Microsoft Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) Portfolio Review

One of the largest players in the artificial intelligence (AI) market is Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure’s AI portfolio is extensive, and the brand reported $192.7 million in AI revenue for 2019, according to a 2020 report by IDC.

See below to learn about Microsoft’s Azure artificial intelligence offerings, which are a key part the company’s global portfolio:

Microsoft Azure AI Portfolio

Here’s are some of Azure’s key offerings in its AI portfolio: 

• Anomaly Detector: Helps developers detect changes to be able to quickly identify problems with apps

• Azure Machine Learning: Gives data scientists and developers tools to build, train, and deploy machine learning models and foster team collaboration

• Azure Cognitive Search: Helps users identify the most relevant content with features like using machine learning (ML) to understand user intent

• Computer Vision: Helps users to extract text from images, generate image descriptions, moderate content, and understand the movement of people in physical spaces.

• Language Understanding: Allows apps to understand natural language. This lets developers build models that interpret user goals and allows apps to extract key information from conversational phrases.

• Microsoft Genomics: Sequences genomes in the cloud. Researchers can use the scale of Microsoft Azure to process genomics data in the cloud.

• Azure Health Bot: Lets health care organizations build bots that are capable of accessing a medical database and have natural language capabilities. This allows apps to understand clinical terms.

• Translator: Instantly translates to and from over 90 languages and employs machine translation

• Speech-to-text: Automatically transcribes spoken audio into text. Works for over 85 languages and variants. Models can be enhanced, so speech-to-text conversions are geared towards certain fields

• Speaker Recognition: Can identify speakers based on their unique voice characteristics

See more: Artificial Intelligence Market

Microsoft Azure AI Partnerships

Organizations can partner with Microsoft Azure to offer their customers AI services. 

These are several of Azure’s AI partnerships:

Simplifai Emailbot

Simplifai Emailbot can understand emails, classify them, and extract relevant information. This can be leveraged by customer service teams, allowing employees to focus on more important tasks. This solution was made by Acuvate Software. 

IT Helpdesk Bot

This platform lets businesses automate their IT help desk with virtual agents. The bot has been pre-trained with 300 FAQs and can be added to the Microsoft Teams application. This solution was made by Acuvate Software. 

SpinOne for Office 365

SpinOne, or Spinbackup, for Office 365 is an AI-driven solution that offers automated daily backups and ransomware protection. This solution was made by Spin Technology.

Microsoft Azure AI Use Cases

Technology: Lumen

Lumen Technologies provides technology infrastructure solutions. They experienced rapid growth but needed a way to integrate all of their different analytics systems. They were able to achieve this with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Prior to switching, Lumen’s customer service speed was negatively impacted. After using the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics platform to design a solution known as Intelligent Digital Delivery, the team at Lumen was able to gather data from all across the company, so internal stakeholders are now able to view everything in the delivery funnel and sort the data according to their preferences. This new analytics solution improved productivity and helped reinforce the customer-focused nature of Lumen.

Government: NYC Department of Environmental Protection

The NYC Department of Environmental Protection is home to a large number of employees who often have IT needs. This can put a strain on IT personnel, especially after hours. After the development of a solution called Ask BIT with Azure, the department was able to implement a chatbot that operates around the clock, addressing queries and resolving tickets. This helps the department avoid the cost and time tied to responding to after hours requests.

Insurance: Munich Re

Munich Re is a global insurance company that carries out complex calculations to determine various insurance practices. This requires a large amount of compute power. Initially, this was all done on premises. This became unsustainable, as the amount of data that needed to be processed grew. Munich Re made use of Azure Data Lake to help process all of its data, along with Azure Data Science Virtual Machines for machine learning. These tools help the firm handle, process, decide on use cases at its locations, while keeping costs under control.

See more: Artificial Intelligence: Current and Future Trends

User Reviews of Microsoft Azure AI

Users are giving various products in the Microsoft Azure AI/ML portfolio favorable scores online:

• Gartner Peer Insights: 4.3/5

Industry Recognition of Microsoft Azure AI

Microsoft Azure’s AI technology has been recognized, for instance, by Frost & Sullivan as the leader in global AI platforms for health care as part of its 2020 Best Practices Awards.

Microsoft Azure in the AI market

Microsoft Azure holds the second largest share of the AI software market (5.6% in 2019), according to a 2020 report by IDC.

In comparison, IBM holds the largest share of the AI software market in the report (8.8%), and SAS ranks third (4.4%).

The AI software market was worth an estimated $3.5 billion in 2019, IDC says.

See more: Top Performing Artificial Intelligence Companies