It’s inspiring to see how customers continue to reimagine how they work with the help of AI, which is more important today than ever. Our customers are finding innovative ways to deliver crisis management solutions, drive cost-savings, redefine customer engagement, and accelerate decision-making.

Here are some notable examples we’ve recently seen:

Scaling crisis management

On the frontlines, first responders rely on Azure AI to scale their triage process to address the overwhelming number of people needing care and to ease volume in the system. For example, healthcare providers have created more than 1,400 bots using our Healthcare Bot service, helping more than 27 million people access critical healthcare information. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a COVID-19 assessment bot that is powered by Azure Bot Service. Motorola Solutions uses Azure Bot Service, as well as speech and language services, in its own voice assistant for public safety, ViQi, to help 911 dispatchers and first responders focus on what matters most.

Realizing cost-savings

Azure AI is also helping customers optimize their operations to reduce costs. KPMG built a risk and fraud analytics solution using our speech and language services to streamline call center transcription and translation—cutting time, cost, and effort by as much as 80 percent. Norwegian Hull Club, a mutual marine insurance company, built a knowledge mining solution using Cognitive Search for employees to access archived documents, reducing the process from hours to minutes and helping them generate significant savings. Duck Creek is leveraging Cognitive Search and Azure Synapse Analytics to build a claims management solution for insurance companies to save on operational costs by reducing claims errors and minimizing fraud.

Accelerating decision making

Given the pace of change, organizations need to move forward with agility, insights, and confidence. Carhartt used Azure Machine Learning to identify new store locations. These sites exceeded their revenue goals by 285 percent.

Tibco helps field analysts accelerate their decision-making for maintaining power plant operations by leveraging Anomaly Detector and Text Analytics. Wilson Allen is helping law firms around the world to automate paper-based processes by using Form Recognizer and Text Analytics to find new business development opportunities. PwC has built a solution with Cognitive Search to help financial institutions meet regulatory requirements by quickly pinpointing relevant information in dense legal documents. TalentCloud’s solution uses Azure Machine Learning to help farmers increase their yield, reduce pollution, and step up food safety by providing crop management recommendations and controlling irrigation equipment. Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has used the new responsible ML capabilities in Azure Machine Learning to spot fraudulent transactions with 99 percent accuracy.

Reimagining customer engagement

Offering people more efficient, personalized experiences continues to evolve everywhere—from call centers to classrooms. Vodafone created TOBi, a customer service chatbot with our speech and language services, so customers can quickly complete tasks, freeing up support agents to focus more on complex customer cases. Similarly, Universal Electronics has developed a virtual assistant to enable voice-based control across thousands of consumer devices such as universal remotes and smart thermostats. In banking, Insight Enterprises has created a self-service kiosk solution using our vision, speech, and language services for a more intuitive customer experience. In education, our partners are developing new Azure AI-powered solutions to facilitate remote learning. For example, TAL Education Group is using the pronunciation assessment capability in our Speech service to help students with remote presentation and foreign language practice. Wakelet and Nearpod are helping students enhance their reading comprehension skills using Immersive Reader.

Onward together

Our customers inspire us to continue our focus on supporting their journey with AI. We look forward to innovating with you to help your organization succeed in meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow.