7 Innovative ways Project Cortex Delivers Business Value Infographic

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Joel Oleson

Understanding Microsoft Project Cortex

Project Cortex applies AI to automatically organize your content. It delivers innovative experiences with Topic cards, Topic pages, and both knowledge and content centers across the productivity tools of Office 365 including Teams, SharePoint, Outlook and Office apps. It has features and tools that enhance the experiences you use everyday to connect experts to the data and capturing knowledge in innovative enhancements based on AI in ways never possible before.

If you’re one of the thousands of people looking to wrap your head around Project Cortex this is the right place. Maybe you understand it at a high level, but struggling with how to “sell” this transformative tool to the business. You know it’s a worthwhile investment, but can you say this is what you should be focusing on right now.

What is Project Cortex?

Project Cortex has many components and features in it’s AI tentacles of reasoned and gathered insights and providing highlighted topics, but the two main components of these AI based Knowledge services are first the Knowledge Center based on AI “Machine Learning” and second the Content Center based on AI Machine Teaching models, classifiers and extractors which allows humans to train the AI to improve content extraction and enable business automation. The third component is reinforcement which is an important components to both sides of this AI “brain.” Reinforcement supports seeding topics through acronmys, taxonomy, and new topics. The administrative interfaces of Project Cortex are designed for managing what it looks at including blocked topics, blacklisted or whitelisted content areas, and an interface for reviewing the recommended topics.

This infographic and article was written to help you understand the business value of Project Cortex and hopefully arm you with easy ways to explain it. Our companion webinar on June 2 will dive into each of these business value statements.

7 Innovative Ways Microsoft Project Cortex Delivers Business Value

Empower teams with knowledge and expertise in the apps you use everyday. Imagine being able to open up a document and have references back to explanations, other documents and experts who have a deeper level of knowledge and understanding! Everyone benefits when you can find answers without getting up from your desk to go find someone. The power of connecting topics like acronyms to a knowledge center of content is brilliant.
Advanced Artificial Intelligence to harness collective knowledge. AI is super powerful, it scales, it reasons, and gets better and better over time at extracting, grouping, filtering, clustering and ultimately building an incredible knowledge center of topics that can be tapped by the organization. With very little human interaction, AI will gather and automate so much of what can be automated and Project Cortex gives us the connections and tools to get at the semi structured content that is scatered across our data, collaboration, storage and content services repositories.
Connect people to knowledge and knowledge to people. Features built into Project Cortex help build ontologies and models, it knows how to group and cluster knowledge into a knowledge graph built to extend the Microsoft graph of people. It helps cluster the data into recommended Topics on Topic pages with experts, files, definitions, questions and answers. What it’s doing is helping make it easier to find answers to the questions you never knew you had. It provides contextual knowledge providing context clues in the productivity tools and one click answers including experts and data in a knowledge center backed by an enhanced knowledge graph and topic pages that are easy to use and designed to evolve over time like a wiki.
Streamline business processes with security, compliance, and automation. With the powerful content center, the business teaches the AI about the incoming data and content types of the organization. It learns to classify and model data through machine teaching and training. Powerful extractors and classifiers help extract fields, metadata, and structured content enabling business processes to be automated in ways never possible right in the Microsoft 365 platform where much of this data already lives. Power Platform tools such as PowerApps, Power Automate and Power Virtual agents can be used to streamline business processes for approvals, forms, applications, custom actions, and real engagement.
Discover information across topics platforms and connected data. As Project Cortex is looking at changes it has the ability to leverage trends, popularity, connections to help you keep on top of the topics that mean the most to you. You can follow Topics and be aware of what’s happening in new ways only possible through AI. The Microsoft graph has been extended to help connect not only files, objects, usage and activities, but expertise, topics, knowledge and relationships through ontologies which are easy to navigate and discover incredible insights on Topic pages.
Empower organizational agility, drive efficiencies and cost savings. A better connected organization is able move more quickly, it is able to be more transparent and work in the open. Through new capabilities as the workstreams are more automated, the business is able to make decisions faster eliminating waste and enabling cost savings opportunities through knowledge that is gathered. An organization can work more closely together and be more aware as silos of information are broken down through transparency and knowledge sharing in context.
Automate extraction and tagging improves search and discovery based on seeding topics from your taxonomies. It is true that metadata makes content more easy to find, filter and group. Taxonomies help us organize our content. Humans are very bad at tagging. They are inconsistent and yes, it’s a pain! They don’t want to do it. AI is very good at tagging and it is very consistent. The good news it gets better and better and a good taxonomy is the best medicine for ensuring a happier and healthier Project Cortex. You can seed the taxonomy, acronyms, and even directly add new topics into the knowledge center. Populating these is a best practice that helps help provide a more intelligent AI which improves search and a stronger ontology to work from which starts adding value even faster.

Project Cortex has a lot going on as the biggest thing happening in Microsoft 365 this year. It’s the culmination of a lot of technology innovation and integrates across all of the major workloads. It has promise to add the ability to add additional compliance as it classifies and extract content, it has the ability to boost business productivity and ramp up new employees looking for contextual clues in content. There’s so much in this package that adds real differentiation. This is knowledge management on steroids while democratizing AI and making it more accessible to all. Project Cortex is poised to reinvent business process automation with the Power Platform while infusing knowledge into the tools we use everyday.

Here’s the infographic in full form.

Download the 7 Innovative Ways Project Cortex Delivers Business Value infographic as a JPG or the Project Cortex Infographic as a PDF. Feel free to use this infographic in your efforts to help your business understand Microsoft Project Cortex. It’s creative commons share alike with attribution.

Join us on the upcoming Free Project Cortex webinar

Webinar: 7 Innovative ways Project Cortex Delivers Business Value

>>Register Now

What is Project Cortex? What value does it provide? What can AI do for my business? If you’re either trying to wrap your head around project Cortex or simply trying to understand the business value, this webinar is for you!

When: June 2^nd at 11am PDT/12pm MDT/1pm CDT/2pm EDT/7pm BST/8pm CEST

>> Register Now!

Speaker: Joel Oleson