A recent study from BitGlass showed that Office 365 has become the number one most used enterprise cloud application. And while Engadget says that Microsoft has been upgrading its Office suite with cloud-based artificial intelligence for several years, the company also announced its release of several new tools intended to optimize data organization and management.
At an AI event held by Microsoft in San Francisco earlier this month, the company revealed Office Insights, an algorithm that will analyze Excel spreadsheet data in order to create pivot tables and charts of top trends.
“Data is incredibly valuable, but it’s only valuable when you’re actually able to extract insights from it,” said Microsoft’s Rob Howard in a statement.
Microsoft also announced Acronyms in Word, an AI that scans organizational documents and emails in order to find acronyms that are relevant to your specific business. Tap in Word also brings up spreadsheets and other documents without having to navigate away from the document currently being edited. Microsoft is also planning to enable a tool that will help to highlight action items located in emails in Outlook, allowing users to respond on the go.
The newly released Office 365 tool “automatically highlights patterns it detects, which makes it easier for everyone to explore and analyze their data,” wrote Office corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer in a recent blog post. “Powered by machine learning, Insights helps identify trends, outliers, and other useful visualizations, providing new and useful perspectives on data.”
According to Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s corporate vice president in charge of AI products, these new cloud-based, artificial intelligence features serve as a reflection of how AI is being embraced and utilized by multiple technology and software tools and companies for searches, communication, office productivity, and much more.
“AI has really been integrated into society for many years,” said Ribas in a recent company news post. “Sometimes, people have been using AI for a long time and they don’t even realize it.”