Predictions in Dynamics CRM with custom Azure Machine Learning integrations

Earlier this year I wrote a post that showed how to perform sentiment analysis in Dynamics CRM using Microsoft Azure Text Analytics. Azure Text Analytics makes it incredibly easy to use sentiment analysis (with English text only), but the full Azure Machine Learning offering is much more powerful. In today's post I will show how to create a custom predictive web service in Azure ML and make predictions with it in Dynamics CRM. One of the exciting announcements about Dynamics CRM 2016 is that it includes some sort of integration with Azure ML, so what's the point of this blog post? For this demonstration I am using data from the AdventureWorks data warehouse sample database to build a model to predict whether a contact in CRM is likely to be a bicycle buyer.