Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics is changing the playing field in the business world, and most people don’t realize it even though they are central to this change. Managers make decisions based on business intelligence, marketing teams engage in targeted advertising using AI tools while customer-facing executives are using data analytics to keep track of customer experience across a range of channels. All these activities are based on data-driven insights, which are being made possible through AI. Let’s see how artificial intelligence along with data analysis is changing the rules of the game today.

How AI is changing the business landscape

Whether it’s creating personalized content on your website, sales forecasting through analytics for the next quarter, using machine learning to increase sales or using automation software for marketing your products, business professionals rely on artificial intelligence to improve their services and attract customers.

The advent in Automation and Big Data technologies over the last few years has led to an increase in algorithmic decision making and this is already visible in areas like personalized credit offers and airline ticket pricing among other real-world examples. With the help of machine learning, businesses can make shopping recommendations to their customers or offer bundled deals based on their purchasing history.

Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter and online shopping portals like Amazon are increasingly using automated marketing efforts to increase traffic, reach out to customers and suggest products to buy or pop-up targeted posts based on their digital history.

As Artificial Intelligence gets smarter in the coming days, more opportunities will be created for ‘machines or bots’ to replace human decision making. With speedier cognitive computing and automation tools, businesses are making better sense of the big data around them and arriving at solutions to complex problems in a faster way.

While most organizations continue to use the traditional BI methods of data visualization and statistical analysis, there are some who are adopting more mature processes such as predictive analytics using Machine Learning (ML) tools and this is where the progression to AI will happen.

Microsoft Cognitive Services

Microsoft has built several APIs to integrate artificial intelligence capabilities for text, speech, vision and search. Microsoft’s Content Moderator API, which monitors User Generated Content on social media sites, chat and messaging platforms and other websites, can be used to flag and filter out offensive and irrelevant content like text, images and videos that could harm businesses. (Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/content-moderator/?v=17.23h )

We will discuss in a while how the Microsoft Content Moderator can be used in SharePoint and Office 365 to improve content management.

Microsoft’s Cortana – the popular digital assistant on Windows 10, uses machine learning to give users a personalized experience when getting their tasks done. Naturally, the more one uses Cortana, the more effective her work will be – whether it’s giving you reminders, sending emails or texts, open an app in your system or simply have a conversation with you. Apart from the Cortana Devices, Microsoft also has done a lot of research in speech recognition with products like Microsoft Translator and Skype Translator that are helping people communicate with each other in multiple languages in real-time. The company has also been credited with building the world’s biggest knowledge graph, which brings together tremendous information on people, places and things, thanks to the learning gathered from Bing and Office 365.

Google’s Cloud Vision API

Google has added new capabilities to its Cloud Vision API, which enables developers to extract metadata from more than one billion images. It can detect objects and faces in photos, extract content that you need from voluminous documents such as research papers and books, and even use artificial intelligence to predict wound progression . The company recently demonstrated the Video Intelligence API, wherein it could not only find a dog in the video but also identify the breed. Users can also search and discover video content from the Google cloud storage by providing information on what they are looking for. All this is made possible due to AI.

AI in Content Management

In a world of self-driving cars, drones and intelligent machines around us, how can we expect content management to be untouched by AI. Marketers are already using automated tools to analyse consumer behavior, suggest strategies to engage with them and predict the customers’ buying pattern. Google uses AI system in its search engine to teach itself about users’ preference and provide them with better answers by learning more about the semantics of their searches. Similarly, Twitter uses bots to publish and push content automatically, and even generate automated tweets to suit the user’s moods.

So, when we talk about AI in content management, it comes down to things like identifying pages that aren’t attracting traffic, broken links, including chatbots to provide instant customer support as soon as a visitor lands on a page, and similar tasks which businesses have started to experiment with. SharePoint and Office 365, which are hugely popular for document management and team communication are using artificial intelligence to better manage content across the enterprise. Let’s see how some tools like the Content Moderator API from Microsoft is helping in this regard.

Moderating Content in SharePoint

Moderating content in SharePoint can be time consuming as teams would have to manually filter out potentially offensive text and images from the documents. However, with AI technology, automated content moderation can be applied to achieve text and image analysis easily. With the Content Moderator API, it will be possible to quickly find potentially offensive text and images.

Microsoft has also has brought out the online Human Review Tool, which can be used to auto-moderate bulk content and review the tagged images within the review tool. One can also invite other users in SharePoint and Office 365 and assign permissions to team members to review the content and give their comments.

SharePoint Essentials Toolkit

SharePoint Essentials Toolkit is a tool that parses large amounts of data in a SharePoint file and has incorporated AI features to allow organizations find offensive text, images or video. Also, the tool can detect PII (personally identifiable information) type of information and build a report, from which users can be allowed to validate the information.

Spell Check as an AI Service

SharePoint Essentials Toolkit also has a bulk spell-check mechanism which allows you to run this tool across thousands of files and find the top 100 documents, for example, with the most spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.

AI has made a head start in content moderation, helping users easily identify objectionable content, offensive language and personally identifiable information to make online content safe for organizations and individuals. AI tools are also performing editing activities like spell-check, basic punctuation and grammatical corrections for the users, and these capabilities will only extend to a wider platform in the coming days.