Now here is some truly exciting news. Office 365 is looking to bring in Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives into three of its core products: Excel, Outlook and Word. Here at SumProduct, obviously we were most interested in the Excel initiative: Insights.

Insights is a new service that automatically highlights patterns detected in your data, helping you discover and analyse new insights such as trends, outliers and other useful analyses and visualisations. It will look for noteworthy trends in your data and provide quick summaries with PivotTables and charts. Because this feature is powered by machine learning, it will provide increasingly advanced analysis as usage grows.

It’s just been announced that it has been rolled out in Preview to Office 365 commercial subscribers enrolled in Office Insiders in the United States this month. We are jealous – we want it too. On behalf of the rest of the world, we promise not to make jokes about why Microsoft has to provide intelligence to the US first if we get it soon!

Ah well, SumProduct would like to say “adieu” now to many of our North American readers…