What is Intelligent Recommendations?

Article
01/18/2024

Intelligent Recommendations democratizes AI and machine learning recommendations through a codeless experience powered by the same technology that fuels Xbox, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Azure. Businesses can now provide relevant discovery for customers with this new, innovative AI for personalization and recommendations.

Intelligent Recommendations provides personalized product recommendations and telemetry insights using modern machine-learning algorithms. These recommendations and insights help you:

Significantly improve catalog navigation and item discovery.
Create upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Improve shoppers' experiences and product usability.

To get an overview of Intelligent Recommendations, watch this video:

Try for Free

Start a free three month trial when you create a 1 Model, 1 RPS account. To learn more, check out our QuickStart Guide.

Capabilities

Intelligent Recommendations helps companies drive better engagement, conversion, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Intelligent Recommendations is a general purpose service that offers one-of-a-kind, patented capabilities. It effectively drives desired outcomes out of the box such as “shop similar looks,” “shop by description,” “real time,” “session based”, Item based recommendations that can combine User interactions and Item Metadata. Businesses can promote and personalize any content type, such as sellable products, consumable media, documents, videos, and more.

Intelligent Recommendations provides the following capabilities for businesses:

Built-in world-class AI-ML delivers amazing, personalized results within minutes. Provide insightful, personalized, tailored, and more engaging customer experiences from existing user behavior data or item metadata, to create measurable lift in any business.
Easy to integrate and extend in any ecosystem and experience. Use codeless tooling guided by business intuition to easily try, build, and deliver any model customization. When paired with extensible APIs, this capability allows seamless integration into any ecosystem.
Trustworthy software service at scale. Microsoft is democratizing the machine-learning expertise, compliant platform, and high-scale capabilities, so businesses can focus on the next horizon of growth and innovation.
Win over customers with delightful discovery. Power hyper-relevant suggestions for any customer or product on Azure, ensuring a personalized journey every time a customer interacts with your business.
Highly composable, easily extensible. Highly adaptable to custom business scenarios and logic, based on input data and algorithm choice.

Business applications of recommender systems

Intelligent Recommendations enables businesses to automate relevant recommendations, including personalized results for new and returning users. It also interprets both user interactions and item or user metadata. In return, businesses receive tailored recommendations models based on their needs and business logic. Intelligent Recommendations frees companies from the tedious management of editorial collections. Instead, it helps drive engagement, run experiments, and build trust with consumers.

Intelligent Recommendations and Responsible AI

Microsoft is committed to the advancement of AI driven by principles that put people first and guard against abuse and unintended harm. Microsoft works incorporating Microsoft’s principles for responsible AI use, building content filters to support customers, and providing responsible AI implementation guidance to onboarded customers. The choices you make as a system owner influence the relevancy of recommendations for your customers. For information about how Intelligent Recommendations honor Responsible AI, you can download a copy of our Intelligent Recommendations Transparency Note .

Example supported scenarios

Intelligent Recommendations provides businesses with a toolkit of relevant scenarios, including:

Personalized recommendations for end users: Includes a list of unique content for a specific user based on their consumer habits and interactions. Businesses can recommend products, articles, videos, and more.
Similar items: Based on various signals (user interactions) or metadata (such as images, text, friends, or demographics). Intelligent Recommendations can recommend visually similar items in a catalog (for example, floral-patterned shirts) or show similar wine based on the description and taste notes.
Real-time and session-based recommendations for users: Each customer journey can now have unique recommendations, even new customers.
Basket completion: Shows complementary items for users based on what is already in their cart.

These interactions can have other metadata, such as the time of transaction, amount of money, duration of interaction, and more.

The following table describes the entire catalog of automated product recommendations available for you to integrate into your existing store experiences. Recommendations are further distinguished by the scenario. For these cases, certain lists have a selectable algorithm that diversifies the results returned. Learn more about our algorithms for these scenarios in our Modeling Q&A Guide.

Scenario	Description	Example
New	Returns a list of the newest products that have been recently assorted to channels and catalogs.
Popular	Returns a list of products ranked by the highest number of sales.
Trending	Returns a list of the highest performing products for a given period, ranked by highest number of sales.
Frequently bought together	Returns a list of products that are commonly purchased together (complementary) with the contents of the consumer's current cart.
People also like	Returns products for a given seed product based on consumer purchase patterns. Can be changed based on consumer action (purchase, views).
Picks for you	Returns a personalized list of products based on purchase patterns of the signed-in user. For an anonymous guest user, this list is collapsed.
Shop similar looks	Returns a list of products with visually similar images.
Shop similar by description	Returns a list of products with textually similar content descriptions.