The innovative capabilities of AI are advancing exponentially, and Microsoft is making unprecedented investments to help our partners seize the incredible opportunity of this generational moment. We want to help every partner go to market and drive demand for the wide array of AI-based solutions, services, and devices they’re creating.
In our previous posts, we explained how Microsoft AI empowers every partner to thrive in the digital economy and highlighted examples of partners who are infusing Microsoft AI into their IP and services, which is helping customers optimize manual processes, reduce costs, modernize operations, and improve data management. In this post, we look at how indirect partners are leveraging Microsoft AI to enhance value-added services for their partners and customers and how device partners are innovating their products with AI across the edge.
Some of these partners are showcased in the AI Transformation Partner Playbook, which provides an overview of Microsoft AI technology, as well as guidance in skilling, innovating, marketing, and co-selling with Microsoft. We created this playbook to show the art of the possible with Microsoft AI by sharing real-world best practices and experiences from partners who have already built successful AI-based practices.
Providing managed AI access with data security
To stay competitive and realize efficiency and productivity benefits, companies need to adopt generative AI quickly without compromising the security of their private business data. Insight Technologies—a multiple 2023 Microsoft Partner of the Year winner, including for Solution Assessments—is enabling secure, end-to-end transformations through a comprehensive portfolio of solutions.
The company created Insight Lens™ for Gen AI Accelerator, a value-added service offering in the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace that helps businesses unlock generative AI’s potential to drive value and provide better data visibility and analysis. Insight Lens for Gen AI Accelerator quickly deploys the power of GPT in a secure, private solution that includes cost management and performance insights. Additionally, this Microsoft Azure-based solution creates a scalable instance of generative AI within customer environments and leverages the Insight Lens platform to gather data from multiple sources and process it into a modern data warehouse. Insight also designs, builds, and deploys the infrastructure needed to support the generative AI platforms.
Insight Lens is just part of the company’s IP development strategy to expand the value of generative AI for clients. With an in-house OpenAI center of excellence, Insight also is using the tool to streamline its internal data analysis and decision-making.
Delivering AI solutions that excel at the edge
Crayon, a multiple Microsoft Partner of the Year winner based in Norway, has delivered more than 300 AI projects to date. As detailed in our AI Transformation Partner Playbook, the company has demonstrated hands-on experience in bringing AI to the Intelligent Edge.
When DNV GL Maritime, a leading provider of risk management and quality assurance services to the maritime and energy industries, wanted to address challenges with AI, it needed help in getting started. Among its challenges was the company’s help desk, which was overwhelmed with responding to 80,000 support cases per year.
Crayon helped DNV train machine learning algorithms to process and interpret texts using classification models on 250,000 archived emails. Over time, the algorithms accurately routed 82 percent of customer support messages to the right department—achieving the same accuracy rate as employees did when they manually routed messages. This reduced the manual workload by up to 70 percent. Machine learning and AI solutions also addressed scheduling inefficiencies for survey plans and inspections.
To help advance its AI expertise, Crayon runs a Global Data & AI Center of Excellence with locations in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. Employing more than 200 data scientists, the group is focused on advancing knowledge of AI to help customers get value from data with scalable AI solutions.
Leveraging AI for intelligent devices and better meetings
Microsoft device partners like Lenovo and Yealink are leveraging innovative new AI capabilities to enable new features and improve meeting experiences.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s is the first commercial notebook powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 compute platform. It also was one of the first devices to debut Windows Studio Effects, a collection of AI-enabled tools that uses the computer’s neural processing unit (NPU) to create background blur, noise suppression, and other effects during video calls. The computer’s enhanced camera option allows AI computer-vision technology with always-on user detection, attention-tracking for smart power management, and zero-touch login. It can even automatically adjust where your eyes are looking in a video call to make it appear as if you’re always making eye contact with the camera.
While providing these effects at a higher quality thanks to AI, Window Studio Effects also uses vastly less power to enable them, extending the computer’s battery life. Offloading these highly compute-intensive effects to the NPU is more than 100 times more efficient than running them on the CPU alone.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon platform and Microsoft Windows Studio Effects also power the Yealink SmartVision 60 center-of-room camera, which can make Teams Rooms more collaborative and intelligent. The camera uses AI to create individual video feeds and visual labels for each in-room participant, helping everyone feel more engaged in meetings.
Additionally, the SmartVision 60’s Multi-Stream People Feed feature gives everyone an individual frame in the gallery to help remote participants feel closer to people in the room. Built-in voice recognition ensures in-room participants are correctly identified in the transcript, enhancing the accuracy of the AI-based Microsoft M365 copilot and intelligent recap in Teams.
Discover what’s possible through partnership
Microsoft partners are innovating with AI across the cloud and edge. If you are interested in building your own Microsoft AI-centric practice, we invite you to join the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program to help you get started building, selling, and going-to-market with Microsoft AI.
We also invite partners to explore our Device Partner Center to learn more about resources related to licensing, technical questions, sales, and marketing to help you build, sell, and market Microsoft devices and solutions. You also can register to receive up-to-date information to enable you to grow your business with Microsoft.