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The modern business advantage: Uncovering deep insights with AI

Organizations around the world have come to recognize AI as the transformative technology that enables them to gain real business advantage. AI’s ability to reason over vast quantities of data allows those who implement it to uncover deep business insights, augment human expertise, drive operational efficiency, transform their products, and better serve their customers.

But this kind of enterprise-wide transformation means bringing AI to every department, business process, experience, and interaction. Across organizations, departments like finance, human resources, sales, marketing, supply chain, customer service, and more can all be improved, optimized, and refined with AI technology.

At Microsoft, we have embarked on a journey to bring AI to every corner of our organization. Here, we showcase some of the ways we use Data and AI as the foundation for transforming the way we run our business.

Augment human expertise

The real power of AI technology is that it amplifies our ingenuity and extends our capacity so that we can achieve more. By taking over repetitive activities, automation allows people to focus on their higher value and strategic responsibilities.

Imagine sifting through volumes of emails to find usable customer feedback or weeding through thousands of marketing leads to find the most viable ones; these tasks are valuable but time consuming.

Dedicating AI technology to tackle tasks like these means the people in those roles can be more productive in their jobs, designing better customer experiences and connecting with potential new customers.

With AI handling the more mundane tasks that support good work, we’ve freed up Microsoft’s most valuable assets, it’s people, to focus on what’s most important. Here are some of the ways that we use AI to empower Microsoft employees to be more productive.


Optimize operations

Competition is fierce, so business success today requires companies to continuously look for ways to cut costs, increase throughput, reduce time-to-market, and improve customer service. We call this improving operational efficiency or optimizing operations. This work involves working through mountains of data to discover new and more effective ways to do everything.

At Microsoft, we’ve found that AI is a powerful partner to answer the questions that arise when we drill deeper into what’s driving these efficiencies: How can I lower costs and remove bottlenecks? How do I consume energy responsibly while improving employee comfort? How do I streamline my supply chain? How do I do my job more effectively? How do I run my business more efficiently?

Learn about how Microsoft is using AI to optimize our operations.


Digital agents—Bots

The bots of today are much more useful and intelligent than ever before, and have become a critical part of how AI empowers employees to do more. Now that bots are infused with natural language processing, language translation, vision, and other useful cognitive skills, they serve as vital productivity tools for all businesses. They can understand human speech, derive intent, communicate in multiple languages, and guide either employees or customers to the solutions they need.

At Microsoft, bots do more than help employees get their jobs done. We use bots as a one-stop shop for all kinds of teams and groups across our organization. They contribute to customer service, answering routine support questions, for example, and help with human resources by locating employment policies or finding the tools to execute common tasks like logging vacation hours or downloading paycheck stubs.

Read about some of the ways bots support and empower the work we do at Microsoft.


Data platform

One of the building blocks of digital transformation is a modern data and analytics platform that harnesses data’s power to reveal patterns and make predictions. Being able to understand and tap into these predictions helps fuel digital transformation for enterprises worldwide, including here at Microsoft.

Implementing a modern data and analytics platform allows us to gather, store, and process data of all types and sizes from any data source. 

This deeper data understanding unlocks valuable insights, making it easier to identify trends and risks that help us ship on time, provide a quality product for our customers, cut down on business costs, and optimize internal operations.

At Microsoft, our data and analytics platform drives our business forward. Here’s how we use a modern data platform to run our business in the modern age.


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