If popular news outlets are to be believed, Microsoft and Salesforce have been in fierce competition recently, just perhaps not in the way that most people would think.
As with everything that we post on here, the answer has something to do with the AI space. More specifically, both companies have been actively deploying AI at scale in their marketing and customer relationship management departments in order to improve their overall performance as well as better do better with customers in terms of loyalty and other factors.
The latest news on this subject, back in September, was that Microsoft has added features to what it is already using AI for in its sales and customer service software in addition to what its HoloLens augmented reality goggles already do.
The Augmented Reality feature of these goggles comes from the fact that workers in certain specializations can use them to help them fix certain things, while being assisted in their efforts by Microsoft employees, who are actually far away in their own offices.
The idea is that these Microsoft employees will help by actually drawing guidelines in the field of vision of these goggles, especially before workers go into dangerous areas. Furthermore, the Chevron corporation has already signed on as a large user of this product, indicating a relatively high level of industry confidence in what Microsoft has produced.
On the other side of things, the utility of these googles, which are being called the “HoloLens,” extends beyond this remote assist feature. They are also able to create maps and plans of real places in a way that looks like the workers are already there when they are not. According to the Bloomberg piece below, Microsoft has also released a fully operational chat bot, which it claims is already able to handle calls just as well as customer service representatives. The company’s chief hope is that because of this ability, more efficiency will be generated in dealing with customer issues.
Despite this promising news, Bloomberg claims that based on traditional indicators, Microsoft still sits behind Salesforce in terms of the success of their AI-driven products. Because in Microsoft’s case, most of these are in their early stages, we will delve into the progress they make over time.
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