Microsoft Corp. is once again doubling down on artificial intelligence and automation within its productivity portfolio.

The company today unveiled a set of new AI tools designed to be used with Office 365 and the Dynamics 365 customer relationship management platform, its answer to Salesforce.com Inc.

The main one is highlight Power BI Insights. According to Microsoft, it’s a series of modules that can help firms uncover how to best engage customers and leads. The first two apps due to be released are Power BI for Sales Insights and Power BI for Service Insights.

Power BI for Sales Insights draws on Microsoft’s vast internal pool of transaction records, LinkedIn data and other business information to estimate the health of a customer relationship. It can also be used to model theoretical sales scenarios so that companies can better prepare for negotiations.

Power BI for Service Insights provides similar capabilities for customer care. Microsoft plans to roll out more apps for areas such as marketing, recruiting and finance further down the road. 

Organizations can augment the data that the tech giant will include in the Power BI apps with information from external sources. To simplify the often difficult task of integrating different kinds of records, Microsoft will pair the tools with an “extensible business application schema” specifically built to accommodate multiple information types.

In conjunction, Microsoft introduced two new editions of Dynamics 365. The first, which has been in beta testing since last year, is called Dynamics 365 for Marketing and offers specialized features for running multichannel campaigns. One of its most important features is an editor that lets users create elaborate multistep workflows for distributing and personalizing promotions.

The other newly released edition is Dynamics 365 for Sales Professional. It’s a slimmed-down version of the platform geared toward small businesses that don’t require all the bells and whistles Microsoft offers for enterprises.

Image: Pixabay