partnership between computers and

humans, it’s important that we address ethical challenges head-on. Designing

trustworthy AI requires creating solutions that reflect ethical principles deeply

rooted in important and timeless values. At Microsoft, we’ve identified six

ethical values – fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusivity,

transparency and accountability – to guide the cross-disciplinary

development and use of artificial intelligence.

We’ve made security and privacy a top priority by helping ensure

compliance with existing privacy laws (including GDPR), providing

transparency and choices regarding data collection and use, designing

our systems to protect against bad actors and using de-identification

techniques to promote both privacy and security. As organisations

transform, Microsoft has already taken precautionary measures to help

ensure their crucial data remains safe. Thanks to systems like Windows

Defender Advanced Threat Protection and Office 365 Advanced Threat

Protection, AI can help actively monitor threats and secure business data

by detecting, and automatically protecting computers and documents

from, malware.

We have committed to promoting fairness by understanding how bias

can be introduced into AI models and affect recommendations, attracting

a diverse pool of AI talent, developing analytical techniques to detect and

eliminate bias and leveraging human review and domain expertise.

We’re working to ensure that our products maintain high standards of

reliability and safety by evaluating training data, testing extensively

with a user feedback loop, monitoring ongoing performance and

designing in anticipation of unexpected circumstances – including

nefarious attacks.

We pursue inclusivity by using inclusive design practices to address

potential barriers that could unintentionally exclude people, enhancing

opportunities for those with disabilities, building trust through contextual

interaction and designing with emotional intelligence in mind.

None of those are possible without transparency and accountability. Our

commitment to transparency means we believe people should

understand how decisions were made. We strive to provide contextual

explanations of our AI processes and we make it easier to raise

awareness of potential bias, errors and unintended outcomes.

We believe in creating accountability for how systems operate. We’re

ensuring that norms are observed during system design, and in an

ongoing manner, and that there is a role for internal review boards.

AI for Good

AI can be a powerful tool for increasing access to information, education,

employment, government services and social and economic opportunities.

There are no limits to what people can achieve when technology reflects the

diversity of everyone who uses it. Enterprises should play an active role to

ensure that these new technologies are applied responsibly and inclusively.

Over the past 18 months, Microsoft has been investing in AI for Good

programmes that lower the barriers of entry to cloud and AI technologies

through grants, education, research and strategic partnerships.

AI for Accessibility

Our AI for Accessibility programme promotes inclusion through intelligent

technology. We are focused on empowering organisations and developers to

harness AI to amplify human capabilities for people with disabilities. The

programme focuses on driving breakthroughs that make the workplace more

inclusive, providing equal access to information through innovations in

vision, speech and machine reading, and helping people with disabilities gain

more independence to perform daily tasks.

A new way of seeing

Seeing AI is a free app designed to help the

low vision community better see the world

around them. This ongoing research project

harnesses the power of AI to describe

people, text and objects.

Learn about Seeing AI

AI for Humanitarian Action

We recently announced an AI for Humanitarian Action 5-year programme

aimed at harnessing the power of AI to support disaster response and

recovery, help ensure the safety and wellbeing of children around the world,

protect refugees and displaced people, and promote respect for human

rights.

AI for Earth

Our AI for Earth programme empowers people and organisations to create

breakthrough innovations in the way we monitor, model and ultimately

manage Earth’s natural systems. The programme focuses on four key areas

that are vital to creating a sustainable future – agriculture, water, biodiversity

and climate change.

Our goal with all the AI for Good programmes is to empower and accelerate

the impact that people around the world can have in solving some of

society’s biggest challenges.

Get started today

AI is the defining technology of our time, impacting every industry and

business. Enterprises are looking for a strategic partner to help them harness

AI to drive their transformation. Microsoft is ready to be that strategic

partner, accelerating enterprise transformation with AI.

Together, we have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to empower

transformation that has positive impacts on entire industries. By transforming

industry verticals, AI can solve some of society’s biggest challenges in areas

like health and environmental conservation, as well as broader issues like

access to technology. We are already seeing breakthroughs in the application

of AI in these areas, from conducting a complete species census in the field

of biodiversity to quickly developing maps for tracking environmental

changes over time. Bringing innovation to the people that will change the

world and driving that innovation with responsibility are key principles of

Microsoft’s AI vision.

We recognise, however, that every enterprise is unique and you will have

your own path to transforming your organisation. To help you take the first

step towards your own AI transformation, we have created the AI Ready

assessment tool. This tool evaluates your own organisational readiness for

adopting AI-based systems and provides customised recommendations

around appropriate AI implementations for your business.

For more information on Microsoft AI, please refer to the list of additional

resources below.

Operation Smile gives hope to

more children

Our non-profit partner Operation Smile

uses AI to analyse photos with a facial

modelling algorithm, and the AI-powered

Microsoft Pix camera app, to improve

surgical outcomes and help more children

in need of facial surgery.

Learn about Operation Smile

Project Premonition

AI technology and cloud software enables

Project Premonition researchers to detect

and track pathogens to prevent outbreaks

and protect biodiversity.

Learn about Project Premonition

Top considerations to ensure an

AI-ready culture:

1. Adopt a data-driven culture: Ensure

your AI solutions are founded on high-

quality data.

2. Share knowledge: Commit to breaking

down data siloes across the enterprise

and making data accessible to all.

3. Choose the right AI solution: Align the

AI solution to your unique enterprise

and ideal business outcomes.

4. Adapt AI to your enterprise: Test AI

with minimally viable products and

improve applications and processes that

already exist – while always putting the

customer experience first.

5. Plan ahead: Communicate the AI

strategy throughout your business, be

proactive about AI training and be

cognisant of ethical concerns.

MICROSOFT AI

Microsoft AI homepage

Microsoft AI for business

The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society

Ethics: Microsoft AI principles

AI for accessibility

Microsoft Generation AI

INTELLIGENT APPS

Cognitive Services

Visual Studio

Windows Machine Learning

CONVERSATIONAL AI

Bot Framework

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Azure AI Gallery

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 AI

Office 365

Bing for Business

and other internet website references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it.

Some examples are for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association is intended or inferred.

This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document

for your internal, reference purposes.

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Economist Intelligence Unit, “Intelligent Economies: AI’s transformation of industries and society”, 2018.

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Nadella, Satya, “Innovation Keynote”, Ignite, Microsoft, 26th September 2016, Atlanta, Georgia.

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