In recent weeks, Microsoft has initiated quite a few collaborations to advance the usage of its Azure services, while simultaneously pushing its Dynamics 365 suite of services. These include a five-year partnership with The Walt Disney Studios to create new content workflows in Azure, a team-up with Schlumberger and Chevron, and partnerships with automotive companies to revolutionize mobility using Dynamics 365.
Today, the Redmond giant unveiled a number of new insights applications for Dynamics 365, driven by Azure AI. Microsoft believes that these capabilities and services will enable employees in all sorts of business to harness the power of AI.
Aside from additional capabilities announced for some already existing services, the brand new applications being offered include Product Insights, Commerce, and Connected Store. The latter two will be geared more toward the retail and manufacturing industry.
For those unaware, Azure AI is a set of AI services built on Microsoft"s cloud platform, boasting insights gained from decades of research. The offerings included as part of this package are Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, Bot Service, and Search. These help with the development of a variety of solutions such as those concerned with the incorporation of vision, speech, and language understanding capabilities into AI bots.
Here is how the aforementioned services now utilize the new and the improved Dynamics 365 applications:
- Azure Machine Learning 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 enable natural interactions with customers across multiple touchpoints with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service.
- Azure Search 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.
Custom AI capabilities can also be added to Dynamics 365 apps by business users using Azure AI. In addition, the tech giant"s Power Platform - comprising of Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow - is also benefiting from Azure AI services, with the following advantages described for business users:
- 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.
More information regarding this will be revealed through Microsoft"s upcoming Business Applications Virtual Launch Event on October 10. With further integration between Azure AI, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform, Microsoft is hoping that business users are driven toward beneficial collaborations with developers and data scientists on the firm"s own cloud platform.