Artificial Intelligence is Coming to Microsoft Office 365

By Swapnil Bhartiya

Instead of using AI to beat humans in games of chess, Microsoft is putting AI to real work.

Microsoft is now baking artificial intelligence (AI) right into its products, most notably Office 365. Speaking at the annual Ignite conference in Atlanta, GA, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that, with Office 365, the company is not just moving to the cloud but is also bringing a host of features powered by AI.

“The most profound shift is in the fact that the data underneath the applications of Office 365 is exposed in a graph structure. And in a trusted, private-preserving way, we can reason over this data and create intelligence. That’s really the profound shift in Office 365,” said Nadella.

The company is introducing artificial intelligence to Office products that add new capabilities, like “Tap” for Word and Outlook, which helps employees reuse existing content from corporate documents and mail by mining Microsoft Graph.

“We have reached a point in our industry where the collective power of technology exceeds that of the individual; where, in a matter of hours, a person can generate insights that previously would have taken days,” Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

In addition to Office 365, AI is also going to power the Relationship Assistant of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. The company is deploying AI-powered virtual assistants at its US support centers, and Uber is already using Microsoft Cognitive Services for its ID service that checks the identity of drivers.

09/28/2016