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Introducing AI Builder for Power Platform

At Microsoft Business Application Summit this year, I’m excited to announce Artificial Intelligence investments in the Power Platform. The Power Platform is a low code platform that enables organizations to analyze data, act on it through applications, and automate business processes. It allows everyone, from the professional developer to the frontline worker, to participate in driving better business outcomes by building apps.

Today we’re announcing AI Builder, our low code artificial intelligence platform that supports the Power Platform. It will be available for consumption on data that already exists in the Common Data Service (CDS), the enterprise-grade datastore included in the Power Platform. AI Builder is the platform for providing a low-code user experience for every developer to create and customize their PowerApps and Flows.

You can access AI Builder from the navigation pane within the PowerApps Studio or the Microsoft Flow website. The simple wizard like experience is tailored to empower every developer in keeping with the essence of the Power Platform. You can access all your AI models in a single pane under the AI Builder ‘Models’ tab, providing key information about each model upfront in a tabular format. Clicking a particular model takes you into its details page, where other key information and actions are made available to the user. You can perform actions like publish and test the model, view the model efficacy and weights of data contributing to it or view other recommended actions from the details page.

Below are the key capabilities of AI Builder that we are announcing today:

Binary Classification

Binary Classification uses historical data to predict whether new data falls into one of two categories. AI Builder binary classification is an AI model that predicts yes/no business outcomes by learning to associate historical data patterns with historical outcomes. Based on those results, the binary classification model detects learned patterns in new data to predict future outcomes. Use the binary classification AI model to explore any business question that is answered as one of two available options, such as yes/no, true/false, pass/fail, and go/no go.

Text Classification

Text Classification tags any snippet of text based on the historical data you provide. Streamline your business by automatically tagging new text. Text classification is one of the fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) problems. It allows tagging of text entries with tags or labels which can be used for sentiment analysis, spam detection and routing customer requests, just to name a few examples. Use AI Builder text classification with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps to automate and scale your business processes, and free your employees to act on these insights. It can also be used as an input for other AI capabilities such as subscription user churn and predictive analysis. AI Builder can learn from your previously labeled text items, and enable you to classify unstructured text data stored in Common Data Service into your own business-specific categories.

Object Detection

Object Detection lets you count, locate, and identify selected objects within any image. You can use this model in PowerApps to extract information from pictures you take with the camera. Object detection can be used to expedite or automate business processes in multiple industries. In the retail industry, it can be used to simplify the inventory management, allowing retail leaders to focus on on-site customer relationship building. In the manufacturing industry, technicians can use it to speed up the repair process by looking up the manual for a piece of machinery by taking a picture, even if the UPC/serial number is not visible.

Business Card Reader

Business Card Reader is a component available in the PowerApps studio that lets you scan business cards. You can use this control to extract contact information from pictures of business cards or your mobile phones camera.

Form Processing

Form Processing identifies the structure of your documents based on examples you provide to extract text from any matching form. Examples might include tax forms or invoices. Form processing allows you to create and consume models that use machine learning technology to identify and extract key-value pairs and table data from form documents. Train your model and define what information needs to be retrieved from your form documents. You only need five form documents to get started. You can get results quickly, accurately and tailored to your specific content without the need for a lot of manual intervention or extensive data science expertise.

With the above announcements, AI Builder makes available Cognitive and AI offerings from Microsoft to everyone by lowering the bar to entry and learning by providing a low code experience to create and consume AI in Business apps and Processes. There by providing a true no-cliffs opportunity with a grow up story to Azure ML and Cognitive services.

We’re delighted to continue to add value to the Power Platform and realize the vision of enabling the next wave of Citizen and Pro-developers to make intelligent business applications.

Customer Testimonial 

G&J Pepsi, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, has more than 1,600 employees focused on manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the full line of Pepsi-Cola products. The G&J Pepsi IT team used AI Builder and PowerApps to create the next generation of their Store Audit App, enabling better mobility and efficiency for field personnel whose job it is to assess product needs on the shelves in stores.

“With AI Builder, we were able to easily build an AI model to help automatically identify and track our products using the object detection model,” said Eric McKinney, Enterprise Business Systems Manager at G&J Pepsi. “For our field worker, it’s now as simple as taking a photo and let AI builder do the rest.”

Please join us during James Phillips’s keynote at the Microsoft Business Application Summit to learn more about AI Builder on Monday June 10, look for our sessions, and come check out our booth in the Power Platform area.  Dont forget to check out the product overview video.