At last year’s Ignite
conference, Microsoft delivered a flood of announcements—among them was Project
Cortex, the first new service in Microsoft 365 since the launch of Microsoft
Teams. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Cortex can provide users with insights
and expertise right in the apps they rely on every day. Project Cortex enables companies
to organize and make sense of collective knowledge, and it can empower people
and teams to do what they need to do to compete, but faster—that is, learning,
upskilling and innovating.
Indeed, Cortex seems like a
natural next step. Along with SharePoint and Teams, Cortex has the potential to
propel organizations forward, toward a better way of working, collaborating,
learning, and innovating.
But, before companies can see those benefits, they must first gain an understanding of how Cortex works.
Project Cortex uses AI to make sense of your organization’s structured and unstructured content, including information that’s created and shared in Microsoft 365. Cortex recognizes content types, extracts important information, automatically tags it, and organizes it into topics. Specifically:
Project Cortex’s knowledge and expertise will be available to users within the apps they use daily. Here’s how:
Because it’s powered by SharePoint and built into Microsoft 365, Project Cortex enables organizations to manage their information with built-in security, privacy and compliance. Access to topics and other information will depend on each user’s permissions, and administrators will be able to exclude information, determine if certain topics can be published for broader visibility, and block specific topics.
Project Cortex is currently in preview, and Microsoft says it will be available in the first half of 2020. Still, that’s no reason to sit around and wait. Business users, without a doubt, will need guidance using Cortex—after all, without training and support for users, the technology cannot deliver on its promises. Organizations that start working on their adoption strategy now will be better equipped to benefit from the technology once it’s available.
Image: Illustration from PhD thesis, modified. Attribution 2.0 Germany (CC BY 2.0 DE)