Microsoft announced on Tuesday September 18 new cloud services based on artificial intelligence (AI) that are allegedly easy to use in order to help with certain types of tasks, particularly customer service and marketing.
The move could help Microsoft's Dynamics cloud business software become more competitive with Salesforce, which has begun offering premium artificial intelligence features for its services. Amazon, Google and other companies are also making progress in these two areas.
Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 AI for "Customer Service" and for "Market Insights" at an event held in San Francisco. The first will highlight existing and emerging problems faced by agents and help with the deployment of chatbots that can handle queries. The latter is intended to help marketing specialists to see what the current trends are in social networks.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced "Dynamics 365 AI for Sales," which can provide information on individual vendors and deals recorded in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 sales relationship tracking service. You can even display information about the sales opportunities reported in the Sales Sales Cloud tool, or comparable Oracle and SAP systems.
The Einstein add-on from Salesforce provides its own suggestions based on information in the Sales Cloud, and platform enhancements are also available for Salesforce's marketing and customer service products.
Microsoft's IA tools for marketing, customer service and sales will be available to customers this fall.
Last year, Microsoft talked about how it worked closely with a handful of customers, such as HP and Macy's, to develop sophisticated customer service technologies specific to each domain. Each PC HP sent included the resulting chatbot as part of the HP Support Assistant software.
But Microsoft will not make such artificial intelligence interactions with customers in the foreseeable future, according to Alysa Taylor, corporate vice president of enterprise applications and global industry.
"When we think about those large contracts of several years, when you are in the internal service, we do it through alliances with global and national systems integrators ...", said Taylor in an interview.
In other words, Microsoft will leave these large projects that involve great costs to its army of partners.
Microsoft began and effectively nurtured the program in its research group and delivered it to the Taylor group this summer, which developed a packaged product that is much simpler for customers to start using on their own.
"We do not have enough engineers in our research team to serve all the organizations on the planet," Taylor said. "That was the design plan from the first day."
Last year, Microsoft added a reference to artificial intelligence to its corporate vision. At this point, Microsoft seeks to help all companies become the first to become involved with AI, Taylor said.