Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: Content Services Management: Project Cortex: Part 1

Project Cortex is the latest and newest content service for knowledge management in Microsoft 365, and it is SUPER EXCITING! Being cloud-based, Project Cortex is easily and proactively accessible by users in SharePoint as it helps to organize content across an organization.

What is Project Cortex?

Project Cortex is an “interactive knowledge repository” of customer content. Being interactive, it leverages AI to intelligently ingest content in a variety of forms from analyzing documents and content to allowing subject-matter experts to teach the system how to understand semi-structured information extracted from conversations, videos, and meetings.

Project Cortex reinvents enterprise content management by leveraging the cloud and AI whereby users create a knowledge network. What is a knowledge network? A knowledge network is a result of creating a union between content, people, and work processes together. Every user in an organization will have the opportunity to access knowledge and to upscale themselves. Knowledge is the key for organizations to gain a foothold, advance, and maintain a strong presence in today’s competitive markets.

How does it Work?

There are many new technologies and apps across Microsoft that many users would benefit from. Project Cortex brings knowledge to the users through the use of these new technologies by integrating the many apps that are available to reach the greatest number of the organization’s audience. Behind the scenes, Project Cortex builds on the intelligence of Microsoft Graph, a variety of Microsoft AI technologies, and leading content services of SharePoint. It brings these together while providing a simple and seamless experience to the user.

With the increase in apps and platforms available, Project Cortex allows organizations to connect to external repositories and systems by using advanced AI to automate content capture, categorization, management, and protection of information with intelligent security and compliance.

Basically, Project Cortex applies AI to reason over structured and unstructured content in an organization. Advanced cognitive services recognize content types, extract the important information, and then automatically organize it into topics along with tags.

What Types of Content can Advanced Cognitive Services Recognize?

1. Text and Image Recognition: identify objects in uploaded or scanned images. The library is vast as it on over 10,000 attributes and text extracts from PDFs and images;

2. Forms Processing: important information can be pinpointed in forms. This information can be extracted as metadata; and

3. Machine Teaching: as opposed to machine learning, machine teaching has experts training AI similarly as one would train a person to read and tag information in documents. With machine teaching, experts can train AI to recognize information in unstructured documents, including contracts, proposals, and training materials, which contain various formatting styles and vastly different types of content. Machine teaching is powered by LUIS and through machine teaching, a reusable model is created based on a small subset of sample documents.

Project Cortex creates and shares content in Microsoft 365 by categorizing the content based on the type and tags it with extracted metadata. The content is securely collected and includes conversations, files, and recorded meetings and videos.

Next, AI applies advanced topic mining logic to identify topics and relate content to those topics. The content can be extracted from Microsoft 365 or from externally connected systems. Customers, projects, policies, products, and procedures are a few examples of important knowledge that can be created by AI as topics. These topics are knowledge entities, a new object class in Microsoft Graph. By connecting knowledge entities, experiences, knowledge, and people, a knowledge network is created.

Project Cortex is the next step in true knowledge collaboration across an enterprise. Microsoft is taking a huge leap in AI and integrating it with human actions to provide value to organizations. This value is knowledge which is the basis for communication and collaboration. By empowering individuals with knowledge, individuals will band together, collaborating and bringing successful solutions and results in the projects that they are tasked with.

In our next article, we will explore Project Cortex in greater detail.