Why Microsoft Dynamics benefits from Azure Machine Learning roadmap

Last month, Microsoft revealed that they would begin building Azure Machine Learning capabilities into the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics AX ‘7' release for use in specific scenarios like demand forecasting. And as Microsoft continues to integrate its solutions under the "One Microsoft" banner, both Microsoft representatives and outside experts believe Dynamics ERP and CRM users will gain even more access to this technology.

Azure Machine Learning's most frequent application today is as a recommendation engine, says Mark Tabladillo, data scientist at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) and a Microsoft MVP. And Tabladillo says recommendation engines (no matter what they're built from) are in fact far more commonplace on the internet today than people may realize.

"When we go to a search engine such as Bing or Google, when we type in a search request, what we're getting back is a list of recommended links," he says. "We're not getting just a straight [query result]. The whole story about Google, with the idea of Page Rank, is they want to present to people the most likely links that people would want to go for. And Bing and all the search engines do this."

Building from ML Building Blocks

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP users are especially good candidates for using machine learning to improve the way their businesses run. What is getting people's interest now is the fact that a tool like Azure ML appears to be rapidly improving its accessibility. That means more opportunities to add ML-driven recommendation and prediction engines to help drive better performance and decision making in existing business processes like e-commerce, customer service, demand forecasting, and more.

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