Three ways you can use AI at your company now
Artificial intelligence is a wide-ranging set of technologies that are complicated to understand, let alone build. But it’s starting to work its way into existing software, which you may well already use in your office or business. Here are three products with AI-enabled features available now or soon.
OneDrive for Business and SharePoint
If you’re a Microsoft 365 user, AI is about to make your work a whole lot less annoying. Starting later this year, any video or audio files stored in either OneDrive for Business or SharePoint will use AI-based transcription, making it easy to search for the specific content you need – and ensuring you never need to type up notes yourself again. That comes alongside text recognition that means you will be able to search screenshots and snapshots of receipts or other documents by the text in the image – handy if you went to Nandos for a cheeky working lunch that you’re hoping to expense. The aim with all these tools is to make it easier to find untagged, unstructured data without hunting endlessly.
Box Skills
Box has been slowly adding AI-powered “skills” to its cloud-storage systems. At the end of last year, the company unveiled “Box Skills” with automated transcription for easier searching, similar to Microsoft’s plans for OneDrive. This summer, it revealed plans to expand that via IBM Watson, using that AI platform to analyse image data and automatically tag documents with concepts and keywords to make it all more searchable. “For lawyers working on time-sensitive matters, this could be the difference between making a court filing deadline and needing to file for a costly extension,” the company said at the time. It’s also automating translation of documents, handy for those working globally.
Zoho Zia
The cloud-based office suite rolled out a set of updates to its core package, Zoho One, that includes a new set of analytics tools as well as integration with its AI-based assistant, Zia. Zoho fans will know that Zia isn’t new, but it’s now moving away from its sales-assistant role – as part of the company’s CRM tool – to all of Zoho One. The key idea is that it will pull in data across apps to make suggestions. For example, it could mash together information from Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, combining it to reveal how many customers are looking for support, or examine the Zoho Books and Zoho People apps to reveal revenue-per-employee. The company is also planning to open up the Zia platform so businesses can build their own customer skills for the assistant.