Microsoft to launch AI-driven business apps under Dynamics 365 brand

As Ignite 2017 kicked off today, Microsoft announced its plans to infuse greater AI capabilities into its business solutions, including new tools within the Dynamics 365 suite.

"The solution we announced today is focused on applying AI to transform the customer service function," wrote Steve "Guggs" Guggenheimer, Microsoft corporate vice president and chief evangelist for Microsoft.

AI for customer service is just the start of a new generation of Dynamics 365 apps, according to Guggenheimer. He offered more detail on the approach:

"Our goal is to increase satisfaction across areas where we engage the customer and within internal support teams who can work more effectively and efficiently. This is accomplished by having virtual agents engage with customers to solve their issues, and seamlessly transfer to support agents only when necessary. The agents receive real-time suggestions when a customer is handed off and can provide real-time feedback to train the virtual agents to become even more effective over time. Everything comes together in a comprehensive conversation management portal that empowers service managers to monitor and refine the conversations the virtual agents have with customers."

The new solution will be differentiated from other approaches like more basic bot technology by allowing "AI authoring" rather than scripted dialogues. It will also rely on machine reading comprehension, a knowledge graph powered by Bing, and will use "reinforcement learning".

The Dynamics 365 AI approach to virtual agents is already in use in several high-profile organizations: HP Inc, Macy's, the Australian government department of human services, ...