In an era of distractions, Microsoft wants AI to be your coworker

Microsoft is aiming to adapt its productivity suite to a short-attention-span world, bringing years of research into products like PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel. This article outlines how after years of slavishly digitizing and formatting words, numbers, and images, future versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will be much more aware of your work and how you do it. Intelligent algorithms will find patterns and meanings in the data and use the insights to help you get through your day more efficiently. This transition to smarter work software has already begun.

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How Starbucks is using AI to improve the customer experience

At Microsoft's Build conference, Starbucks showed how artificial intelligence is helping them better predict what customers may be in the mood for by considering such factors such as weather, location, and user preferences.

Analytics & AI solution video

This video is a quick introduction to Microsoft Analytics and AI, explaining how to expand the reach of your data insights and gain increasing levels of efficiency and personalization. By harnessing the power of Microsoft Analytics, you can inform and drive intelligent automation through AI and machine learning. 

Leveraging Tech to Improve Customer Experience: 11 Smart Techniques

The importance of customer experience has taken off in recent years. As competition becomes the norm in many digital and application spaces, the interaction that the consumer has with a company becomes more important. CX is vital in helping a company retain its customers and grow its customer base through organic referrals. Luckily, technology offers several ways for businesses to improve their customer experience. In this article, 11 members of the Forbes Technology Council explain some techniques businesses can use to improve their customers' experience.

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Deepen and engage customers with AI

Microsoft Analytics and AI accelerates digital transformation that deepens engagement, predicts outcomes, and automates operations. Subscribe now!

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The Workforce of the Future eBook

New levels of connectivity and advanced technologies like AI enable businesses to process more data on a larger scale. AI plays one of the biggest roles—in terms of disruption and resulting opportunity—for our industry and our workforce. As we look to a future powered by a partnership between computers and humans, we must address these challenges head on: How will AI impact employment and jobs? How do we ensure that AI is designed, used, and governed responsibly? Explore answers to these questions and more in this valuable eBook.

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Allstate transforms the customer experience with Azure AI

This video showcases how Allstate is transforming customer support with artificial intelligence. With Azure Cognitive Services, Allstate is capturing insights from customer calls to enable a more seamless customer experience.

ROI Azure Synapse

This infographic shows how @Microsoft Azure Synapse brings Big Data and Data Warehousing together in a single service to provide limitless analytics.

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The Role of AI and People Analytics in Developing the Leaders of Tomorrow

While investment in digital business solutions continues to increase, employees remain the lifeblood of every enterprise. This article from Forbes covers key ways AI and analytics help organizations hire the right people and train them for success.

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Overcoming misconceptions about open source

Driving adoption of open-source DevOps becomes easier after addressing four common myths. Myths like open source isn't secure, or open source isn't enterprise-grade. For debunking these and more, this infographic has the answers.

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Building Autonomous Systems with Microsoft AI

This video is a powerful example of how autonomous systems can be aligned to intelligently perform routine tasks. Toyota Material Handling partnered with Microsoft using AirSim (an open source simulation platform originally developed to teach drones or robots to learn in high fidelity simulated environments) to train a forklift on tasks like picking up a pallet. This video illustrates the vision for a future warehouse with pre-trained, intelligent forklifts assisting people in everyday activities.

Alaska Airlines makes shopping easier

A great online shopping experience begins with great software. Alaska Airlines is using microservices, Microsoft Azure, and Windows Server Containers with Docker to launch new e-commerce features faster—in minutes versus days. Travelers get new offers sooner, which translates to happier customers and higher revenues. By running its e-commerce engine in Azure in hybrid fashion, Alaska can also scale more easily and cost-effectively, ensuring its sites run at the optimum point of performance and cost.

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Building an AI Powered organization

The business world is rapidly changing. It is estimated that AI will add $13 trillion to the global economy over the next decade-and yet from thousands of executives surveyed, only 8% of firms are adopting core practices that fully support implementation. Businesses arrive at progress slowly, reflecting a failure to rewire within the organization. This article from Harvard Business Review demonstrates how companies can make a successful shift to utilizing AI and setting themselves up for success.

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2 Types of Artificial Intelligence

Bring the future into your business today with AI. Explore two types: Pre-Built and Custom Built. Pre-Built AI has cognitive services - deep learning cognitive capabilities ready to use (vision, speech, knowledge, translation, etc.), whereas Custom Built AI uses machine learning capabilities to analyze data to build and an artificial neural network to address specific problems not covered by Cognitive Services.

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Microsoft Analytics and AI spark innovation and enable endless opportunities for using your data to foster growth. Subscribe now!

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H&R Block delivers with Azure DevOps and Microsoft

With recent changes in the tax industry, H&R Block made plans to stay ahead, providing seamless multichannel experiences and unifying its disparate data sources to better serve its customers. By moving its various workloads to Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and Microsoft Azure and using Azure data services, the tax provider has been able to enhance service delivery, scale to meet its peaks in demand, and accelerate innovation. Watch this video for the story.

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Future Generali uses Microsoft AI to Deepen Customer Engagements

Future Generali India Life Insurance Co. Ltd. adopted the use of REVA, a chatbot built on the Microsoft Bot Framework, which plays a key role in driving insightful conversations with its customers. In this video, see how the company has already seen an increase in the customer satisfaction rate by 91%, which won them the Microsoft and CNBC TV18 #AIForAll award for leveraging AI for enhancing customer engagement.

Learn with Visual Studio Remote Office Hours

Remote Office Hours is a new live broadcast directly from the Microsoft Visual Studio team. It's about everything Visual Studio, with rare insights into the inner workings of features, processes, and the people that make it all happen. The style is conversational, light, and casual—a show by developers for developers. Read on to learn more here:

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