AI has become a transformative force, promising to reshape how corporate functions operate. For the past year, Microsoft, along with many tech industry leaders, has been emphasizing AI’s potential. This article, the first in a series, aims to provide concrete examples and showcase the tangible benefits. We will explore how the Microsoft Digital team, Microsoft’s internal IT organization, is collaborating with partners to employ AI. The goal is to accelerate growth and enhance operational efficiencies across critical areas like HR, legal, and real estate. By presenting real-world outcomes, we hope to provide our customers with inspiration, a roadmap, and potentially, a solution to follow.
Within Microsoft Digital, the team that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft’s digital experience, we work closely with our corporate function partners across the company. These include teams from HR and legal to real estate. All are tasked with achieving more while optimizing costs, maintaining or improving productivity. Our team’s mission is to uncover solutions that support these goals, and AI has become a key driver. It plays an essential role in modifying workflows, raising operational efficiency, improving user productivity, maintaining regulatory and corporate compliance, and streamlining data-driven decision-making. Over the past year, we have seen how AI can revolutionize internal corporate functions by automating repetitive and time-consuming operational tasks. One of the first examples is our internal project: an AI-powered document lifecycle management platform.
“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate. From saving valuable time for our legal professionals, to optimizing building occupancy, to helping our HR professionals support employees in the hybrid workplace, to enabling many self-service experiences for our employees; we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful,” states Patrice Pelland, partner software group engineering manager for HR & CELA in Microsoft Digital.
Document Management Reimagined
Our new AI-powered platform is designed to revolutionize end-to-end document management, empowering our corporate functions teams. Capabilities extend from creating templates, authoring documents, and facilitating collaboration to organizing seamless workflows, providing secure storage, and managing records. This system leverages AI to boost operational efficiencies, reduce expenses, and ensure accurate compliance in any document-based process.
“This platform addresses the critical need for end-to-end document management across various Microsoft verticals,” explains Mohit Chand, principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “It was created to streamline processes like digitizing documents and addressing the common pain points that typically makes this activity take months to complete.”
The Microsoft Digital team developed the document lifecycle management platform using six core principles:
- Automation empowerment: Automate document management to increase productivity and efficiency.
- Seamless integration: Integrate with Microsoft 365 and Azure for a smooth user experience.
- AI-driven innovation: Use cutting-edge AI technology to enhance functionalities in search and analysis.
- User-centric design: Focus on intuitive interfaces that simplify complex functionalities.
- Scalable flexibility: Adapt to different organization sizes and processes.
- Cost efficiency: Reduce operational costs by optimizing document processes.
Transforming the Document Lifecycle
The team utilized Microsoft 365, Azure Open AI, Azure Cognitive Services, and Microsoft Purview to provide the following system capabilities:
- Template digitization and management: Digitize and manage templates by creating and modifying snippets and operational data fields.
- Secure and controlled editing: Easily manage and update templates and snippets with controlled workflows, ensuring only approved and published templates are used.
- Efficient document drafting: Start with standard templates and dynamically assemble documents, incorporating required metadata and content snippets seamlessly in Word.
- Streamlined approval processes: Automate review and approval workflows, integrate eSignatures, and keep everyone updated with real-time notifications and status changes.
- Smart ingestion and storage: Automatically ingest documents, perform validation checks, and securely store, tracking all changes and updates.
- Intelligent content analysis: Extract and use metadata and content snippets for enhanced document classification, improving search capabilities and document retrieval using both keyword and natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
- Automated compliance enforcement: Apply retention labels, manage document lifecycles, and enforce policies to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory standards.
“We aimed to reduce the digitization process from three to six months to under fourteen days,” says Andrew Voss, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It was a ‘North Star’ goal, and I’m pleased that the implementation has now been successfully achieved for all our onboarded processes so far.”
Xbox’s Contract Management Transformation
The Xbox team was among the first to test the new platform. They targeted the automation of a frequent contract type, which is critical for onboarding new games into the Xbox ecosystem. Historically, this process was manual, relying on non-digitized templates and redundant data entry across multiple systems, consuming 1,800 hours annually.
The manual contract creation process was time-consuming, error-prone, and delayed the onboarding of new content, impacting service level agreements (SLAs). The implementation of the new solution has saved the Xbox team over 1,600 hours, representing an 88% time savings in the contract generation process. Contract processing time decreased from 1,800 hours to just 158 hours per year!
“The amount of business impact and return on investment that we’ve been able to deliver by partnering with the Microsoft Digital team has been outstanding,” states Hoss Hostetler, a senior service engineer at Xbox. “The ability to automate initial contract generation from configured templates through to sending out signatures and getting notified of fully signed contracts via application programming interfaces (APIs) has been absolutely game-changing for our team.”
Encouraged by the initial outcomes, Xbox is preparing to expand the solution to automate two additional standard contracts. Anticipated time savings are over 600 hours annually.
“Our collaboration with Xbox highlights the effectiveness of this solution in optimizing complex business processes,” comments Alpa Jain, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “As Xbox continues to extend its use across a wider range of contract types, we are committed to introducing new technological advancements that will contribute to the platform’s growing autonomy, adaptability, and sophistication.”
Extending to Customers Through SharePoint Premium
While the AI-powered platform initially focused on internal Microsoft Corporate Functions teams, many of its features will be available in SharePoint Premium. SharePoint Premium is Microsoft’s advanced content management and experiences platform for customers and brings AI, automation, and enhanced security to content experiences, processing, and governance. This synergy with the SharePoint team exemplifies Microsoft Digital’s internal innovation being leveraged for external product development.
The transfer of knowledge, functionality, and insights from the internal document management product and the Microsoft Digital team will greatly improve the effectiveness of the SharePoint Premium product for our customers. “This is a unique case where Microsoft Digital, acting as Customer Zero, developed a product to address the needs and challenges our internal corporate function customers encounter, and that solution is now being incorporated into an external customer-facing product,” says Bidyadhar Patra, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For us, this approach demonstrates a new method of leveraging internal needs for broader product development.”
By embracing AI, corporate function leaders can digitize templates, streamline reviews, and effectively manage their documents, greatly improving efficiency. The document lifecycle management platform, developed within Microsoft Digital, provides an inspiring example of this. The time to act on AI is now to maximize business results and return on investment.
