Microsoft Corp. says it’s building an array of custom artificial intelligence services for specific industries in partnership with Accenture Plc.

Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of commercial partner channels & programs, announced the initiative in a blog posted on LinkedIn. It said it builds on the customized virtual support agents it has built for customers including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Macy’s Inc. The company said it built those custom agents by integrating technologies including its Knowledge Graph, machine-reading tech and data from Bing.

Now, Schuster says Microsoft will build on those efforts by working with Accenture’s Applied Intelligence group in order to create more specific AI systems for markets such as consumer-packaged goods, retail and telecommunications.

The idea is to combine Microsoft’s AI Solution for Care with Accenture’s Intelligent Customer Engagement framework. Doing so will enable digital assistants to “better understand and respond to thousands of different customer’s needs,” Schuster said.

The companies will also integrate Accenture’s Intelligent Revenue Growth service with Microsoft’s AI platform to create new AI services for the consumer-packaged goods market.

According to Schuster, Accenture’s IRG platform relies on machine learning to help sales teams identify opportunities and deploy them up to ten times faster. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s AI suite includes a range of tools such as Visual Studio Code Tools for AI, AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge and Machine Learning Studio; plus AI frameworks such as the Azure Cognitive Toolkit and Onnx; and also other infrastructure such as the Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Kubernetes Service and more besides.

The initiative will also involve Avanade Inc., a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture that was created back in 2000. Together, the three firms have pooled together a team of AI experts that includes platform architects, engineers and data scientists to help provide early access to the planned new services.

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