Microsoft has used its Ignite conference to unveil several products aimed at making Artificial Intelligence (AI) more accessible to organisations, developers and individuals.

The company has been using its chatbot solution for its own customer care in the US since earlier this year, with the virtual agent handling 650,000 sessions per week.

Now Microsoft is making the service available to 3rd parties via its Dynamics 365 AI platform, with HP and Macy’s confirmed as adopters via its Early Access Program.

The company says the Dynamics 365 AI solutions are designed to tackle high-value, complex enterprise scenarios and are tailored to existing processes, systems and data.

The first solution includes an intelligent virtual agent for customer care, an intelligent assistant for customer service staff and conversation management tools, all powered by Microsoft AI.

Microsoft claims the Australian Government Department of Human Services, HP, Macy’s and its own teams are already using the technology to improve overall customer satisfaction and handle more requests, in a shorter amount of time.

Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President of Developer Platform & Evangelism and Chief Evangelist at Microsoft, said:The promise of AI has always been to make lives better and to enhance the things we are doing today in a much more efficient and more powerful way. [Dynamics 365 AI] is focused on applying AI to transform the customer service function. We have seen that today’s customer care can be costly, painful and inefficient.

“Customers generally do not enjoy needing to engage with support, agents can have low job satisfaction working with frustrated customers, and support leaders are always under CFO scrutiny leaving few dollars for innovation. We envision an AI powered future where customers get immediate, accurate and 24/7 support. Customer interactions become a source of insight for innovation and drive upsell and loyalty. A future where support agents focus on richer, more valuable interactions. That’s the future we demonstrated at Ignite.”