Fujitsu and Microsoft have announced they will work together to develop artificial intelligence services for companies. The two companies will also be jointly working at new customer development, primarily of existing users of Office 365 and Microsoft 365, and aim to develop USD 2 billion worth of new business in the global market by 2020.
The new AI services will be based on Microsoft 365 integrated cloud service, combined with Fujitsu's Global Communication Platform, together with Fujitsu's AI technology, Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, and Microsoft AI platform services on Microsoft Azure. Internal trials on the new AI products will held in several countries The companies will then bring them out onto the Japanese market from the second quarter, and roll them out worldwide after that.
The two companies will be offering consulting services around the deployment of these AI services, as well as experience courses, to be held at the Fujitsu Digital Transformation Center located in Minato-ku, Tokyo, and the Microsoft Technology Center located in Minato-ku, Tokyo.
Fujitsu and Microsoft have been working together on corporate services since 2002, expanding their scope in time to include cloud and IoT for manufacturing. Since 2015, the two have been working in the field of work-style transformation, with Fujitsu, through technical assistance from Microsoft, deploying a globally unified communications platform based on Office 365 for its 160,000 employees. It then began using the experience gained from that internal deployment to make its Global Communications Platform available to about 1.5 million customers in Japan.
The new AI services will focus on creative work with high added value. It would take the big data generated through Microsoft 365, aggregate it and then let Zinrai AI prioritise tasks mentioned in the body of an email, for example, helping users handle high priority tasks. The services would also look to automate and streamline routine tasks using AI, combining Microsoft Cognitive Services and Microsoft Azure Bot Service with Fujitsu's conversational AI and the Zinrai natural language analysis API, offering a more human-centric user experience. This could help users set up a meeting for example: the conversational AI technology would be able to search for an open timeslot shared among the participants, and list candidate dates and times, meeting formats, and venues according to participant convenience. AI would also help find the right person for a job, with the right insights and network. Finally, it could analyse the drivers of productivity and motivation, by comparing people, teams and companies.