Microsoft is now using AI to help automate Office 365 tasks

Like a number of other tech players, Microsoft is investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) development. They have their own digital assistant Cortana, and a Twitter chatbot (although that experiment went horribly wrong). Now, Microsoft is applying AI to some of its other services.

The company has announced that Office 365 is now using cloud-based AI to help with some tasks. For instance, “Tap” is a new feature for Word and Outlook, that helps you re-use existing content from your organisation in current documents or emails. Basically, it uses Microsoft Graph to mine your company’s data and then surfaces the relevant content for whatever you’re penning down. PowerPoint and Sway meanwhile have a “QuickStarter” feature that curates an outline for any selected topic, so you don’t have to manually do that for a presentation. And in Excel, the AI can be used to turn raw location-based data into Bing-maps.

While some of the features are already available, Excel and PowerPoint will have to wait for the update, due to hit later this year.

There are a few other applications as well, and you can read the full text of the announcement here.