Today WSJ technology columnist Christopher Mims offered insights on Why Microsoft Bought LinkedIn. Mims acknowledges there are reasons for skepticism about Microsoft’s purchase and the company’s ability to successfully recoup its huge investment. But Mims points out several golden opportunities that the LinkedIn property offers the storied Seattle tech giant.

Microsoft Office productivity suite can now leverage LinkedIn’s vast database of professional profiles. Enterprise professionals are online all the time anyway, so merging the productivity tools they use with their professional social network should result in positive synergies.

If Microsoft can somehow leverage a user’s rich LinkedIn identity across many Microsoft products and platforms, Mims suggests, that would open a treasure trove of insights, data, and even new products Microsoft could monetize. Mims mentions examples used by Satya Nadella to illustrate the possibilities, including having bios and other data on key participants prior to entering a sales meeting and getting feeds from LinkedIn experts when you’re working on a specific topic.

Mims mentions other integration and monetization possibilities, including leveraging LinkedIn data to improve Microsoft’s CRM software.

One possible upside from the acquisition that Mims doesn’t bring up is its potential impact on Cortana, Microsoft’s intelligent assistant. At their Build 2016 conference this spring, Microsoft didn’t miss an opportunity to emphasize its commitment to Cortana and the deep integration it intended the virtual assistant to have across all its product lines, as discussed in this article by Nate Swanner in The Next Web.

Imagine the possibilities if we could choose to give Cortana access to our LinkedIn profiles, our network of connections, the groups and other interests we follow, and our complete set of professional interests. Could Cortana leverage all this data to become the enterprise assistant many have dreamed about for years?

Perhaps Cortana could notify us of important information, such as a blog post dealing with our area of research that we shouldn’t miss, Maybe she could sort through all those job postings and let us know when there’s one we absolutely really should apply to. Maybe she could find people within our network who could help with a tough project, or even more intelligently suggest new connections.

Let’s not forget Microsoft’s recent entry into the world of bots with their Bot Framework. Cortana could one day communicate with LinkedIn users via as a conversational chatbot interface, or tap into LinkedIn insights during a chat session on Skype or some other platform.

It remains to be seen how or if Microsoft will integrate their intelligent assistant into the LinkedIn platform, but the possibilities for an enterprise Cortana with access to LinkedIn information are certainly compelling.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Microsoft, acquisitions, intelligent Assistants, Cortana, LinkedIn