This article was originally written by Avanade alum Steve Palmer.

While there’s no hotter topic at the intersection of business and technology than artificial intelligence (AI). The latest Avanade research shows that 88% of global business and IT decision-makers say they don’t know how to use AI, and 79% say that internal resistance limits their implementation of it.

At Avanade, we see the potential for artificial intelligence across a wide spectrum of scenarios.  We see many use cases that are serving to augment human capabilities in manufacturing, customer care centers, marketing, business process automation, new product development and more.  We see great potential become real with AI-infused practical applications that we tailor to our clients' industries and business scenarios, harnessing the power of Microsoft's advanced analytics capabilities, platforms and frameworks such as Cognitive Services, Machine Learning Studio, AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge, the Microsoft Bot Framework, Cortana, Emotion and Face Detection just to name a few.

We’ve deployed advanced analytics scenarios at thousands of clients and understand what it takes to go beyond basic analytics functionality to deeply embedded intelligence applied to business processes.  For example, we worked with ATB Financial in Canada to create “Pepper,” a 4-foot humanoid robot concierge to assist clients with product selection and has even become a selfie favorite with clients. For a global cleaning products company, Avanade leveraged artificial intelligence and cloud transformation to allow a billion-dollar business to predict health inspections with 90% accuracy and 27% increment product revenue opportunity.

We’re taking an active role as well – just look at some of our latest thinking on AI, as well as our perspective for managing your data estate as a key step to becoming ready for AI. 

Avanade is working deeply on the advanced analytics and AI front for some time with our colleagues at Accenture to build out machine learning talent and capabilities, advanced analytics experience and to connect those with Microsoft technologies that help clients harness all the goodness, scale and flexibility that Microsoft Azure has to offer.  We take things even further, working with these technologies in managed services to shorten the time it takes for our customers to realize value from early AI industry scenarios through automated platforms like the Accenture Insight Platform (AIP), and ongoing management expertise. 

It’s also why we are excited to work closely with our friends Microsoft and Accenture to align and expand our support, development and implementation capabilities around two compelling scenarios – Accenture Intelligent Customer Engagement (ICE) Framework and the Accenture Intelligent Revenue Growth IRG) solution. 

Our work with Intelligent Customer Engagement framework enables multiple industries that provide customer care centers to leverage digital assistants to automate, anticipate and solve for customer questions, problems and needs.  We augment human call center representative capabilities - by providing contextual information to help them solve client needs at that key moment of truth – where the intersection of buying, selling, supporting and building loyalty lies.

With the Accenture Intelligent Revenue Growth solution, we see the intersections for consumer-packaged goods clients leveraging AI and machine learning to reduce stock-outs, connect the buying process, connect their ecosystems from back-end manufacturing to front-end consumer experiences.

The opportunity for exponential growth using AI has never been stronger. To learn more, please refer to Gavriella Schuster’s blog.