Lunchtime talk 3 with Rob Bath on AI for Information Governance in Microsoft365

The third lunchtime talk on AI for Information Governance in Microsoft365 took place on April 5. Please find the recording below

Abstract: While artificial intelligence has been claimed to be ‘just around the corner’ for several decades now, over the past few years there have been clear indications that the technology is starting to be used in real-world scenarios.

Within the Information Governance community AI is certainly being anticipated as somewhat of a panacea. With most organisations having inadequate processes surrounding the way they store and manage information throughout its lifecycle, AI is starting to be seen as the solution that will clean up the existing mess and sort out everyone’s ‘digital heaps’.

Microsoft, alongside other tech giants has recently been investing heavily in starting the bring the potential of artificial intelligence into their cloud collaboration platform, Microsoft 365. We’ve already seen several information management applications being introduced into the platform, which leverage the AI provided by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services.

In this session, Rob Bath outlines the functionality provided by some of the existing AI-driven governance tools that can be found within Microsoft 365. These include:

• Trainable Classifiers – uses AI to automatically classify content in your tenant that matches the positive examples that you’ve provided.

• Viva Topics – a knowledge management extension, which automatically creates a knowledge network out of your existing content.

• Microsoft Syntex – a quickly maturity suite of tools, which use AI to automatically identify, classify and extract metadata from specific types of content. The various models that Syntex provides will be outlined, including Structured, Unstructured & Freeform Document Processing.

During this session, Rob Bath will outline his views on each of these capabilities as they currently exist, while also exploring the next steps that he sees on the horizon, especially the application of AI for auto summarisation of content within Microsoft 365.

Speaker: Robert Bath
Having overseen some of the UK’s most extensive records management architectures in Microsoft 365, Rob Bath is a leading solution architect and subject matter expert of the platform’s retention capabilities. Currently serving as the IRMS’ Digital Director, Rob aims to help to bridge the gap between Information Management and IT.