Inspire 2018: Microsoft plans preview of new Dynamics 365-focused AI and data services updates, ISV co-sell improvements

Microsoft will begin offering industry-specific extension to the Common Data Model, starting with healthcare. Microsoft corporate vice president Alysa Taylor announced the plans, along with a range of other Inspire 2018-related updates in a new blog post.

The new Microsoft Health Accelerator contains pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data, as well as other tools to help partners build and deploy new healthcare solutions, according to Taylor. It is designed to help companies "implement applications mapping to pre-defined business and healthcare entities."

Microsoft is also planning new telemetry-based usage information for partners related to their Dynamics 365 offerings, available from Partner Center and the Microsoft Partner Network. The information has no direct consequences today, apparently, but "in the future, these contribution indicators will help partners receive credit for their role in driving adoption and customer satisfaction," Taylor writes.

Microsoft will begin previewing Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, which, according to the original announcement in September 2017, will allow for "AI authoring" rather than scripted dialogues, will rely on machine reading comprehension, a knowledge graph powered by Bing, and will use "reinforcement learning".

As Taylor describes it today, the product will "offer out-of-the-box insights that help maximize sales productivity by providing insights into which opportunities are at risk and which leads have the highest propensity to convert allowing salespeople to focus their time for the highest impact."

Microsoft is also introducing new preview features for Power BI that will begin appearing in the service in July. There is also an effort underway to unify access to data between Power BI and