Microsoft and Fujitsu announce partnership to collaborate on AI technologies

Microsoft and Fujitsu today announced their agreement to work together in the field of AI to accelerate the transformation of the ways people work in organisations by building new solutions. The new applications will be built on top of Microsoft 365 and it will be powered by Fujitsu’s AI technology, Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, and Microsoft AI platform services on Azure.

The new solutions will offer the following:

1. Focus on creative work, generating high added value

Big data generated through use of Microsoft 365 is aggregated through Microsoft Graph, and Microsoft MyAnalytics and Microsoft Workplace Analytics, etc. visualize the usage status of email and calendars, which had in the past lacked visibility. Zinrai AI technology distinguishes the importance and priority of tasks mentioned in the body of an email, and encourages users to perform important tasks. This helps users quickly handle high priority tasks, enabling them to focus on creative work, such as idea generation, which can lead to higher added value.

2. Automate and streamline routine tasks leveraging AI

Automation and streamlining of tasks is achieved by combining Microsoft Cognitive Services and Microsoft Azure Bot Service with Fujitsu’s conversational AI technology and the Zinrai natural language analysis API, offering a more human-centric user experience. For example, in setting up a meeting, the conversational AI technology is able to search for an open timeslot shared among the participants, and list up candidate dates and times, meeting formats, and venues in consideration of participants’ convenience.

3. Eliminate silos and discover the right person, insights and network

Using the connections among people or things is considered an effective way to find exceptional human resources or valuable documents within organizations. To this end, Knowledge Graph is used as a base of knowledge that expresses in graph form the relationships among people or things. Furthermore, when the characteristics of such relationships are analyzed by Zinrai AI technology, and this is applied to Knowledge Graph, it becomes possible to discover outstanding human resources and meaningful documents, offering the ability to effectively utilize information, such as in selecting the most suitable team members when launching a project.

4. Analyze the drivers of productivity and motivation comparing people, teams, and companies

Users of Microsoft MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics etc. can visualize the ways both individuals and teams work. Moreover, by combining and benchmarking Knowledge Graph and Fujitsu Laboratories-developed Deep Tensor machine learning technology, which enables highly accurate analysis of graph-structured data, these solutions can provide insight into how high-performance individuals, organizations and companies are working. It can also enable an understanding of the important factors behind such performance, and lead to true transformation of the way people work.

Microsoft and Fujitsu are planning to make these new solutions available in the Japanese market from the second quarter of 2018 (April to June). Global roll out will be done later on.