Analytics provides insight into how you spend your time at work and suggests ways to cut out on unproductive time for better efficiency and productivity. Office 365 infuses this layer of intelligence, going beyond traditional workloads. It does not just stop there, it expands to Dynamics 365. For instance, taking the example of sales, in any business applications, everything is explicitly modelled on the world. In sales, the sales people, their accounts, customers, prospects, opportunity pipeline, etc., are the ones that are all modelled on. There is a lot of data captured, but the one real problem this brings about is that most of the sales activities happen outside of a CRM system. So the goal of the intelligence is to be able to reason about your sales data model not just inside your CRM system but outside too.
A relationship assistant that is part of Dynamic CRM is added to truly transform a CRM application inside out. In a CRM application, when you log in, cards present on the dashboard provide you with information on actions inside the system based on the activity happening outside. This enables you to change and update information in context to the things that are happening outside. The Web graph then informs your CRM actions. Similarly the Microsoft Graph, built on Office 365 enables you to search from inside that data-visualization and search application and connect with the data. This is a complete revamp of how one goes about a CRM sales module.
A similar approach is taken with customer service. In the traditional way, the application is modelled on what a customer service agent does, how they open a case, how they escalate a case, how they keep track of all the workflows that happen within a customer service department. But in reality the customer service starts with the customer contact so at Microsoft, a virtual assistant has been developed to interact with customers. But for proper interaction it needs to escalate to real customer service from time to time. The virtual assistant through a mechanism called reinforcement learning not only helps the customer service representative get better, it itself also gets better. This phenomenon of applying AI to customer service will get your customer service outcomes to be more efficient and enhances your customer satisfaction. These are two simple examples where AI in sales and customer service are going to transform Dynamics 365.
The capabilities underneath Office 365, Dynamics 365, and SwiftKey are the building blocks that enable people to build the same intelligent applications easily. The Cortana Intelligence Suite included in Dynamics 365 enables businesses to transform data into intelligent actions. This concept of using machine learning on large amounts of data is already having a transformative effect across every industry in every country. New capabilities added to the Cortana Intelligence Suite include the Bot Framework. The Bots are like applications. It is a convenient way for users to interact with your information, your data and your process. But in order to build a bot, you need to have building block services that have the necessary conversational understanding. That is what is encapsulated in the Bot Framework, which will then enable you to build a Bot that can be available on Skype, online and on Facebook. In short, the Bot you build will not be limited to any one conversational canvas. Around 45000 developers have been taking the advantage of the Bot Framework to build these Bots and enhance their businesses processes.
