微軟要如何擊敗Salesforce？Office36五、Azure、Dynamics365 全面佈局AI | 雙語

 

微軟在上月宣佈組建本身的 AI 研究小組。該小組聚集了超過 5000 名計算機科學家和工程師，加上微軟內部研究部門，將共同挖掘 AI 技術。

與此同時，亞馬遜，Facebook，Google，IBM 還有微軟聯合宣佈成立一個非盈利組織「人工智能合做夥伴」。該組織將致力於推動人工智能研究，樹立開發新的人工智能技術準則，以及增強公衆對人工智能的認識。

而巨頭們也紛紛拿出了本身的看家本領，Apple 的 Siri 利用天然語言處理來識別語音命令；Facebook 的深度學習面部識別算法可以快速準確地識別出人臉；Google 的「大腦」可能更爲聰明，並且可以安裝在數百萬安卓系統的設備上。

而隱藏在 CRM 領域的對手之一 Salesforce 也聲稱推出了一款全新的人工智能平臺。還有 Amazon、Netflix 和 Spotify 都在強調使用機器學習瞭解如何與客戶創建聯繫。

最近的人工智能領域如此煊赫一時，就連微軟的首席執行官納德拉也提到，「將 AI 覆蓋到全部領域，是由於微軟想要實現「AI 技術民主化」，從而解決全球最緊迫的挑戰。」

據悉，微軟將從如下四個細分方向實現「AI 技術民主化」：

Agents. Harness AI to fundamentally change human and computer interaction through agents such as Microsoft』s digital personal assistant Cortana
一、助手。利用 AI 從根本上改變人機交互過程，如微軟的數字我的助理 Cortana。

Applications. Infuse every application, from the photo app on people』s phones to Skype and Office 365, with intelligence

二、應用平臺。從移動端的照片 app 到 Skype，再到 Office365，每個應用平臺融入了 AI 技術。

Services. Make these same intelligent capabilities that are infused in Microsoft』s apps—cognitive capabilities such as vision and speech, and machine analytics—available to every application developer in the world

三、服務。讓全球每位應用開發者都能獲取一樣的 AI 技術支持。如微軟 app 中視覺與語音識別能力，機器分析能力。

Infrastructure. Build the world』s most powerful AI supercomputer with Azure and make it available to anyone, to enable people and organizations to harness its power

四、基礎架構。以 Azure 云爲平臺，構建強大的 AI 超級計算機，爲企業和我的提供該項服務。

那麼，微軟近期推出的幾款人工智能產品看似「姍姍來遲」，但在 AI 領域的重量可不能小視，那麼，微軟在如何佈局 AI 呢？其旗下幾大產品又都與 AI 有着怎樣的關係？

一、推出人工智能版 Dynamics365

提高銷售轉化率，更好地理解客戶行爲，是現在移動、社交、雲三者融合時代的大背景下企業須要具有的重要能力。

過去幾周，CRM 領域頻頻傳來人工智能利好的消息。現在，微軟也向世人透露：在下月 1 日，將推出人工智能版 Dynamics365，爲銷售人員提供雲端商務應用解決方案。

該款產品將 ERP 與 CRM 進行整合，打形成爲一個單一的雲端解決方案。

這次產品的推出主要針對的就是 CRM 領域占主導地位的 Salesforce，而此前不久，Salesforce 剛剛推出了一款名爲「愛因斯坦」的人工智能雲平臺，可以爲企業客戶提供相應服務。

Microsoft has built in a couple of intelligence features into the release designed specifically for sales and service personnel. First, there is Customer Insights, a stand-alone cloud service, which enables users to bring in a variety of internal and external data sources. Companies can integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. The solution includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don』t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).

微軟推出的 Dynamics365 可以爲銷售人員提供如下幾類服務：一是客戶洞察（Customer Insights），一款單機雲服務，幫助用戶收集各種內外部數據信息。

企業可以將全部數據與內部指標（KPIs）進行集成，基於數據進行自動化行爲的驅動。這套解決方案還包括了合做夥伴如 Facebook 和 Trip Advisor 上產生的大量數據，不過，這也說明了用戶無需借外部獲取數據。

It』s been designed as a stand-alone service that can work with any of the Dynamics 365 CRM components—sales, customer service or field service—and can also work with any external CRM tool with open APIs. This last point is particularly telling because it』s giving customers who might not be using Dynamics 365 (but are using other Microsoft tools like Outlook) access to this feature.

一方面，單機服務可以與 Dynamics365 CRM 的組成部件進行很好地兼容，包括銷售、客服或者現場服務；另外一方面，還能與任何一個帶有開放 API 接口的外部 CRM 工具進行兼容。

此外，單機服務還能爲並未使用 Dynamics365，而是微軟其餘工具如 Outlook 的客戶，提供該項服務的渠道。

The second piece is called Relationship Insights, which as the name suggests gives sales people information about the status of their customer relationships at any given moment. It』s built on the on the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which Microsoft introduced in 2015 and uses tools like sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of the deal closing and the next best action to take.

二是關係洞察（Relationship Insights），爲銷售人員即時提供客戶關係信息。該服務基於人工智能助手小娜的平臺進行提供。這個智能助手於去年在全球推出，經過情感分析檢測交易結束的可能性，並判斷下一步最佳實踐方案。

For now, know that Microsoft has consolidated its artificial intelligence tools into a single, coherent division and just about every vendor—not just those selling CRM—is trying to build some level of intelligence into its products. Dynamics 365 is just the latest manifestation.

總的來講，微軟已將人工智能工具嵌入一個單獨連貫的區域，並且不僅是 CRM 領域的供應商，基本上每一個供應商都在試圖將某種程度的智能技術嵌入到其產品中。

二、Office365 的我的分析服務

在上月舉辦的 Ignite 年度大會上，微軟展現了 Office365 新的 AI 功能，覆蓋了爲企業提供的核心產品。

New smart features coming to Office 365 include Tap in Word and Outlook, which aims to help workers reuse content already to be found in corporate documents for new documents and emails.

Office365 自己是一款文檔協做工具，可是通過 AI 升級後的 Office365 具備瞭如下一些特色：Tap in Word 和 Outlook，旨在幫助辦公人員將公司文檔中現有的內容再次用於新的文件和電郵。

Another is Quickstarter for PowerPoint and Sway, offering a faster way to integrate text and images into presentations. Excel meanwhile will gain a Bing Maps feature to visualize geographic data.

另外，Quickstarter for PowerPoint 和 Sway，可以更爲快速地將文本與圖像集成到同一個演示文檔中。同時，Excel 表格也添加了 Bing 地圖功能，將地理數據進行可視化。

Office 365 is also gaining the MyAnalytics personal analytics service, formerly known as Delve Analytics, which Microsoft gained when it acquired VoloMetrix last year.

一樣，Office365 還添加了 MyAnalytics 我的分析服務（以前被稱爲 Delve Analytics），該服務主要是經過去年對 VoloMetrix 的收購而來。

MyAnalytics provides a visualized breakdown of personal performance at work, offering a snapshot of 'meeting hours', 'email hours', 'focus hours', and 'after hours'. Users can also query the percentage of email read by recipients and what time email was read to help workers optimize the timing of email.

MyAnalytics 將我的工做表現進行視覺化細分，如將「會議時間」、「電郵時間」、「關注時間」等進行快照處理。用戶還能查詢用戶電郵的讀取狀況，從而幫助工做人員優化發送電郵的時間。

The main goal of MyAnalytics is to help workers manage how they personally spend their time at work. However, it also has a social component that, for example, shows response times to colleagues as well as customers. Users can drill down into each category to discover how much time was spent multi-tasking and assess whether it was time well spent.

MyAnalytics 主要幫助員工有效管理我的工做時間。不過，這也包括社交時間，如可以顯示出對同事和客戶的響應時間。經過仔細研究每項功能，用戶可以發如今進行多任務時的耗時，評估時間的利用是否穩當。

三、Azure 雲融入 AI 技術

除了應用程序和服務上進行人工智能技術的嵌入，微軟還悄悄在其 Azure 雲服務上進行了必定程度 AI 技術的融入。在過去的兩年間，微軟已在全球五大洲 15 個國家進行了大規模數據中心的部署。

前不久，微軟在愛爾蘭都柏林的發佈會稱要將 Azure 雲打形成爲世界上第一款人工智能超計算機（下稱「超算」）。

"Ultimately the cloud is about powering the next generation of applications," he said. "It is always the next generation applications that have driven infrastructure and when we look at this current generation of applications that people are building, the thing that is going to define these applications, that characterises these applications, is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Therefore we are building out Azure as the first AI supercomputer."

納德拉認爲，「雲計算將最終主導下一代應用，而下一代應用將推進基礎設施建設。目前來看，定義和塑造這些應用的是機器學習和人工智能。所以，咱們正力圖將 Azure 雲打形成爲第一款 AI 超級計算機。」

「We made a major investment in PGAs [programmable gate arrays],」said Microsoft』 Research engineer Doug Burger at the company』s Ignite conference in Atlanta this week.「PGAs are programmable hardware. You get the efficiency of hardware, but you also get the flexibility to change your functionality on the fly. This new architecture that we built effectively embeds an FPGA-based AI super computer into our old, hyper-scaled cloud. You get compute, scale and efficiency. It will change what is possible for AI.」

「咱們目前在可編程門陣列 PGAs 上作了大量投入」，微軟研究部工程師 Doug Burger 提到，「PGAs 是一款可編程硬件。這樣，你能高效利用硬件，並能靈活改變運行中的功能。

這種新的基礎架構是將基於 FPGA 的人工智能超算，有效嵌入到舊有的超規模雲端，從而在計算和擴展能力以及效率進行提高。這將改變人工智能的應用。」

「We now have FPGA support across every compute port of Azure,」said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.「It means we have the ability through the magic of the fabric of the network to distribute you machine learnings, your deep neural nets to all of the silicon that is available so you get back performance, that scale.」

納德拉還提到，「如今，FPGA 能夠支持 Azure 雲平臺的每一個運算過程，這意味着咱們有能力經過構造網絡，將機器學習等深層神經網分發給全部的內部芯片，經過 BPS 衡量計算機的性能。」

微軟並非在打無把握之仗

微軟高層人士之一 Qi Lu 認爲，想要贏得這場沒有硝煙的戰爭，手中仍是得具有五個核心要素：

Qi Lu is happy to make the case for Microsoft』s competitive advantage. Lu is one of the dozen people on Nadella』s senior leadership team, overseeing the company』s applications and service groups.

But to win, Lu says, a company needs five "key assets." The first is a "conversation canvas"—a place where people are doing lots of talking and texting. Microsoft has Office, Outlook, Skype, and Cortana. The second is that AI "brain"—a sophisticated mental model of the world. Microsoft says its own AI efforts date back nearly 20 years. The third is access to a social graph—people』s activity on the internet often involves their friends and coworkers. Not coincidentally, a few days after I met Lu, Microsoft announced it would spend $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn, and its 433 million registered users.

一是「會話區域」，也就是人們可以進行大量交談和信息發送的地方。好比，微軟如今有了 Office，Outlook，Skype 和 Cortana。

二是 AI「頭腦」，可以面對周圍世界進行復雜的思惟模式。

三是可以獲取社交圖譜，由於人類在互聯網上的活動每每會與朋友和同事有交集。正因如此，前一段時間，微軟戰勝其中一個強大的競爭對手 Salesforce，以 262 億美圓收購 LinkedIn，目的是爲了獲取其大量的註冊用戶資源。

四是爲人工智能研發而建立的平臺。微軟有 Windows，Xbox 等一系列設備。

五是擁有一批強大的開發團隊，而且該團隊願意爲此項事業獻身。

毫無疑問，微軟將目光轉向人工智能，與強大對手爭搶資源，打得並非無把握之仗。

目前 AI 技術也有必定的侷限性

While AI research has been going on for more than 60 years, the technology is now at an inflection point, the panelists agreed. That has happened because of three things: faster, more powerful computers; critical computer science advances, mainly statistical machine learning and deep learning techniques; and the massive information available due to sensors and the Internet of Things.

儘管 AI 研究已經持續了近 60 年，可是該項技術目前還是處於轉折期。這主要基於三類事物的改變：更快更強大的計算機；關鍵領域計算機科學的進步，即機器學習和深度學習技術；以及基於傳感器和物聯網環境下可獲取到的大量信息。

Teaching machines common sense, said LeCun. He gave the problem of text translation as an example. The technology is far from perfect, he said, because machines don』t have a deep understanding of the text they are translating.

「Most of what we [humans] learned, we learned in the first few years of life just by observing the world,」said LeCun.「And we don』t know how to do that with machines, how to teach them to learn by observing the world. This is one mountain we need to climb, but we don』t know how many mountains are behind it.」

侷限一：以文字翻譯爲例，文字翻譯技術目前還遠遠不夠完美，由於機器對所翻譯出來的文字內容沒有深層次的感知能力。Facebook AI 技術負責人 Yann LeCun 曾提到，「人類所習得的大多數知識主要經過早年觀察周圍世界獲取的。徹底不知道如何改造機器，教會機器經過觀察世界進行學習。」

Technical challenges aside, another massive mountain to climb, says Banavar, is how to deploy AI in the real world. That would have to involve the point-of-view of not just tech developers, but also users and policy-makers.「In environments where machines and humans are interacting there』s got to be an element of trust,」he said.「That trust building will take time.」

侷限二：除了一個又一個的技術挑戰須要攻克，如何在現實世界對人工智能進行部署一樣也是一個問題。這必然會受到技術開發人員、用戶甚至是政治決策者的影響。

「在人機交互的環境中，必然存在信任的問題。這種信任的創建須要必定的時間。」Banavar 提到。

Deploying AI systems in the real world will also include other humanistic challenges, said Jeannette Wing, corporate vice president at Microsoft Research. Her comments stemmed from the fiasco earlier this year with Microsoft』s AI chatbot Tae, which got hacked and learned to become racist and abusive, forcing the company to take it down within 24 hours. This was in the U.S. A similar chatbot in use in China since 2014 has been massively successful.

侷限三：「在真實世界部署 AI 技術，一樣還涉及到其餘方面人性的挑戰。」微軟研究小組負責人 Jeannette Wing 提到。她提起這個話題的主要緣由在於，今年上半年微軟開發出的一款名叫 Tae 的人工智能聊天機器人，因受到黑客攻擊，結果通過學習以後言語變得十分具備攻擊性，這不得不迫使微軟公司在 24 小時以內將其下架。

而相對來講，該款產品引進中國以後卻得到了極大的成功。

總之，人類對人工智能的認知和開發仍是處於最初級階段。或許，在將來人類看到一款帶有智能屬性的機器人，可以簡化軟件運行的複雜程度，並引導用戶獲取問題的解決方案。

儘管目前這個目標還未實現，但心中抱有實現生產力的提高的想法不是不可能。（本文由國外媒體綜合編譯）

 

做者：T客匯 楊麗

網站：www.tikehui.com