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Artificial intelligence (AI) will be playing a key role in Microsoft’s Office plans, according to Rajesh Jha, EVP of the company’s Office product group.

Asked what the role of AI will be in his division’s initiatives going forward, Jha said at the UBS Global Technology Conference in San Francisco Nov. 16 that “it’s huge.” He told the conference that when people say they “do AI, the first thing you’ve got to wonder is do they have unique data — do they have unique signals?” With Office, he explained: “We have billions and billions of data points as our users interact with our products. They are signaling us. When I share a document with you … that’s a signal. If I email [or] if somebody sends me email and I dwell seven or eight minutes on that e-mail versus my typical minute or two, that’s a signal.”

Office 365 software treats all that learned information “as a customer’s data and customer’s signals,” he said, adding: “So, then what do we do? Now we’ve got lots and lots — billions of endpoints of data and signals. Then, we bring in machine learning and AI techniques and natural language processing to give back [to] the end user or the customer unique insights.”

As an example, he said: “Let’s say you’re editing a document in Word and you’re preparing a report and then you think maybe I want to reuse a chart from a report I had seen somewhere in my work group and you didn’t quite remember who had shared this with you, but you want to use one of those charts. So, what we have today as a feature now in Office 365 is called Word Tap. So, you’ll literally one-tap onto the ribbon and we use the AI technique to bring all the relevant documents that you’ve seen in the past that may be interesting to the content that you’re writing now, and we auto-bring those things into your right pane.

“You can scroll in the right pane. You can tap on the chart that you see, and boom, it’s in your Word document. And so instead of going — leaving Word, going and doing a search, find the filter you searched on, remember who sent you that thing, the AI signal brings it back into Word.” There are many examples of those types of uses for AI, he said.

With AI, Microsoft is “helping the users get time back, get value back — whether in terms of efficiency or automating the tasks,” he said. But Jha said he’s also “excited about AI from the IT’s perspective,” adding that one other place that AI is now used in Office 365 is in security. He told the conference that Microsoft sees “ton and tons of some malware thrown at our customers — and I see that in Office.” He added: “My colleagues see that in Directory in Azure; we see that in Windows. We triangulate all of these signals and then we overlay that in giving our customers, the IT guys, insights into what the threats are — who are the most targeted users, which devices may have been compromised, suggesting protections.”

Of AI, he concluded, that “when you have lots of data and lots of signals, then you have the opportunity to use … AI to give value back to the users and customers; I’m really excited about what we are doing here and we’ve got a bunch of ideas here.”

As part of Microsoft’s efforts to expand its AI initiatives, the company announced Aug. 22 that it signed a deal to buy Genee, a Mountain View, Calif.-startup that runs an AI-powered scheduling service. Microsoft planned to integrate Genee into Office 365 to “accelerate intelligent experiences” in the software suite, Jha said at the time in a blog post.