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Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled several new artificial intelligence capabilities across Dynamics 365 applications and a new solution to help project-centric services organizations transform their operations. The AI enhancements include first- and third-party data connections in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft's customer data platform (CDP). "The work in AI and CDP is new and a key part of Microsoft taking their products to an AI-driven approach," noted Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. The company also unveiled new manual and predictive forecasting capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamic 365 Sales Insights. "Integration with the CDP is important, but more important will be the ability to automate transactions and apply AI to drive the next best action," Wang told CRM Buyer.

Welcome! Complete this survey to learn where your organization stands within Constellation Research's capability maturity model for adopting and integrating artificial intelligence capabilities. In addition, by completing this survey, you will be contributing to a research report on AI adoption by businesses. After completion, you will receive a score on a scale from 1-5 indicating the degree of AI adoption. You will have the opportunity to learn more about what your results mean when the full research report is published. This survey seeks to understand: what are the drivers of business investment in AI; how much are businesses investing in AI; at what stage are businesses in their AI implementations; what are businesses using AI to accomplish; is there resistance to the adoption of AI; and how will AI impact the workforce.

Microsoft on Thursday announced a number of artificial intelligence, mixed reality and customer insights tools for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at its Microsoft Business Forward event in Paris. There is "a lot of hype around AI and MR," noted Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, "but these are real applications delivering value to customers today." Microsoft also announced it will publicly preview a new Microsoft Forms Pro this spring. There is "a consistent theme in all these offerings -- providing high degree of flexibility to enable citizen developers and power users while still maintaining technology governance and compliance," remarked Nicole France, principal analyst at Constellation Research. "Microsoft's advantage is its decades of investment in R&D across its portfolio, which it's bringing to bear on its business applications portfolio," Wettemann told CRM Buyer.

Constellation Research is a Silicon Valley-based technology research and advisory firm specializing in digital transformation and disruptive technologies. In this recent report, author Doug Henschen, VP and Principal Analyst, explores the evolution of self-service BI and the rise of smart analytics in the market, examining four key areas in which Tableau continues to invest: Data prep, data analysis and discovery, natural language interactions, and predictive analytics. With a greater variety of data and increased demand to use it, Tableau is not just out to democratize data, but to make complex analyses of it simpler--speeding up insight to action. Technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and smart algorithms (all under the umbrella of smart analytics), are a great opportunity for the world of analytics to take the next big leap. Tableau is at the forefront of this new era pushing the boundaries of what's possible to help more people than ever before see and understand data.

Everybody wants to know where the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is going inside day-to-day IT, and June 5 marks a good opportunity to get some research metrics on all of this. Constellation Research will soon publish its 2018 Artificial Intelligence Study, and here today in eWEEK, you can get a sneak preview of the highlights. You can't beat the price; it will be available free of charge. This report delivers findings from the 2018 Constellation Artificial Intelligence Survey, which assesses the state of AI among the first movers, early adopters and fast followers that comprise Constellation's subscriber base. The survey asked C-level executives about the state of AI investment and deployment in their organizations, budgets for AI investment, technologies driving AI development, how AI might impact executives and the workforce, sources of internal resistance to AI, and privacy.

Oracle on Tuesday demonstrated artificial intelligence and machine learning advances in the Oracle Cloud Platform at Oracle CloudWorld in New York. Autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management are scheduled for availability in the first half of this year. Oracle also demonstrated an Oracle Digital Assistant, which will provide centralized communications across CRM, ERP, HCM, custom applications and business intelligence data. The assistant will use AI to correlate data and automate user behavior. The Assistant's cross-application capability "is the differentiator," said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

How will enterprises manage artificial intelligence deployments when most managers and executives don't understand the underlying models, data science, or technology? That question is almost haunting. Artificial intelligence (AI for short) is lumped together with big data, machine learning, and neural networks to create what equates to a technology buzzword orgy. And if you want another theme toss in cloud computing, which is the enabler for AI. Sure, we know AI is a bit hyped.

Google on Wednesday released its Cloud AutoML Vision service in Alpha. It is the first in a planned series of Cloud AutoML services designed to help people with limited machine learning expertise build their own custom models using advanced techniques such as learning2learn and transfer learning. Learning2learn is a process for automating machine learning, while transfer learning "takes a fully trained model for a set of categories and retrains it from the existing weights for new classes," a Google Cloud spokesperson told the E-Commerce Times in a statement provided by company rep Danny McCrone. Cloud AutoML Vision makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition. Its drag-and-drop interface lets users upload images, train and manage models, then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud.

Editor's note: Business is no longer as usual. New technologies in the workplace, like machine learning and augmented reality, create opportunities for companies to enhance employee productivity. Alan Lepofsky, analyst at Constellation Research, Inc. discusses three key areas where technology will impact work as we know it. From Baby Boomers to Gen Z, today's workplace contains a mixture of generations. Although each has grown up with very different technological and cultural experiences, all face similar challenges at work, like information overload and having to stay up-to-date with technology that's constantly changing.