Digital transformation underpinned by artificial intelligence and machine learning can have wide-ranging benefits for businesses, from modernising sales and customer service to creating intelligent supply chain operations and e-commerce platforms.
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 supports businesses with the insights and freedom to thrive by connecting data, processes and teams with intelligent business applications.
Technology is playing an increasingly critical role in helping businesses, particularly when it comes to providing more control and oversight of online finances and operations, to using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to bolster sales and marketing strategies. Modern business applications can arm decision makers with the insights they need to spot trends and make changes which help them build and maintain better customer relationships.
For certain sectors, such business applications can help to address key challenges from managing supply chain and logistics operation to enabling workforce transformation or eCommerce activity. For example, the manufacturing sector has faced labour shortages for some time now, but the pandemic has exacerbated this challenge. This has led many businesses to double-down on efforts to use technology as a means of offsetting the headwinds caused by ongoing recruitment issues.
For example, many businesses find that their current supply chain technologies are ill-equipped for an environment characterised by ongoing disruptions, constraints and shortages. A recent survey by McKinsey & Company found that successfully implementing AI-enabled supply-chain management has helped early adopters to improve logistics costs by 15 per cent, inventory levels by 35 per cent, and service levels by 65 per cent, compared to slower-moving competitors. This has led to increased investment in advanced supply-chain solutions that can connect disparate systems, unify data, increase supply chain visibility, and use artificial intelligence to push actionable insights to decision-makers.
At Microsoft, we also believe AI and intelligent automation will transform eCommerce. Just as Microsoft Excel transformed finance departments following its release over 30 years ago, AI and machine learning are positioned to reshape how companies can operate online. Many businesses were catapulted into the world of online platforms two years ago, but with increased investment in their eCommerce technology they have been able to make the experience more efficient, accurate and smooth for customers and site users.
Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight – but Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 is an ‘off the shelf’ solution, meaning it can be implemented quickly and easily, so a business can almost instantly benefit from the built-in insights, intelligence and workflows, kick-starting their transformation journey. Many customers are using Dynamics 365 to replace their older enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to future-proof their business with a more modern, agile cloud-based technology.
First and foremost, Dynamics 365 is built for the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. That means Azure provides the perfect environment to deploy, manage and build applications, and Dynamics 365 works seamlessly on this cloud. With Dynamics 365 on Azure, businesses can rely on a stable and cutting-edge technology that unleashes the ERP and CRM systems.
In the case of manufacturing, Dynamics 365 is helping manufacturing organisations tackle the challenges they face today while also preparing them for tomorrow’s opportunities. Whether enabling workforce transformation and enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernisation, helping navigate disruptions by increasing supply-chain visibility and improving insights, or standing up reverse supply chains and circular economies – this solution can build the resilience and agility they need to succeed.
Microsoft also recently announced the general availability of finance insights, a set of AI-powered capabilities that help customers of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance improve the efficiency and quality of financial processes by leveraging intelligent automation.
Many business owners will have heard a lot about the promise of AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) in recent years. However, missing from the discussion have been concrete examples of where to apply these emerging technologies to drive higher value outcomes and improve our business and financial processes. With business traffic being driven increasingly through online platforms, websites and social media pages, there is a renewed need to understand customer payment insights, cashflow forecasting and consumer spend.
Equally important is the need to protect businesses and online customers more than ever before. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection solutions uses adaptive AI that continuously learns to protect businesses against payment fraud, bots, account takeover, and returns and discounts fraud.
ACI Worldwide, Microsoft Azure supporting fraud-busting AI tool
Interestingly, Microsoft Ireland has been working closely with the Limerick-based data science team at ACI Worldwide to develop an AI-powered patented solution built on Microsoft Azure to address the complex and ever-evolving landscape of fraudulent transactions around the world.
ACI Worldwide is a global software company specialising in real-time payment and fraud detection solutions for merchants and financial services. While the team started working on ways to put incremental learning into practice in ACI Worldwide’s own production environment, the company also kicked off its partnership with Microsoft and began a five-year plan to move from on premise data centres to Azure.
Thanks to their innovative new solution, fraud prevention rates in the global payments sector are set to be transformed by their latest technology, and using Microsoft Azure has enabled the company to build its solution much faster and more effectively than expected. What makes the AI-powered software especially interesting is its ability to ‘learn’ and adapt to new threats – something the team were not expecting.
Jimmy Hennessy, director of data science and software engineering at ACI Worldwide said: “our goal was to be able to have a fraud detection model decide for itself when it needed to change to keep its performance at the same level as it was previously. We only built this to ensure fraud detection models didn’t degrade, we didn’t expect it to improve itself, so it has caused a lot of excitement. Using Azure definitely expedited us. We did not expect we could have an elastic, scalable service like this available to clients so quickly. Usually these things take years.”
