Microsoft launched Project Cortex at its annual Ignite Conference.
Based on artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML), Microsoft Project Cortex is a knowledge organization, accumulation & distribution service. The idea is to collect all relevant information from a variety of Microsoft’s & 3rd party services, & categorize this ‘knowledge’ to make it available ‘on tap’.
For example, if you’re producing a video about a product, Microsoft will have on hand a chain of information gathered from SharePoint, Outlook Email, Office 365, Teams & other services/utilities, which will instantly provide topical information related to the product, such as employees working on the project, specifications added to various documents & related communications.
The search facilities provided by Project Cortex has been in the works for a number of years now, with Microsoft’s Infopedia, a planned knowledge-management service acting as the pre-runner for this new service. Infopedia failed to launch, but Project Cortex draws its main ideas & functionality from this earlier plan.
This is a broad & ambitious notion, since it’s exceedingly difficult for machines to identify unstructured data & categorize it in a logical fashion, sufficiently structured to make sense as a single ‘intelligent’ resource.
The new service’s objective is to assist organizations to access & utilize their data more effectively, easing their workload. Also, by leveraging data in this manner, fewer errors will result since vital information that could affect a project’s success will be available on all platforms.
Currently, the service is available on a ‘private preview’ basis to a select few individuals and enterprises, but Microsoft plans a general roll out in early 2020.
Consumers of Microsoft’s products such as the highly successful SharePoint & Office 365 will be able to utilize the power of machine learning to ‘pull’ data & tie it ‘intelligently’ to any utility they’re working with.
In this manner, data which traverses an organization such as notes from meetings, email communications, videos, voice recordings of telephone conversations & text documents can be harnessed to project accurate, associative information as a combined resource to promote improved assimilation.
