This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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.”
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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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:
Train an AI model with AI Builder to extract text from a .PDF file or image.
Take extracted information from the AI model and create a guide using Power Automate.
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
Create your AI model: Choose “form processing” (under the “Documents” area of the AI Builder homepage) and go through the step-by-step wizard.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The two billion frontline workers, which represent 80 percent of the world’s workforce, have weathered risk, exhaustion, and ongoing disruption throughout the pandemic. From shutdowns to new safety protocols to increased workloads and dwindling inventory, the frontline is constantly facing challenges. Today we are releasing a set of technology innovations and partnerships to reduce stress on the frontline and empower the way they work and interact.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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.
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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Organizations have an increasing need to interact with their customers to solicit feedback on products and services, building customer trust with process transparency. Dynamics 365 Customer Service has launched two capabilities in preview to enable organizations to invite customer suggestions and build vibrant communities.
Community managers and moderators can use the first capability, the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community Preview app, to crowdsource portfolios of ideas and quickly respond to community suggestions.
The second capability is offered with the Modern Community (preview) portal template, which enables organizations to provide their customers with delightful and engaging experiences for posting suggestions in community forums and collaborating to shape the future of products they use by upvoting, commenting, sharing, and flagging ideas posted in the community.
To see examples of these capabilities in action, check out the major public feedback portals for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Edge, which are now powered by Customer Service Community.
Capabilities for community managers and moderators
The Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community app provides community managers and moderators with the necessary capabilities to capture and evaluate ideas. They can be responsive and “close the loop” as community members give input. Now community managers can:
Configure the portal to fit their organization’s brand, including colors, custom header and footer, and quick links to digital assets.
Enforce acceptance of terms of use and privacy statements by users.
Create and manage idea forums.
Manage content, including content moderation and merging duplicate ideas.
Update the status of ideas or requests and respond to community feedback.
Manage users and assign security roles at the forum level.
Try out the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community app in your sandbox environment first to learn about its capabilities.
Users experience a vibrant community
The Modern Community (preview) portal template offers all the functions needed to delight users as they share new ideas and collaborate at scale. Users can:
Browse, search, filter, and sort idea lists.
Post new ideas. This flow includes autosuggestion of existing ideas to prevent duplicates.
Collaborate and engage in a community that includes upvoting, commenting, sharing, and following ideas.
Flag inappropriate content.
Track the status of ideas that they are engaged with.
Next steps
Customer Service Community Preview has launched and is available to use in the public cloud. Refer to the documentation to learn how to install the Community app and get started.
To ask questions of our team, or to view questions that others have asked, use theDynamics 365 Customer Service Community forum. When posting your question, select Community from the Filters list in the form.
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