As we reach the tip of 2023, nearly every industry is undergoing a collective transformation – discovering entirely latest ways of working because of AI advancements.
Microsoft Ignite is a showcase of the advances being developed to assist customers, partners and developers achieve the full value of Microsoft’s technology and reshape the best way work is finished.
As we round out the 12 months, there are strong signals of AI’s potential to remodel work. Take our latest Work Trend Index. Eight months ago, we introduced Copilot for Microsoft 365 to scale back digital debt and increase productivity so people can deal with the work that’s uniquely human. What everyone desires to know now could be: Our research, using a mixture of surveys and experiments, shows the productivity gains are real:
- 70% of Copilot users said they were more productive and 68% said it improved the standard of their work; 68% say it helped jumpstart the creative process.
- Overall, users were 29% faster at specific tasks (searching, writing and summarizing).
- Users caught up on a missed meeting nearly 4x faster.
- 64% of users said Copilot helps them spend less time processing email.
- 87% of users said Copilot makes it easier to start on a primary draft.
- 75% of users said Copilot “saves me time by finding whatever I would like in my files.”
- 77% of users said once they use Copilot, they don’t want to provide it up.
Today, we’ll make about 100 news announcements that touch on multiple layers of an AI-forward strategy, from adoption to productivity to security. We’ll zoom in on a number of key areas of impact below.
Rethinking cloud infrastructure
Microsoft has led with groundbreaking advances like partnerships with OpenAI and the mixing of ChatGPT capabilities into tools used to go looking, collaborate, work and learn. As we speed up further into AI, Microsoft is rethinking cloud infrastructure to make sure optimization across every layer of the hardware and software stack.
At Ignite we’re announcing latest innovations across our datacenter fleet, including the newest AI optimized silicon from our industry partners and two latest Microsoft-designed chips.
- Microsoft Azure Maia, an AI Accelerator chip designed to run cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads similar to OpenAI models, Bing, GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT.
- Microsoft Azure Cobalt, a cloud-native chip based on Arm architecture optimized for performance, power efficiency and cost-effectiveness for general purpose workloads.
- Moreover, we’re announcing the overall availability of Azure Boost, a system that makes storage and networking faster by moving those processes off the host servers onto purpose-built hardware and software.
Complementing our custom silicon, we’re expanding partnerships with our silicon providers to supply infrastructure options for purchasers.
- We’ll be adding AMD MI300X accelerated virtual machines (VMs) to Azure. The ND MI300 VMs are designed to speed up the processing of AI workloads for top range AI model training and generative inferencing, and can feature AMD’s latest GPU, the AMD Instinct MI300X.
- The preview of the brand new NC H100 v5 Virtual Machine Series built for NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, offering greater performance, reliability and efficiency for mid-range AI training and generative AI inferencing. We’re also announcing plans for the ND H200 v5 Virtual Machine Series, an AI-optimized VM featuring the upcoming NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU.
Extending the Microsoft Copilot experience
Over the past 12 months we have now continued to refine our vision for Microsoft Copilot, a set of tools that help people achieve more using AI. To transcend individual productivity, we’re extending Microsoft Copilot offerings across solutions to remodel productivity and business processes for each role and performance – from office employees and front-line employees to developers and IT professionals.
Microsoft is the Copilot company, and we imagine in the long run there might be a Copilot for everybody and for every part you do. A few of our Copilot-related announcements and updates include:
- Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365: This month, Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available for enterprises. Already customers like Visa, BP, Honda and Pfizer and partners like Accenture, EY, KPMG, Kyndryl and PwC are using Copilot. We proceed to bring latest value, based on learnings from our Early Access Program and other research channels. The brand new Microsoft Copilot Dashboard shows customers how Copilot is impacting their organization – with insights like those present in our Work Trend Index. We’re introducing latest personalization capabilities that help Copilot offer responses which can be tailored to your unique preferences and role. To empower teamwork, latest features for Copilot in Outlook enable you prep for meetings, and through meetings, latest whiteboarding and note-taking experiences for Copilot in Microsoft Teams keep everyone on the identical page. And customers who need it could possibly now use Copilot during a gathering without transcription retention. Once you give Copilot a seat on the table, it goes beyond being your personal assistant to helping all the team – take a look at the Microsoft 365 blog for updates across the suite including PowerPoint, Excel, Microsoft Viva and more.
- Microsoft Copilot Studio: AI transformation begins by tapping into a company’s unique data and workflows. Microsoft Copilot Studio is a low-code tool designed to customize Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 by integrating business-critical data and construct custom copilots for internal or external use. Copilot Studio works with connectors, plugins and GPTs, allowing IT teams to steer Copilot to one of the best data sources for specific queries.
- Microsoft Copilot for Service: The latest copilot to supply role-based support helps businesses speed up their AI transformation of customer support. Copilot for Service includes Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and helps extend existing contact centers with generative AI. In customer interactions, agents can ask Copilot for Service questions in natural language and receive relevant insights based on data sources from knowledge repositories, resulting in faster and smarter resolutions.
- Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides: Combining the facility of generative AI and mixed reality, this copilot helps frontline employees complete complex tasks and resolve issues faster without disrupting workflow. Available first on HoloLens 2, the hands-free copilot will help service industry professionals use natural language and human gestures to supply interactive guidance through content and holograms overlaid on the equipment.
- Microsoft Copilot for Azure: That is an AI companion for IT that simplifies day-to-day IT administration. Greater than only a tool, it’s a unified chat experience that understands the user’s role and goals, and enhances the power to design, operate and troubleshoot apps and infrastructure. Copilot for Azure helps IT teams gain latest insights into their workloads, unlock untapped Azure functionality and orchestrate tasks across each cloud and edge.
- Bringing Copilot to everyone: Our efforts to simplify the user experience and make Copilot more accessible to everyone starts with Bing, our leading experience for the online. Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply develop into Copilot. With these changes, when signed in with a Microsoft Entra ID, customers using Copilot in Bing, Edge and Windows will receive the good thing about industrial data protection. Over time, Microsoft will even expand the eligibility of Copilot with industrial data protection to much more Entra ID (formerly Azure Energetic Directory) users at no additional cost. Copilot (formerly Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise) might be out of preview and develop into generally available starting Dec. 1. Learn more here.
Reinforcing the information and AI connection
AI is just pretty much as good as the information that fuels it. That’s why Microsoft is committed to creating an integrated, simplified experience to attach your data to our AI tools.
Microsoft Fabric is an element of that solution. Available now, Microsoft Fabric reshapes how teams work with data by bringing everyone together on a single, AI-powered platform that unifies all those data estates on an enterprise-grade data foundation.
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric also integrates with Microsoft Office and Teams to foster an information culture to scale the facility of information value creation throughout the organization. We’ve made greater than 100 feature updates since Construct and expanded our ecosystem with industry leading partners, and have over 25,000 customers including Milliman, Zeiss, London Stock Exchange and EY using it today.
Unlocking more value for developers with Azure AI
We proceed to expand selection and suppleness in generative AI models to supply developers probably the most comprehensive selection. With Model-as-a-Service, a brand new feature within the model catalog we announced at Microsoft Construct, pro developers will have the opportunity to simply integrate the newest AI models, similar to Llama 2 from Meta and upcoming premium models from Mistral, and Jais from G42, as API endpoints to their applications. They can even customize these models with their very own data while not having to fret about organising and managing the GPU infrastructure, helping eliminate complexity.
With the preview of Azure AI Studio, there’s now a unified and trusted platform to assist organizations more easily explore, construct, test and deploy AI apps – multi functional place. With Azure AI Studio, you’ll be able to construct your personal copilots, train your personal, or ground other foundational and open models with data that you simply bring.
And Vector Search, a feature of Azure AI Search, is now generally available, so organizations can generate highly accurate experiences for each user of their generative AI applications.
The brand new GPT-3.5 Turbo model with a 16K token prompt length might be generally available and GPT-4 Turbo might be in public preview in Azure OpenAI Service at the tip of November 2023. GPT-4 Turbo will enable customers to increase prompt length and convey much more control and efficiency to their generative AI applications.
GPT-4 Turbo with Vision is coming soon to preview and DALL·E 3 is now available in public preview in Azure OpenAI Service, helping fuel the subsequent generation of enterprise solutions together with GPT-4, so organizations can pursue advanced functionalities with images. And when used with our Azure AI Vision service, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision even understands video for generating text outputs, furthering human creativity.
Enabling the responsible deployment of AI
Microsoft leads the industry within the protected and responsible use of AI. The corporate has set the usual with an industry-leading commitment to defend and indemnify industrial customers from lawsuits for copyright infringement – the Copilot Copyright Commitment (CCC).
Today, Microsoft takes its commitment one step further by announcing the expansion of the CCC to customers using Azure OpenAI Service. The brand new profit might be called the Customer Copyright Commitment. As a part of this expansion, Microsoft has published latest documentation to assist Azure OpenAI Service customers implement technical measures to mitigate the chance of infringing content. Customers might want to comply with the documentation to reap the benefits of the profit.
And Azure AI Content Safety is now generally available, helping organizations detect and mitigate harmful content and create higher online experiences. Customers can use Azure AI Content Safety as a built-in-safety system inside Azure OpenAI Service, for open-source models as a part of their prompt engineering in Azure Machine Learning, or as a standalone API service.
Introducing latest experiences in Windows to empower employees, IT and developers
We proceed to speculate in and construct Windows to empower people to navigate the platform shift to AI. We’re thrilled to introduce latest experiences in Windows 11 and Windows 365 for IT and employees that unlock latest ways of working and make more AI accessible across any device. To further our mission of creating Windows the house for developers and one of the best place for AI development, we announced a bunch of recent AI and productivity tools for developers, including Windows AI Studio.
Announcing NVIDIA AI foundry service
Aimed toward helping enterprises and startups supercharge the event, tuning and deployment of their very own custom AI models on Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA will announce their AI foundry service running on Azure. The NVIDIA AI foundry service pulls together three elements – a set of NVIDIA AI Foundation models, NVIDIA NeMo framework and tools, and NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing and services – that give enterprises an end-to-end solution for creating custom generative AI models. Businesses can then deploy their models with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software on Azure to power generative AI applications, including intelligent search, summarization and content generation.
Strengthening defenses within the era of AI
The threat landscape has evolved dramatically in recent times, and at Microsoft Ignite we’re introducing latest technologies across Microsoft’s suite of security solutions to assist defenders make the world a safer place.
Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR (previously Microsoft 365 Defender) might be combined to create the industry’s first Unified Security Operations Platform, with embedded Security Copilot experiences. With built-in generative AI, it’s a single, powerful experience focused on protecting threats at machine speed and aiding defenders by simplifying the complexity of their environment.
Moreover, the expansion of Security Copilot embedded inside Intune, Purview and Entra will help IT administrators, compliance units and identity teams simplify complex scenarios. In Entra, identity administrators can quickly troubleshoot identity access. In Purview, data security alerts deliver wealthy context to assist resolve problems faster. In Intune, IT administrators can use “what if” evaluation to maintain business running while improving governance and compliance.
And that’s only a snapshot of what we’ll be announcing at Ignite. As a reminder, you’ll be able to view keynote sessions from Satya Nadella, Rajesh Jha and Jared Spataro, Charlie Bell and Vasu Jakkal, and Scott Guthrie live or on-demand.
Plus, you’ll be able to get more on all these announcements by exploring the Book of News, the official compendium of all today’s news, and the product blogs below.
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Watch the keynotes and get all the newest photos, videos and more from Microsoft Ignite
The net event for Microsoft Ignite
With a systems approach to chips, Microsoft goals to tailor every part ‘from silicon to service’ to fulfill AI demand
Introducing latest Copilot experiences to spice up productivity and elevate customer experiences across the organization
Simplify IT management with Microsoft Copilot for Azure – save time and get answers fast
Introducing Microsoft Copilot Studio and latest features in Copilot for Microsoft 365
Announcing general availability of vector search and semantic ranker in Azure AI Search
GPT-4 Turbo with Vision on Azure OpenAI Service
How Azure AI Content Safety helps protect users from the classroom to the chatroom
Elevating the developer experience on Windows with latest AI tools and productivity tools
Microsoft unveils expansion of AI for security and security for AI at Microsoft Ignite