Microsoft made bold moves this year to position its voice assistant Cortana for enterprise customers, analyst Raul Castanon-Martinez said, and is uniquely poised to overtake competitors Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant in the workplace.

Castanon-Martinez's firm 451 Research estimates voice user interfaces and digital assistants are among the top technologies organizations will adopt in the next two years – and Microsoft is in the best position to gain their business, he said.

"Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant dominate the market on the consumer side, but Microsoft has a leg up in the enterprise, given its dominant position with its productivity and collaboration product portfolios," Castanon-Martinez said.

Moving away from consumer

Competition in the workplace is the latest development in the relationship between Alexa and Cortana.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year said the company no longer sees Cortana as a competitor to Amazon's Alexa.

Amazon and Microsoft even partnered in 2018 to integrate Cortana in Amazon's Echo smart speaker and Amazon's Alexa into Windows 10 PCs.

Rather than compete with Amazon or Google in the consumer market, Microsoft recently killed off the Cortana app and introduced new Cortana capabilities to refocus Cortana on the enterprise market.

Those moves include integrating Cortana into Outlook Mobile, embedding Cortana (plus Alexa and any other virtual assistant) into its new Surface earbuds and integrating Cortana into office applications.

Alexa vs. Cortana in the workplace

"Microsoft has several factors that work in its favor to become the top intelligent assistant in the workplace," Castanon-Martinez said.

Cortana can work across Microsoft devices and services, including the company's bundle of business applications called Microsoft 365. Microsoft says Cortana can use information stored within Microsoft 365 to help employees with meetings, documents, and contacts, and suggest tasks.

While Alexa is popular among consumers, the company also markets the voice assistant to enterprise customers through Alexa for Business. Amazon's pitch is that Alexa can be used for things like reserving meeting rooms, starting conference calls, and allowing IT teams to build a voice interface for applications such as Salesforce.

Cortana could have a unique advantage in the workplace, Castanon-Martinez said, now that Microsoft has released a tool called Project Cortex. Project Cortex is what's called a knowledge management system, which basically means it's used for creating, sharing, and managing knowledge or information within an organization.

It's similar to a search engine, except it can surface information in real-time within any Microsoft application.

"Combined with the capabilities enabled by Project Cortex, this puts Microsoft in a strong position to help knowledge workers automate business workflows and integrate voice commands to get work done in the applications they use every day using Cortana," Castanon-Martinez said.