AI Builder: If data is the new oil, AI is the new electricity to make your data work but AI is nothing without data.

Having been in the AI Industry since 1997 after doing one of my two postgraduate degrees in this area, I am perpetually amazed by how accessible AI is to everyone. However, AI depends on data to work.

If data is the new oil, AI is the new electricity to help organizations to really make your data work.

Credit: I am inspired by Andrew Ng’s insight that AI is the new electricity and you can find Andrew Ng’s full post here. I am standing on the shoulders of a giant!

Microsoft are powering their AI Builder with new features to make AI more accessible, but to also address issues with the underlying data. For example, the team are introducing a new set of prebuilt models that add intelligence to the Power Platform and are accessible via Power Apps and Power Automate. For business users, having prebuilt AI models means they don’t have to gather data, build, or train their models.

Here’s a quick summary of the new AI Builder features that are available in preview at Ignite:
• Key phrase extraction identifies the main talking points in a text document
• Language detection identifies the predominant language of a text document
• Text recognition, which uses OCR detection of embedded printed and handwritten text
• Sentiment analysis, which detects positive or negative sentiment in social media, customer reviews, or any text data

AI is nothing without data.

The Microsoft team are addressing this issue by creating new features that will help to identify and fix missing data. For example, AI Builder will also be powering AI in Dynamics through Customer Insights to predict missing data in customer segments and SharePoint, through the extraction of metadata and business processes.

Here is a video from Microsoft, which neatly summarizes the features. Let me know in the comments if you try it out!

To summarise, AI accessibility is important but so is the data. If you’d like to learn more on how to get started from the business perspective, please take a look at my 8 ‘C’s framework here.