How o9 & Microsoft are Empowering Supply Chain Operations

o9, a leading enterprise AI software platform provider for transforming planning and decision-making, announced that it is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft by integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service applications with the o9 Digital Brain to improve the platform’s AI-powered planning capabilities.

Azure OpenAI Service provides REST API access to OpenAI's powerful large language models (LLM), including the GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and embeddings model series. These models can assist in content generation, summarisation, image understanding, semantic search and natural language-to-code translation.

How Microsoft will power up o9's digital brain

o9's Digital Brain, known for its ability to convert structured and unstructured data into knowledge using its Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) technology, will now leverage LLMs to digitise and connect ‘tribal knowledge’ from sources like Microsoft Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Teams into accessible expert recipes for planners. The AI service uses Azure OpenAI Service to translate natural language queries into a proprietary integrated business planning language (IBPL), enhancing semantic searches across the Enterprise Knowledge Graph.

“As companies look to continuously improve their supply chain operations and make processes more efficient, generative AI technologies and APIs will allow planning teams to leverage vast amounts of domain knowledge to make more informed business decisions in real-time,” says Chakri Gottemukkala, Co-founder and CEO of o9.

“We’re very excited to collaborate with Microsoft and its Azure OpenAI Service offering to open new possibilities in streamlining supply chain processes and breaking down siloed knowledge transfer capabilities for our joint customers.”

How the pair will improve supply chains

The integration aims to empower companies to leverage generative AI capabilities for faster decision-making and optimised planning, enhancing digital assistant workflows through an agent framework utilising Azure OpenAI Service's chat-completion and code-generation features, enabling intelligent automation within enterprise planning operations. 

This added functionality allows supply chain planners to apply the o9 Digital Brain’s domain knowledge to answer queries that inform real time decision-making.

“We are pleased to strengthen our long-standing collaboration with o9 to make generative AI capabilities accessible to more companies,” adds Dominik Wee, Corporate Vice President of Manufacturing & Mobility at Microsoft.

“By integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service into the AI-powered o9 Digital Brain platform, we can help manufacturers turn their data into action, allowing for faster decision-making and optimised planning.”

For example, when a user enters a query, the system will determine whether it requires a knowledge-based response or data retrieval. The system uses a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) model to find information that fits within the query’s parameters, responds to the user, and, in certain contexts, can also prompt a user to determine what next steps should be taken.

Over time, as the system gathers more domain knowledge and refines its query responses, it becomes capable of providing insights more efficiently, while also enabling hyper-automation based workflows.

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