Dive Brief:

• Microsoft is planning to develop AI-based tools designed to aid enterprise productivity, according to a Computerworld report.

• Julie Larson-Green, chief experience officer for Microsoft Office, said it has already added AI-powered features to the latest versions of Office but that it will build even more AI into its tools and products soon.

• The eventual goal, according to Larson-Green, is to create "smarter software assisted by artificial intelligence and 'decomposable' documents that are easier to find.”

Dive Insight:

Improving enterprise productivity is a growing focus for several tech companies, particularly where it involves technologies such as machine learning that can create a more fluid cross-application search that could help save users’ time. 

Larson-Green said that components that make up documents will be broken apart and searchable in the future, which would allow a user to find specific things without having to manually dig through files.

"I think documents will decompose into their parts," said Larson-Green during the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco Tuesday. "So you can ask, 'What’s the last chart I sent to Emily? I don’t remember where that’s at'—and I can get that back."

Microsoft's plans are similar to the new enterprise search engine Google unveiled earlier this week. Google's Springboard acts as a digital assistant, searching for information within all of a company’s Google apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Contacts and more.