Azure Machine Learning Gets Continued Investment

• The Azure Machine Learning service, Azure’s general-purpose machine learning offering, is receiving significant updates in several functional areas.
• The updates will help organizations build AI-based applications, which are becoming popular.
• Most of the updates are in preview.

Azure Machine Learning has been available for many years, but it is receiving substantial investment as machine learning (ML) and AI technologies have gained significant momentum over the past year.

Overview

Azure offers several services that developers (and those with other roles who work with ML, such as data scientists) can use to leverage ML (often called AI) in applications. (See the sidebar “Azure’s Machine Learning Offerings”.)

Azure Machine Learning allows customers to execute mathematical algorithms on data to draw conclusions based on known results in similar data and to categorize data. This predictive analytics capability can be used for purposes such as determining product recommendations, equipment maintenance requirements, and financial credit scores. It can also be used as the basis for generative AI, which drives applications such as chat agents that communicate with users in natural language.