For tech enthusiasts who are interested in solving fundamental science, puzzles are provided with a globally distributed platform – Microsoft Research. The programs undertaken for the organization often focus on disruptive technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence. With its mission to underpin AI smarts in all of its products, the company is also seeking ways to merge innovations by Microsoft Research in the rest of the company.

In every certain way, the company is trying to become more and more innovative especially around its work concerning AI. Microsoft is also putting processes into place to attain such innovation.

The company is usually open about its processes and this year at Ignite, its focus was on such innovations only. Ignite is a yearly conference that typically focuses on technical IT management issues.

Similar to what Google used to do with its ATAP group at its I/O events, Microsoft, for the first time, has presented its cutting-edge innovation, that happens inside Microsoft, externally at a dedicated keynote.

To govern its AI innovation efforts, the company has created the Microsoft AI group led by Mitra Aziziard. The leader has been assigned the work to establish thought leadership in AI innovation space both internally and externally.

CEO Satya Nadella, in his keynote at Microsoft Ignite 2019, rolled out Project Cortex. This project uses artificial intelligence to create a knowledge network that reasons over an organization's data and automatically manages it. The previous name given to the project was 'Knowledge Network for Microsoft 365.'

The AI-fuelled Project Cortex is the first new M 365 service since the release of Microsoft teams two years ago. Efficient in its features, Cortex provides better management of content across teams and systems and converts organizational data into shareable knowledge in a user-friendly manner. It is built to boost efficiency.

Reportedly, this project started 10 years ago but that time it was merely a concept with undeveloped technologies. But today owing to breakthroughs in developing knowledge graphs or knowledge networks, it has become possible.

According to M 365 Content, Collaboration and Knowledge Director Dan Holme, Cortex is doing three major things in AI which are collecting, organizing and delivering knowledge.

Project Cortex recognizes content types, extracts important information and automatically organizes content into shared topics. It then creates a knowledge network based on the relationships among topics like projects, products, policies and customers, content and people.

The project is scheduled to launch officially in the first half of 2020 in Microsoft 365 with cloud business platform Dynamics 365.