Earlier in 2021, we had discussed how retailers can create an intelligent supply chain to successfully navigate through the disruptions and quickly adapt to changing customer behavior. As our retail customers embarked on the journey to create a resilient and intelligent supply chain, there were three key areas that emerged where our customers prioritized their investmentsoptimizing fulfillment, predicting supply chain risks, and enhancing supply chain visibility. Let’s take a look at some of Microsoft’s recent innovations in these areas that enable retailers to create a supply chain of the future.

Turning order fulfillment into a competitive advantage

A retailer’s success hinges on having the right inventory at the right place at the right time. As retailers and brands continue to adapt to meeting the growing e-commerce demand, determining where the inventory is fulfilled for e-commerce versus in-store orders becomes critical to ensure that customer demands are met on time and in a profitable manner.

As a recent Gartner report found, one of the ways to achieve supply chain excellence is by holding distribution center inventory in a channel-agnostic manner for flexible use of inventory to fulfill online and in-store demand effectively¹. To achieve this level of flexibility, retailers need a system that offers rules-based order orchestration leveraging AI and real-time omnichannel inventory data to proactively address constraints and profitably fulfill orders on time and in full.

At Microsoft, we are at the forefront of these efforts, investing in solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management that help retailers reimagine the future of global supply chains and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

Predict risk and enhance visibility with AI-powered insights

According to Gartner, 76 percent of supply chain executives indicated that compared to three years ago, their company today faces more frequent disruptions in their supply chain. Meanwhile, another 72 percent reported that the impact of disruptive events has increased.²

Retailers have made significant strides in 2021 to create resiliency in their supply chains but the response has still been very reactive in nature. Slow digitization of the supply chain continues to inhibit organizations from proactively planning for changing customer demand and supply challenges. With an increase in e-commerce, it is imperative to gain real-time visibility into inventory at every node of the supply chain, all the way from the manufacturer to shipping ports to distribution centers to stores and finally to the consumer. Brands gain affinity when they consistently deliver on their order promise to their customers.

With this need for increased visibility and consistency in mind, we recently launched Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights in preview that enables organizations to predict risks in their supply chain based on news, weather, geo-political events, etc., and enables them to make better supply chain decisions with proactive risk mitigation via prescriptive insights powered by AI.

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, retailers and consumer goods companies can create a digital representation of their physical supply chain. This enables them to simulate different scenarios at different nodes along the value chain and make well-informed decisions to mitigate any disruption. They can further gain visibility into the supply chains of their multiple tiers of suppliers, and improve the effectiveness of their demand and supply planning to ensure a delightful customer experience.

We also made significant enhancements to the Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Retailers can now get near real-time inventory visibility across all their internal channels and disparate third-party supply chain systems in a single place. Adding multiple systems in a scalable manner allows them to add new third-party integrations as they grow their supplier network or acquire new businesses. The enhanced visibility enables businesses to proactively mitigate any out-of-stock situations. Furthermore, they can perform soft reservations based on omnichannel sales demand so that they do not incorrectly commit to a customer.

Retailers can further leverage enhanced planning capabilities to enable near real-time inventory planning by prioritizing certain orders over others with ease. For example, they can prioritize orders for products that are low on stock versus the ones that are not. Lastly, retailers can optimize and streamline back-of-house operations like receiving and replenishment using the Warehouse Management mobile app. The mobile app empowers distribution centers, warehouses, and brick-and-mortar locations to make inventory decisions like transferring goods from one location to another simply by scanning the items. By running critical warehouse operations on Edge, retailers can ensure business continuity across all locations despite latency or network issues at HQ.

All the supply chain solutions from Dynamics 365 are not only interoperable with each other but also seamlessly work with other third-party ERP, commerce, and supply chain systems.

Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Here are some recent examples of our retail customers who have created a resilient supply chain this past year using Dynamics 365.

Servis Industries Limited powers direct-to-consumer expansion by moving to the cloud

Established more than 50 years ago, Servis Industries Limited (SIL) is a leading manufacturer and exporter in Pakistan. To achieve its goal of becoming a global, world-class, and diversified company, SIL moved its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud by adopting Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Commerce. Now, the company has a holistic overview of its retail stores and an infrastructure management system that can support rapid national and international growth.

“To achieve our goal, we need to open 40 to 50 outlets per year. It used to be that with each new store, our team had to be on-site to provide technical support. Now, everything is cloud-based, so we don’t have to travel. The new stores can just access the systems and start their operations almost immediately.”Faisal Rizvi, Head of IT, Servis Industries Limited.  

Another challenge that SIL encountered in its journey was the need to meet the evolving customer expectation for personalized engagement, omnichannel experiences, and frictionless interactions. For this, the company turned to Distributed Order Management to deliver smooth order processing between its e-commerce platform and physical stores and to optimize order fulfillment across their network by utilizing AI, automation, and real-time inventory.

Khaadi delivers rapid omnichannel success

Founded in 1998, Khaadi is Pakistan’s premier fashion retailer with more than 70 physical stores across Pakistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the United Kingdom, and online stores in more than 12 countries. With its growing network of physical and online storefronts, the company needed a solution that could streamline its omnichannel sales delivery and empower its daily operations with actionable store-level insights for managers. The drive towards omnichannel was forced into overdrive when pandemic lockdowns moved all of Khaadi’s operations online. Suddenly, they needed to pivot to leverage a single inventory across the business and use their stores as fulfillment hubs.

To meet this challenge, Khaadi turned to Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI, alongside Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. With this technology in place, Khaadi successfully transitioned to omnichannel.

“We were able to draw up a blueprint for omnichannel sales rapidly and implemented a complete enterprise-level scenario in just in one weekend. IT was able to transform the dynamics of our business within just a week’s time, making Khaadi a truly omnichannel enabled retailer. From there, it was only a matter of three months before we scaled the roll out ten times with help of Dynamics 365 Commerce Distributed Order Management.”Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

As you can see by these recent customer success stories, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies to deliver the retail supply chain of the future by empowering direct-to-consumer expansion and accelerating omnichannel success.

What’s next?

The events of the past two years have made it essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense supply chain constraints and disruptions and predict spikes and troughs in demand. Microsoft Dynamics 365 assists companies in integrating these types of new capabilities, such as real-time, end-to-end visibility, priority-based planning, and AI-empowered insights so that they can effectively compete in this new normal. As we have seen here, this can take the form of accelerating direct-to-consumer and omnichannel success, empowering retailers to turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage, and integrating advanced warehousing solutions to improve distribution processes.  

To learn more, join the Ask the Experts session on how to automate and optimize fulfillment on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can watch the on-demand webinar on how to create a resilient and sustainable supply chain and the total economic impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. You can also watch the on-demand webinar on how to enhance the visibility of your supply chain by taking a composable approach to rapidly deploy a Supply Chain Control Tower.

Sources:

1- Gartner: The Contemporary Guide to Retail Supply Chain Excellence: Part 1 Inventory and Assortment Published 22 November 2021 – ID G00743960

2- Gartner, Six Ways Supply Chain Analytics Mitigate Business Disruptions, 2021

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Omnichannel has been around for more than a decade now, so it might be surprising to realize that there are still gaps in a strategy that has become table stakes for most retailers. The gap that does exist presents a lack of clarity about what omnichannel retail is and the inability of organizations to deliver on the strategy. With retail in the midst of one the largest transformations we have seen in decades, many organizations are trying to understand where to start bridging the gap between traditional and modern retail experiences. Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings together a unique set of capabilities and services that allow retailers to streamline buying experiences for customers across channels while empowering organizations to gain a deeper understanding and ownership of their sales, operations, and customer data. 

Disconnected data disrupts the modern buying journey

The lack of unified data in a retailer’s current systems still proves to be a significant roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences to consumers. Like many retailers, the U.S. national retailer GNC, which specializes in health and nutrition-related products, also struggled with disconnected data across its systems. This meant, among other things, that GNC found it challenging to provide a single source of truth about its customers that would allow them to communicate efficiently and effectively. The siloed data affected customer communications, but it also kept the retailer from gaining real-time insights into things like customer preferences and inventory.

The ultimate solution for GNC and for any business looking to leverage data across systems is to use a single collection of data automatically updated across applications in real-time. This is one reason why GNC deployed Dynamics 365.

“With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, we’re going to have a single, reliable view of each customer that updates in real-timeWe’ll use the AI capabilities in Customer Insights to better define our customer segments and ensure that every customer gets the right communication at the right time.”Lauren Mannetti, Vice President, Marketing, GNC.

Microsoft also continues to help retailers adjust to customer needs with tools like intuitive customer segmentation and experimentation capabilities. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables organizations to increase customer engagement and satisfaction by using tools in e-commerce site builder to target specific customer segments with different experiences based on the shopper’s device, geo-location, and other dynamically derived attributes from their browser request.

Regardless of the solution you choose, you need to be able to pinpoint a customer all the way through their journey, from browsing online to asking each customer for feedback. Increasingly, retailers will be tasked with offering ever-more personalized experiencesand that requires sophisticated and connected data that overcomes the limitation of siloed separate systems.

Complexity of legacy solutions

Many businesses have invested heavily in their current legacy solutions. Rightly so, most wish to maximize the benefit of these investments. Unfortunately, businesses can end up dealing with the complexity of their existing systems far longer than necessary as they attempt to avoid investing in a new unified solution. Sometimes, though, adding additional visibility and integration on top of existing solutions works well to address this problem without having to scrap the current systems being run for separate functions.

This is how Khaadi, a large Pakistani fashion retailer, figured out how to get its complex incumbent solutions to work together to keep operations going during the pandemic. It needed to be able to integrate data so that it could continue selling in-store inventory online during pandemic shutdowns.

To make this pivot, the company chose Microsoft Power Apps, which helps companies build custom apps that connect existing data, to create the brand’s integrated sales services in-house. Then, three months later, the company scaled the roll out ten times with the help of Dynamics 365 Commerce to make these capabilitiesand morepart of its new operating norm.

“It’s incredible because we know of some similar retail businesses who started their omnichannel journey 14 to 15 months back but have not yet implemented similar capabilities.”Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

Using Microsoft Power Apps coupled with Dynamics 365 Commerce allowed the company to continue using its existing systems by allowing those systems to better “talk to each other” and leverage the data across them. This provides a solution that many other retailers can turn to make immediate use of their data that otherwise is isolated in separate systemswithout replacing those systems.

Inability to adapt to changing customer habits

Another roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences is an inability to adapt to changing customer needs. This can result from a business that isn’t using the right technology to streamline operations and connect all of its data. The need to streamline backend operations is just as critical to customer experience when the goal is being able to adapt to rapidly changing customer behaviors and habits.

Now, more than ever, consumers seek out reviews and social proof before making a purchase. In fact, social commerce sales in the U.S. were an estimated $36.62 billion in 2021.¹ It is not surprising then that businesses without the technology infrastructure required to connect these new sources of demand and customer intelligence may fall behind.

Dynamics 365 enables retailers to easily adjust and meet customers where they are through a common data model and a natively headless commerce engine. Easily connect with customers on new and emerging platforms to ensure your business stays competitive and relevant in an ever more competitive retail environment.

Along with this, it is essential for retailers to be able to automatically track reviews across platforms, monitor them, and automate the solicitation of reviews from customers through post-shipping emails and other such activities. Also, monitoring and identifying how specific customers respond to social storytelling requires deep data that connects across platforms. This is another area where Dynamics 365 Commerce can help.

Learn more in our recent blog, Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences.

Increased demands and customer expectations

Consumers today understand that retailers can capture data of how, what, when, and where they make purchases. Not only do they understand this point, but they also expect it. This is one reason retailers face increased demands to understand consumers better and personalize experiences accordingly.

An area where customer expectations have evolved and increased is the desire for convenience. According to the National Retail Federation, 97 percent of consumers have backed out of a purchase because it was inconvenient to them.²  This can be seen by the popularity of curbside pickup, next-day delivery, and easy returns. Yet even though businesses can lose sales if they inconvenience consumers, many companies are still challenged to provide the options that customers have come to expect.

Retailers like Aubainerie are using Dynamics 365 to improve customer experience and personalize customer engagements across channels. The company’s apparel designers are using Dynamics 365 Commerce combined with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to include more product information for staff and customers at the point of purchase. They are also able to fine-tune their understanding of customer needs to deliver more personal customer buying experiences and exceed customer expectations.  

“We can designate activity filters in Dynamics 365 and then plan in advance for e-commerce and in-store displays based on those data points, which improves our omnichannel capabilities.”Simon Jacobsen, Director of e-commerce, Aubainerie.

For companies to offer these convenience features to customers and meet the expectations for personalized and relevant shopping experiences, retailers can look to Dynamics 365 to help bridge the omnichannel gap for long-term business success.

Learn more in our blog, Deliver personalized customer engagement with Dynamics 365.

What’s next

We’re ready to help you evaluate the best ways to unify and connect data by leveraging technology to overcome these four major roadblocks so that you can bridge the omnichannel gap in retail. To see how Dynamics 365 can help your retail business succeed, see how you can get started with Dynamics 365 or give our Dynamics 365 Commerce free trial a try today.

Sources:

1- eMarketer, 2021. Social commerce surpasses $30 billion in the US.

2- National Retail Federation, 2020. Consumer View Winter 2020: Convenience and the Consumer. January 14, 2020.

The post Bridging the omnichannel gap in retail with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Organizations across industries and around the world are seeking new ways to unlock their customer data to provide high-quality, connected customer experiences. Microsoft’s work to help enterprises, especially those in the retail, consumer brands, healthcare, manufacturing, and media and advertising industries to meet their customers’ expectations by delivering privacy-aware, consent enabled personalization has gained some recognition.

Microsoft is thrilled to be named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Data Platforms Focused on Front-Office Users 2021-2022 Vendor Assessment (doc # US47524621, December 2021). The IDC MarketScape is the first research by a major analyst firm evaluating customer data platform (CDP) vendors.

Source: “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Customer Data Platforms Focused on Front-Office Users 20212022 Vendor Assessment”, By: Gerry Murray, David Wallace & Michelle Morgan, December 2021, IDC # US47524621

The report highlights customer data management, including 360-degree customer view, improving customer experience, and globalization as top capabilities within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps customers unify all their B2C and B2B customer data to generate AI-powered insights in real-time, creating a single view of the customer. Interactive reports help marketers optimize their customers’ journeys, and AI-powered insights speed the prediction of customer needs.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights elegantly supports both technical and non-technical usersbe it through a visual UI/drag and drop interface for marketers or through advanced analytics for data scientists. The IDC MarketScape said to, “Consider Microsoft if you have significant investments in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 applications such as marketing or sales or if you are looking for user-friendly AI/ML modeling capabilities that do not require marketers (and other LOB users) to be data scientists.” The report also noted, “Microsoft’s CDP segments are created through automated discovery powered by AI, API configuration, and visual UI/drag and drop interface for markets and through analytic/SQL queries for data scientists. Segments are updated based on a variety of factors such as streaming web session data, geolocation, and dynamic modeling and based on batch data updates.”

The IDC MarketScape noted, “Microsoft is strong in this important area for enterprise CDP buyers as the speed, scale, and response time for processing high volumes of customer data are an important enabler of personalization and customer experience.”

The IDC MarketScape also stated, “Microsoft has strengths in all aspects of globalization: number of languages supported in its CDP; number of countries with customers, sales, service, and support; and regional implementation partners.”

We invite you to read the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Data Platforms Focused on Front-Office Users 2021-2022 report excerpt for full details.

Find out how Microsoft customers are creating great brand and customer experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Campari Group raises the bar for customer experiences with a 360-degree customer view that enhances the personalization of its marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.

Chipotle served up personalized experiences to convert more guests into loyalty program members.

Walgreens Boots Alliance is unlocking insights that power more engaging, personalized customer experiences.

About the graphic:

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market.  The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.

The post Microsoft named as a worldwide Leader in IDC MarketScape for Customer Data Platforms appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As digital transformation drives innovation and transforms the way we work, we see business operations and traditional internal processes being disrupted daily. To adapt and scale changes across their business, many organizations are overwhelmed and faced with digitizing thousands of manual checklists, paper forms, documents, and more. The good news is today’s Microsoft solutions make this transition easier than ever before. With Microsoft’s suite of low-code development solutions (e.g., Microsoft Power Platform, Power Automate, and AI Builder), employees of all skill levels can create and customize business applications and processes. By combining these solutions with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, a mixed reality application that offers step-by-step, hands-free work instructions and collaboration, you can convert your existing 2D manuals into 3D holograms, rather than transferring manually. Once converted, organizations can use Dynamics 365 Guides to provide immersive, on-the-job guidance that will increase efficiency, increase knowledge retention, and enable your organization to adapt at the speed of change.

Better together: Dynamics 365 Guides, AI Builder, and Power Automate

With Dynamics 365 Guides, authoring instructions is as simple as creating a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint. Using the Guides PC and HoloLens apps, you create and edit instructions by dragging and dropping 2D and 3D content into your real-world environment to show users how and where to complete tasks. However, converting an existing multi-page manual by copying the information from scratch makes the authoring process feel time-consuming and daunting. This is where Microsoft Power Platform AI Builder comes in. AI Builder empowers anyone to build, train, and publish AI models, enabling you to infuse AI into your regular processes. You can create and train a custom AI model to extract text information from a variety of paper manuals in minutes, or use one of the pre-built models.

Using Power Automate, you save the extracted information to Microsoft Dataverse (an enterprise-grade intelligent scalable data platform that powers business applications like Dynamics 365 Guides). By storing the data in a format readable by Dynamics 365 Guides, users can simply open the Dynamics 365 Guides PC and HoloLens apps and add 3D content on top of the text instructions extracted from existing manuals.

In this blog, we’ll focus on how to use the AI Builder form processing model to extract and convert information and create a guide. Every organization has work instructions that come in different formats, such as checklists for inspections, training documentation, and standard operating procedures. By using the form processing model, you can read and save information from existing documents such as images or PDF files.

When you automate this process, you save valuable time by reviewing, extracting, organizing, and saving the data automatically by using Power Automate and Power Apps.

Overall process

Creating a guide using a custom AI model and Power Automate requires three simple steps:

1. Train an AI model with AI Builder to extract text from a .PDF file or image.
2. Take extracted information from the AI model and create a guide using Power Automate.
3. Enhance the guide further and author in the Dynamics 365 Guides PC and HoloLens apps.

For a closer look at each step below, follow along with a team at Toyota Motors North America in this video, at the 2:40 min mark.

Step one: Train an AI model with AI Builder to extract text from a .PDF file or image

1. Create your AI model: Choose “form processing” (under the “Documents” area of the AI Builder homepage) and go through the step-by-step wizard.
2. Define the data you want to extract: Define the fields, tables, and checkboxes you want to teach your model to extract. See the create a form processing custom model documentation for more details.
3. Upload your documents: Upload at least five different versions of the same basic document. AI Builder also supports collections of documents that have different layouts. See the AI Builder form processing models blog for more details.
4. Select important areas, and then train your AI model: Teach your model areas it should learn aboutand then train it. Training is an automatic process where AI Builder “teaches” your AI model to understand a specific instruction type, such as a PDF checklist.
5. Publish and use your new AI model: Now you can automate document processing in apps and flows.  

Step two: Take extracted information from the AI model and create a guide using Power Automate

1. Extract the data: Create a Power Automate flow to take the extracted information from AI Builder and create a guide with step-by-step instructions. You can do this in minutes and no coding skills are required.
2. Create a Power Automate flow and convert data into steps: Build each piece of data as a “step” for your instructions with easy-to-follow drag-and-drop functionalities. This is where you reference the Dynamics 365 Guides data in Microsoft Dataverse. By harnessing Dataverse, we can connect data so that your instructions are now editable from the Dynamics 365 Guides PC app.

Step three: Author in the Dynamics 365 Guides PC and HoloLens apps

1. Make edits in the PC and HoloLens apps: Once content for your guide is in the right spot, you can author in the Dynamics 365 Guides PC and HoloLens apps to make edits and changes.
2. Optimize for 3D experience: Customize the steps to better suit hands-free needs based on a 3D, mixed-reality experience. Add links, photos, reports, 3D models, and other resources.

Whether creating a single manual or hundreds, AI Builder and Dynamics 365 Guides can transform instructions and training, making your processes easier, smarter, and faster. Seamlessly capture, translate, and extract information to unlock a new way of working and save your teams hours of time.

“Customers have been able to save months of deployment time by using AI Builder and Guides, allowing them to quickly integrate mixed-reality work instructions into their daily workflows without any development expertise. They’re able to update content they already have into 3D holographic instructions for a variety of scenarios, including assembly, changeovers, training, and service and maintenance, resulting in improvements to safety, efficiency, and reduced onboarding time.”Shirley Ho, Senior Designer, Dynamics 365 Guides.

Getting started

Ready to design a guide using AI Builder, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 Guides today? Here’s how to get started.

• Power Apps: A Power Apps or Power Automate license is required to start using AI Builder. For more details about Power Apps and Power Automate licensing, see the licensing guide.
• Dynamics 365 Guides: Try the 60-day free trial of Dynamics 365 Guides. Learn about licensing requirements.
• AI Builder: Models in preview do not require an AI Builder trial or license nor consume credits. Anybody can test AI Builder and start a free trial today.

Other resources

AI Builder in Power Automate

• Learn more about AI Builder and get your questions answered using AI Builder documentation. Make sure to see these topics:
  • Form processing model overview
  • Object detection model overview
  • List of AI solutions

Dynamics 365 Guides

• Watch our Toyota North America customer video that showcases Dynamics 365 Guides and AI Builder in Power Automate.
• Read more about Dynamics 365 Guides capabilities and get your questions answered using our Dynamics 365 Guides documentation.
• Take the Work with Dynamics 365 Guides learning path.

The post Convert data into 3D assets using Dynamics 365 Guides, AI Builder, and Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing announced a range of new AI features. We strongly believe in the power of AI to help businesses and their customers grow. We also recognize that these new technologies have the potential for misuse and harm.

That’s why in Dynamics 365 Marketing, we are taking an intentional and rigorous approach to upholding Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. AI requires scrutiny, thoughtfulness, and research to first understand potential impacts on people and society, and then seek solutions that mitigate harm.

As Satya Nadella says, Microsoft runs on trust. And trust must be earned in the short term as well as the long term. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, we see responsible AI as an opportunity to demonstrate trustworthiness as well as a path for innovationa way to minimize harm and expand our capacity to provide useful and delightful experiences for our customers and their customers.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the work we’re doing on a new AI feature called Content ideas.

What is Content ideas and how does it work?

The Content ideas feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing helps marketers get inspiration for emails and create their best content faster. Marketers can type in a few key points, and Content ideas will generate original content based on those key points. Under the hood, Content ideas also references the customer’s past marketing emails so it can generate ideas that are similar in tone, structure, and style. This is a powerful advancement I’m very excited about, where marketers never have to start from a blank slate when writing content.

The AI technology behind this feature is a large language model called GPT-3, developed by OpenAI and currently available in an invite-only preview as part of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service as well as through OpenAI’s API. GPT-3 can perform a wide range of natural language tasks, including summarizing text, analyzing text for sentiment, andas it’s applied in Content ideasgenerating original text that looks like a human wrote it. GPT-3 is one of the leading examples of the type of AI model the industry is moving toward, rapidly accelerating AI capabilities that bring value to customers.

But large language models such as GPT-3 come with risks, including generating content that isn’t factual or content that reflects the biases of the dataset used for trainingwhich, in the case of GPT-3, was approximately 45TB of text from the internet. To mitigate such risks, OpenAI and Microsoft are committed to helping customers identify potential safety issues that could arise from using GPT-3 and providing best practices for safety. And at Microsoft, as we incorporate these kinds of technologies into our products, we’re also investing deep thought into how risks might show up for our customers in our specific scenarios, and how we can address those challenges.

Here, we’ll zoom in on one area we’re looking at closely for Content ideas: the user experience (UX).

UX questions for a responsible AI approach

Dynamics 365 Marketing has focused on human-centered research to deeply understand the needs and aspirations of marketing content creators, as well as explorations in UI design and data science, to translate responsible AI principles into a powerful UX that elevates and empowers human expertise.

As Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President of our Business Applications and Platform says, “An emerging technology like GPT-3 is such an exciting breakthrough in innovation. I’m proud of products like Dynamics 365 Marketing, where teams are working across engineering and design to intentionally think about how we responsibly bring AI to our customers.”

Early research leads us to these key questions:

1. How might we build transparency around how Content ideas works, so people can use the feature to meet their specific needs?

Setting clear expectations about Content ideas’ capabilities and limitations is essential, both to help people achieve their goals and to prevent people from using it in a way that isn’t intended. The more people understand how GPT-3 uses their key points to generate original content, the easier it is for them to craft key points that will get them helpful suggestions. In the current UX for Content ideas, we offer a “Learn more” panel from multiple points during onboarding. This panel is structured similar to a FAQ, addressing top questions about what the feature does and how the technology works. We’re also using design principles such as progressive disclosure to give people relevant information at just the moment they need it. For example, after marketers have submitted their key points and are waiting for Content ideas to generate suggestions, the loading screen sets expectations around potentially seeing unexpected results and offers tips for what to do next if none of the suggestions are a good fit. We’re continuing to explore ways to help people better understand how their choices affect the system outputs.

2. Once people understand how the technology works, how might we give people more control over the system?

A foundational pillar in human-AI collaboration is making sure people have meaningful oversight and control. The right amount of control helps people make the system work for their goals and context, and helps them build confidence in the system. With Content ideas, we want to empower content creators’ expertise and give them the right levers and buttons so they can use the system in ways that work for them, while automating parts of the process that don’t require human judgment. For example, we frame the feature as a brainstorming and writing partner, rather than a magical tool that does all the writing for you. In the end, the author is in chargeContent ideas makes suggestions that they can choose to use, edit, or ignore. Our research has also shown that content creators want more granular control over generated suggestions, such as being able to copy and paste smaller sections from different suggestions, and the ability to instruct the system on additional attributes such as audience and tone. We’re exploring how to integrate these potential interactions and others along these lines.

3. Once people understand how the technology works and how they can influence it, how might we help them understand their accountability and feel confident about their responsibility for the final content?

Large pre-trained language models like GPT-3 are general purpose and don’t always produce perfectly accurate results, particularly for tasks that require specific knowledge like the latest pricing data for a product. This means that even with detailed key points to start with, Content ideas might include color variations, prices, or sale dates that could look realistic but might not be correct. We want to make sure content creators feel confident in their responsibility as final owners of the content, making sure they have robust opportunities throughout the experience to check for accuracy and edit as appropriate. Additionally, in our “Learn more” panel, we directly answer the question, “Can I use the suggestions word for word?” (The short answer: Yes, as long as you review carefully for accuracy and appropriateness.) As we move forward, we’re exploring ideas such as a reminder to check for accuracy before someone adds a suggestion to their draft, or a feature to flag details that might benefit from a close read.

4. How might we measure the success of our UX to capture how well we are building trust, supporting creativity, and empowering user confidence in using Content ideas to meet their goals?

Success in UX is often measured by things like: Were we able to help someone accomplish a task more quickly? Was the task done at a higher quality? And are people satisfied with the result? Content ideas invites us to consider additional ways in which people might have a successful experience. For example, since the feature can offer a range of possible ideas for a content creator to consider, if someone is looking for multiple avenues of inspiration, creativity might look like generating many ideas and then building new ideas from thererather than copying and pasting a single idea. In our research for Content ideas, we’re considering how to qualitatively assess people’s experiencessuch as how much they felt that the feature helped them become more creative, and how confident they were over having control over the final textso that we have a more holistic understanding of where we can improve the experience to support a range of user goals. We’re also exploring ways of gathering feedback in the UI to help us understand the usefulness of generated ideas.

These are hard questions, and we don’t have all the answers yet. But we are committed to developing solutions that minimize harm and empower human expertise, while always providing our customers and our users an amazing experience. Ultimately the goal is to build high-quality experiences that establish appropriate trust, bringing sustainable value to people and businesses. We’re educating ourselves and trying to learn quickly so that we can achieve this vision for our future and yours. I’m proud that Content ideas is one of many areas Microsoft is looking at when it comes to responsibly implementing AI technologies like GPT-3, such as the recently launched Ten Guidelines for Product Leaders to Implement AI Responsibly and the new responsible AI dashboard.

Learn more

Content ideas is available in preview as of October 2021. Learn about this and other new AI-powered capabilities and more in the 2021 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Marketing.

And to learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and sign up for a free Dynamics 365 Marketing trial to explore real-time customer journey orchestration and the other rich capabilities offered in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Dynamics 365 Marketing approaches responsible AI with intention appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of finance insights, a set of AI-powered capabilities that help customers of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance improve the efficiency and quality of financial processes by leveraging intelligent automation.

Reshaping corporate financial management

A core set of financial management processes and systems support the work of every organization. Yet, while digital transformation has significantly impacted business solutions in workloads like commerce, manufacturing, and warehousing, not much has changed for financial processes, at least by comparison.

At Microsoft, we believe AI and intelligent automation will transform financial workloads. Just as Microsoft Excel transformed finance departments following its release over thirty years ago, AI and machine learning are positioned to reshape corporate financial managementmaking routine and error-prone tasks more efficient, focused, and accurate.

Learn more in our blog: Improve efficiency and quality with AI-infused finance processes or in the webinar, Reshape the Future of FinancialsThrough AI.

Applying AI in finance

Finance professionals have heard a lot about the promise of AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) in recent years. However, what has been missing from the discussion were concrete examples of where to apply these emerging technologies to drive higher value outcomes and improve our business and financial processes. Finance insights bridge this gap with customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and intelligent budget proposals.

“Our Global Risk Officer at SOLEVO wanted to have more insights on customer payments, especially to take automatic actions based on the historical analysis for each customer. We hope that finance insights can help us setup a more proactive process and help him getting a better overview.”Martin Sengel, CIO of SOLEVO Group.

Customer payment insights

Finance insights customer SOLEVO has been a leading distributor of chemicals and inputs for specific industrial and agricultural segments in Africa for over seventy years. SOLEVO became interested in finance insights as means of providing management with an improved understanding of customer payments. Specifically, they wanted to automate actions based on historical customer data analysis and use these insights to set up a more proactive collections process.

Traditionally, it has been a challenge for businesses to predict when customers will pay their invoices. This lack of insight leads to less accurate cash flow forecasts, collection processes that start too late, and orders released to customers who may default on the payment.

But what if organizations were able to predict if a customer would pay their invoice on time? Or if they will pay it late?

Customer payment insights empower organizations to predict when an invoice will be paid by applying machine learning to financial data. This new capability enables Dynamics 365 Finance to learn from historical invoices, payments, and customer data and is nothing short of transformative for the collection process.

Customer payments insights effectively shift the collection process from reactive to proactive by allowing companies to act on data-driven, AI-derived predictions to proactively automate the task of following up with at-risk customers.

Cash flow forecasting

Cash flow is critical to every business. Even profitable companies can become insolvent by failing to maintain the cash flow required to fund operations. The cash flow forecasting capability in finance insights help companies avoid this undesirable outcome by more effectively monitoring and managing their cash balances.

Intelligent cash flow forecasting enables automatic integration from external systems and reports and uses machine learning to help businesses forecast cash flows more accurately than was previously possible. With more accurate forecasts, managers make more effective decisions, optimizing opportunities within the context of their current cash position. Intelligent cash flow forecasting also enables automatic integration from external systems and reports.

Using time-series, cash flow forecasting in combination with customer payment predictions improves overall cash flow accuracy. The ability to save cash flow forecasts and compare against actual financial results further enables organizations to measure forecast performance and prepare more accurate forecasts in the future.

Intelligent budget proposals

Organizations spend a significant amount of time and resources preparing budgets. Much of this time is spent scrubbing historical data to enable an accurate view of history, a repetitive and low-value add process.

Budget proposals help alleviate much of this work by providing a streamlined mechanism to prepare multiple years of history, analyze the data, and predict what the budget or forecast should look like based on what has happened over time.

Learn more in our recent blog: How finance leaders can leverage intelligent automation to unleash innovation.

Transformational capabilities

Finance insights brings AI and automation functionality to Dynamics 365 Finance to enable data and outcome-driven finance. It is a true game-changer, redefining transactional finance and empowering data and outcome-driven finance. As we have seen here, this is accomplished by effectively leveraging AI, machine learning, and intelligent automation in an interrelated set of three new financial management tools: customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and budget proposals.

These tools will allow finance organizations to drive better business decision-making by providing new AI-driven business insights that are clearer and faster while also improving operational efficiency by utilizing intelligent automation. At Microsoft, we are truly excited to make these transformational capabilities available and look forward to adding additional features to finance insights soon.

What’s next?

Dynamics 365 Finance is a leading provider of financial management solutions in the product-centric, cloud-based enterprise resource planning market. Our goal is to make Dynamics 365 Finance the most intelligently automated financial management solution available, and with finance insights, we have moved one step closer.

If you are already a Dynamics 365 Finance user, you can learn more about getting started with finance insights by checking out the finance insights support documentation or by watching the webinar, Reshape the Future of FinancialsThrough AI.

The post Finance insights is now generally available in Dynamics 365 Finance appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.