Microsoft Cognitive Services brings cloud AI to the enterprise- Valutrics
Enterprise usage and applications
Unlike many cloud services, such as compute instances, object storage or databases, that mimic existing enterprise IT functions, Microsoft Cognitive Services is meant to enable entirely new application types — not host existing ones. Most of these involve the analysis of previously intractable forms of data, such as photos, videos, speech, locations and unstructured text. As a result, the usage scenarios for AI and machine learning are highly dependent on an organization’s business, its available data sources and the creativity of its staff.
Some examples of organizations that use Microsoft Cognitive Services include:
- A Dutch furniture store uses the Recommendations API to provide recommendations to customers, such as items frequently bought together or suggestions based on past order history.
- One company employs Microsoft’s Computer Vision, Face and Emotion APIs to automatically extract metadata from a variety of unstructured content, including text, images and videos. The company can scan videos and tag those in which individual faces show emotions, such happiness, sadness or surprise.
- Uber uses the Face API to verify that the driver is the same person it has on file for that driver account.
As these examples suggest, sales enablement, customer relationship management, security, conversational UIs and image/video analysis are fertile areas for Microsoft Cognitive Services.