Microsoft Goes Deeper Into AI, Mixed Reality

Ahead of next week's Microsoft Ignite 2018, the vendor’s conference for IT pros and enterprise developers, Microsoft announced new artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) applications that expand the company’s Dynamics 365 portfolio. These new offers execute on Microsoft’s vision of redefining how the world thinks about business applications.

The new Dynamics 365 AI applications include Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service and Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights. The new – and first-ever – Dynamics 365 MR applications include: Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Layout.

“We continue to expand our category with AI and mixed reality,” Alysa Taylor, corporate vice president, business applications and industry at Microsoft, shared in a virtual news briefing. “We’re taking another step forward on our journey to help empower every organization on the planet to achieve more through the acceleration of business applications.”

Alysa Taylor

The new out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 AI applications set out to commoditize and democratize AI within applications.

Calling its new Dynamics 365 MR applications “a whole new kind of business application,” Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Layout.

“We know that the way people interact with technology is changing. So, what we’re bringing to you today, is being able to evolve from just mobile and PC applications to bringing mixed reality into our portfolio — knowing that the end users need a new way of interacting with technology,” said Taylor.

Microsoft’s Lorraine Bardeen, general manager, Microsoft Mixed Reality, talked about first-line workers — those who work in field service, manufacturing, retail and warehouses, to name a few. They are required to understand their environment. First-line workers make up 80 percent of the world’s workforce, or more than 2 billion people.

“One of the things that ties together first-line workers is that for much of their day, they need their hands free and available to do their work,” she said.

Lorraine Bardeen

Microsoft HoloLens allows these workers to remain hands-free while they focus on their work space and bring any digital content into their real world, so they have data exactly where they need it to solve their work problems.

Microsoft noted that the total addressable labor force is 3.3 billion people broken down by front-line workers, who account for 2.6 billion of those, and information workers — the other 700 million. They have an increasing need to meet and collaborate remotely, which can be made more effective with 3-D content.

Here's a breakdown of the new out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 MR applications:

“We know that this can be a competitive advantage for many organizations. So bringing in and merging the physical and virtual world allows organizations to quickly do new ways of space planning and realize the potential within different spatial constraints in a new way,” Taylor said.

Dynamics 365 revenue has grown more than 60 percent since the company began disclosing it in 2017's third quarter, surpassing billings of $1 billion last year, Microsoft said.