Retail Realm 2016: Microsoft Highlights Business Intelligence and Machine Learning for Dynamics AX via Cortana Intelligence Suite

In the past, most retailers could only dream of being able to understand what a customer really thought. But that is now not only possible, but also on display in the form of business intelligence tools from Microsoft at this week's Retail Realm 2016 in Las Vegas.

The conference offered several showcases of services from Microsoft's Cortana Intelligence Suite that allow users to discover insights in their data. The Cortana Intelligence services can be found on the Microsoft Azure portal.

"People are already [signing up and] using them," says Luis Cabrera, principal program manager of Cortana Intelligence Suite. "Azure Machine Learning Studio and cognitive services are part of the Cortana Intelligence suite. The goal is to find insights in your data, and to find value in your data. So then you can use it to take action. "

Training the predictive models can give users a valuable way to analyze past data to determine future patterns and probabilities. For example, in medicine, such models can be used to look at the likelihood of a person having - or getting --- a disease such as breast cancer. In retail, focused data can be used, via cognitive services, for scenarios as different as recommending products or helping to predict the probability of fraud taking place.

Much of the talk this week was on the importance of data, without which analysis is virtually worthless, Cabrera maintains.

"People say ‘data is gold,' but it is really like coal. You have to work to make it valuable," he says.

Until the recent past, the level of data analytics that Microsoft is showing off this week was pretty much the domain of large companies who ...