During the past year, the pace of AI adoption has accelerated significantly, ushering in groundbreaking advances, discoveries and solutions with the potential to help address humanity’s biggest problems. We see this as a massive platform shift, akin to the printing press, which was not just an invention, but a technology that shaped a new economy. Alongside the incredible promise and benefits of AI, we recognize the resource intensity of these applications and the need to address the environmental impact from every angle.

In line with our commitment to responsible AI and our ambitious sustainability commitments, we’re determined to tackle this challenge so the world can harness the full benefits of AI. There are three areas where we’re deeply invested and increasing our focus. The first is optimizing datacenter energy and water efficiency. The second is advancing low-carbon materials, creating global markets to help advance sustainability across industries. And the third is improving the energy efficiency of AI and cloud services, empowering our customers and partners with tools for collective progress.

1. Optimizing datacenter energy and water efficiency

Over the past decade, our quest to innovate across every part of our cloud infrastructure to deliver more sustainable cloud services has led to many changes across how we design, build and operate our datacenters. As we continue this work, two of the biggest challenges we’re addressing are energy management and water intensity.

Energy management

The energy intensity of advanced cloud and AI services has driven us to accelerate our efforts to drive efficiencies and energy reductions. In addition, we have expanded our support to grow the availability of renewable energy, both for our own operations and for the communities in which we operate.

To continue driving improvements in datacenter energy management, we work to reduce peak power, safely harvest unused power, increase server density in existing datacenters through intelligent utilization and power-aware virtual machine allocation, and drive efficiency all the way to our chips and code.

With recognition of the need to continue bringing more renewable energy online, we currently have more than 135 renewables projects in our power purchase agreement (PPA) portfolio globally, a powerful mechanism to support the global energy transition. In the way we design, build and operate our datacenters, we’re focused on the path to 100% zero-carbon electricity 100% of the time.

We’re also working on solutions that enable datacenters to provide energy back to the grid to contribute to local energy supply during times of high demand. For example, in Ireland we built batteries into wind turbines for a wind energy project to capture energy when the turbines over-perform and deliver that energy to the local grid. In Denmark, excess heat created in a Microsoft datacenter will provide heat to the local community, producing enough heat to warm around 6,000 local homes. Both are examples of our work to use our data centers as a source of electricity to relieve pressure on local electric grids.

Water intensity

Currently, many datacenters rely on water for two reasons: directly for cooling, and indirectly for electricity generation. Although at a global scale total water consumption by datacenters is relatively small, weighing in about 0.1% of national water use in the U.S.¹ we recognize the impact of datacenter operations on water-stressed areas, and are working to reduce this impact and design solutions that advance our progress on the road to water positive.

We take a holistic approach to water reduction across our business, from design to efficiency, looking for immediate opportunities through operational usage and, in the longer term, through design innovation to reduce, recycle and repurpose water. We’ve found success in using direct air instead of water to cool datacenters, harvesting rainwater, and procuring reclaimed water from utilities to reduce our dependence on fresh water. For example, in our Sweden datacenters, we will use a process called free cooling, a simple, cost-effective method that results in a 30% reduction in energy costs and 90% less water usage than standard systems.

2. Advancing low-carbon materials

For our future datacenters and to help drive progress industry-wide, another way we can advance progress is by helping to accelerate markets for low-carbon building materials. As a sector, building materials such as steel and cement are currently some of the highest contributors to the carbon cost of new construction, together producing an estimated 13.5% of global carbon emissions.²

Innovations in green steel³ and lower-carbon cement are rapidly emerging, however, these markets are still nascent and need significant investment to scale up and bring supply online.

With our $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund, we’re investing to hasten the development and deployment of new climate innovations, especially for underfunded sectors and supply-constrained markets like lower-carbon building materials. For example, we are investing in solutions such as H2 Green Steel to expand market supply of near-zero carbon steel⁴ which can deliver up to 95% lower CO2 emissions than conventional steel. We are also evaluating use of near-zero carbon steel in our own building materials and equipment supply chains.

Similarly, we’re working to broaden availability of low-carbon concrete and other construction materials through commercial projects and collaboration with the largest datacenter companies in the world. In Washington state, our pilot program utilizes concrete alternatives like biogenic limestone and fly ash and slag with the goal of lowering the embodied carbon in concrete by more than 50% compared to traditional concrete mixes. With these investments, we aim to facilitate the commercialization of materials that can make an outsized impact on carbon reduction, for our own construction and the broader industry.

3. Improving energy efficiency of AI and cloud services

Reducing the energy needed to power AI and cloud services up front is another critical component of the solution. We’re working to support developers and IT professionals with tools to optimize models and code, exploring ways to reduce the energy requirements of AI, and harnessing the power of these advanced technologies to drive energy breakthroughs.

As a founding member of the Green Software Foundation, we collaborate with other industry-leading organization to help grow the field of green software engineering, contribute to standards for the industry and work together to reduce the carbon emissions of software. Across our cloud services, we’re working to ensure IT professionals have the information they need to better understand and reduce the carbon emissions associated with their cloud usage.

As AI scenarios increase in complexity, we’re empowering developers to build and optimize AI models that can achieve similar outcomes while requiring fewer resources. Over the past few months, we’ve released a suite of small language models (SLMs) called “Phi” that achieve remarkable performance on a variety of benchmarks, matching or outperforming models up to 25x larger. Now available in the Azure AI Studio model catalog, Phi-2 offers a compact model for research and development or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks.

We’ve learned that the complex sustainability challenges we face today are best addressed through multidisciplinary, multi-sector collaboration, and energy breakthroughs are no exception. We recently collaborated with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) using advanced AI models to find new materials that can reduce reliance on traditional battery materials such as lithium. The team screened over 32 million materials, discovered 500,00 stable candidates, and synthesized one promising candidate to a working prototype, shortening a process that can take years to a matter of days.

These highlights provide a glimpse into our work to build and operate cloud services more sustainably, advancing solutions that can reduce the future impact of AI. Our ambitious 2030 targets to become carbon negative, water positive, zero waste and to protect biodiversity require continued innovation across every aspect of our operations, and we’re committed to sharing what we learn along the way. Stay tuned for more on this topic in the months ahead.

Learn more:

To learn more, visit the Microsoft Sustainability website and read the whitepaper Accelerating Sustainability with AI. To learn how we’re integrating AI into our sustainability solutions, watch the digital event This is AI . . . for Sustainability.

 

 

Sources in footnotes:

¹Data centre water consumption | npj Clean Water (nature.com)

²Cement and steel — nine steps to net zero (nature.com)

³What is green steel and how can it help us reach net zero? | World Economic Forum

⁴Iron & steel – IEA

 

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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Artificial intelligence is a defining technology of our time. Over the past year we’ve begun to see how it can unlock profound possibilities for individuals, organizations and society — and it’s clear that we have only scratched the surface.  

For Microsoft and our partners across industries, AI offers a generational moment to reimagine the capabilities that software and services can provide. Our goal at Microsoft is to innovate and democratize our breakthroughs in AI — and the opportunity for partners is far greater than the sum of AI technologies themselves.  

For this State of the Partner Ecosystem moment, we’ll share how partners are seizing the opportunities that AI offers and making its promise real for organizations across the world. We’ll highlight partners who are building AI-powered solutions to innovate across industries, including three partners who are: 

• Helping people and organizations achieve, in months, what once might have been a multi-year endeavor. 
• Innovating in higher education by streamlining work in marketing, admissions and student advising. 
• Empowering real-time decision making at the point of impact across the supply chain. 

First, we’ll look at how Microsoft is empowering our partners to innovate, build and differentiate with AI through a combination of technology advancements, an industry leading partner program and true market differentiation. During this time of AI transformation, there has never been a greater time to be a Microsoft partner, and our partners are fully embracing this new opportunity.

Unprecedented momentum: the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program 

Microsoft is driving innovation in generative AI, with new Azure OpenAI Services and an expanding portfolio of Copilot offerings. Today, we offer the most comprehensive commercial portfolio in the market with AI infused everywhere from the cloud to the edge, and across every solution area.  

Partners can tap into all this innovation through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. Through research, partnership, and new investments, we are bringing partners the capabilities and benefits to help them empower customers of every size, in every industry.  

Just as AI capabilities are infused throughout our technology portfolio, AI benefits are wired throughout the partner program. And today we are announcing enhancements to enable partners to create an AI-powered future, including:  

• The expansion of AI skilling, boot camps and events 
• New benefits packages with product enhancements like Microsoft 365 developer, increased Azure credits, and Visual Studio enterprise, to support AI practice growth 
• New designations for partners to establish certified AI solutions or ways to differentiate themselves. 

This builds on the incredible momentum we’ve seen since we announced the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program last July. In fact, the Microsoft AI Transformation Partner Playbook outlining new possibilities with AI has been downloaded over 35,000 times. Our free go-to-market asset, the Era of AI marketing campaign-in-a-box, has been downloaded over 13,250 times.  

Today more than 13,000 partners building solutions with Microsoft Azure AI, serving more than 53,000 customers with generative AI capabilities alone. Our partner ecosystem is rising to meet demand with a nearly 250 percent increase in the number of generative AI-related partners in the past eight months. 

When you add that up, it points to a year of exponential innovation and growth for partners, and we are continuing to develop new ways to support this growth curve. Here are some specifics on the updates we are making to the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program in the coming months.

Program updates, including new designations and certifications for partners

Solutions partner designations and specializations are one way we help partners differentiate themselves in the market. Designations and certifications help to verify skills and validate the effectiveness of solutions so customers can find the partner and technology that’s right for their needs. 

To obtain designations and specializations, partners must meet skilling and performance requirements, and provide customer evidence to demonstrate their capabilities — and partners have embraced this opportunity with Microsoft AI. We have seen 58 percent growth since last July in partner designations for Azure Data and AI solutions, and 172 percent growth in partner specializations for the Build and Modernize AI apps with Azure and AI and Machine Learning designations.  

To build on this momentum, today we are announcing several new designations for partners across software, services and training. 

A new set of designations for partners who develop software: Solutions Partner with certified software 

Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Solutions Partner[i] with certified software[ii] designations. Certified software designations provide an opportunity to better connect with customers and to unlock additional benefits from Microsoft.  

By becoming a Solutions Partner with certified software, partners can differentiate their solution, increase their discoverability in the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, connect with more customers, and take advantage of marketing and branding resources designed to help accelerate revenue growth in a rapidly expanding market.  

There are two pathways to become a Solutions Partner with certified software: solution areas and Industry AI:  

• Solution areas. To become a Solutions Partner[i] with certified[ii] software for solution areas, a partner’s software must meet readiness and technical requirements and demonstrate a track record of customer success. Solution area designations include Azure, Business Applications, Modern Work and Security.  

• Industry AI. To become a Solutions Partner with certified software for Industry AI, in addition to the requirements above, a partner’s solution must also meet an industry-specific challenge aligned with the Microsoft Industry Cloud scenarios and include a Microsoft AI capability. Currently, partners can attain the following certified software designations for Industry AI: Healthcare AI, Retail AI, Financial Services AI, Manufacturing AI and Sustainability AI.  

More than 75 partners with solutions across all five industries and from around the world have participated in the public preview of the designation, including Netherlands, Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Norway, Ireland, India, Canada and the United States. There are 49 solutions currently certified with an additional 27 in progress.

New Training Services Solutions Partner designations 

We are also releasing new designations for partners who provide training services. Starting April 10, partners who qualify for Solutions Partner for Training Services designations will be able to complete enrollment.  

Qualified partners will receive designation-specific badges distinguishing their services from other partner types within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. These badges greatly enhance customer discoverability, making it easier for them to identify partners with unique expertise and a proven track record of delivery quality training. 

New Small and Medium Business (SMB) paths for Azure and Security Solutions Partner designations 

Based on partner feedback, we are investing in our small- and mid-sized business ecosystem and creating a pathway for partners who focus on delivering solutions for SMB customers across Azure Data & AI, Digital & App Innovation, Infrastructure and Security.  Later this year, we will introduce dedicated SMB paths for Solutions Partner designations for Azure​ and Security, adding to our existing SMB paths for Business Applications and Modern Work. 

For partners who serve smaller businesses, this creates an exciting new opportunity — a new way to qualify for existing Solutions Partner designations, giving more partners access to the products, go-to-market resources, support, and advisory benefits that come with these designations. The new SMB paths will differentiate partners who can meet customer needs and drive customer success by validating those partners’ capabilities in our Azure and Security solution areas.  

Additional details for the SMB paths for Azure and Security will be available in the coming weeks. 

An update on the Support Services Solutions Partner designation  

Today we are announcing that partners with a Solutions Partner for Support Services designation will soon receive exclusive new benefits, including paid support agreement pricing and access to a knowledge-based library of curated materials designed to help partners resolve incidents quickly and efficiently, in addition to customer-facing badging. General availability and more details will come later this year.

Equipping partners through AI skilling  

Rapid innovation with AI technology has created an increased demand for partner skilling for both pre-sales and technical roles. Responding to partner feedback, we have launched a breadth of Microsoft AI-focused skilling workshops, boot camps and training events. Since July 2023, more than 350,000 partner personnel have also become skilled pre-sales and technical depth learners for Microsoft AI, Copilot and Fabric. 

Microsoft AI partner training roadshow 

In March, we launched an in-person training series called the Microsoft AI Partner Training Roadshow to target six cities globally through June, across India, the Bay Area, Germany, Japan and Brazil. Our inaugural event in India had 1,500 attendees from 40 partner organizations with 96 percent of participants agreeing that the event was valuable and 94 percent indicating they gained new skills to be successful in their roles. The roadshow is focused on in-person training on AI, targeting 270 partner organizations, and includes a keynote session highlighting the unique value of Microsoft AI, Fabric and Copilot for Microsoft 365, followed by a sales excellence and technical excellence tracks. 

Copilot for Security upcoming release and partner skilling 

To support our partners and customers in securing their businesses, we are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security in all commerce channels, including Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) channel, on April 1, 2024. We initiated an active Copilot for Security partner community at Inspire last year, which has since grown to more than 1,000 participants. Over the past six months, Microsoft has engaged with more than 100 Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in a Copilot for Security Partner private preview. Upcoming security skilling events include:  

• Microsoft Copilot for Security Partner Boot Camp – Helps participants understand how Microsoft Copilot for Security enables security analysts to move at the speed and scale of AI by augmenting the human experience. Starting April 16. 

• Threat Protection and Incident Response with Microsoft Sentinel Workshop – Participants will learn how to deploy and connect this SIEM and SOAR solution to different data sources and   use intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence capabilities for attack detection, threat vulnerability, proactive hunting and threat response. April 22-25. 

New AI skilling for sales/pre-sales and technical depth  

• Azure OpenAI Workshop – Designed to help participants deepen their understanding of Azure OpenAI Services, this is tailored for developers and data scientists aiming to do more with less. Starting April 16. 

• Microsoft Fabric Workshop – Participants will learn more about this comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering and data integration, all in one place. And learn how to implement this easy-to-use product that is designed to simplify analytics needs of enterprises. Starting April 8. 

• Copilot for Microsoft 365 Pre-Sales, Deployment and Adoption Bootcamp – Participants will explore how Copilot for Microsoft 365 provides real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills. Starting March 26. 

New Partner Benefits 

On Jan. 22, Microsoft launched three new benefits packages: Partner Launch Benefits, Partner Success Core Benefits and Partner Success Expanded Benefits. Purpose-built to meet the varied needs of partners at different stages of growth and help partners scale their business through a portfolio of key Microsoft benefits, the packages are available for purchase at a significant discount for partners.  

These refreshed benefits follow partners through every element of the partner journey: from creating their solutions, to go-to-market, to differentiating their organizations in the marketplace. Beyond the three new packages, partners can continue to pursue Solutions Partner designations and specializations to differentiate their organizations in the Microsoft  Commercial Marketplace and access additional product and support benefits. Partners who develop software IP can also tap into ISV Success, a collection of resources that help accelerate software solution development and amplify sales.  

The feedback on the new packages has been incredibly positive, and we continue to listen to partner feedback and explore new ways to invest in our partners.  

Update on Copilot for Cloud Solution Providers  

On Jan. 16, Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available across all sales channels, including through our Cloud Solution Providers. General availability of Copilot for M365 opened a wealth of immediate opportunities for partners to deliver end-to-end services to help customers achieve a smooth transition into an AI-powered organization.  

One Microsoft distribution partner, TD SYNNEX, has already engaged more than 2,000 partners in its enablement journey for Copilot for Microsoft 365, demonstrating the industry’s eagerness to harness the potential of generative AI. With more than 500 individuals certified in the program, TD SYNNEX provides its partners with the technical and operational expertise, solutions and resources to help partners leverage Copilot’s capabilities and gain a competitive edge. 

From vision to reality: partners are delivering AI solutions around the world 

We are committed to building AI capabilities across the Microsoft cloud, guided by our Responsible AI principles. Our partners enable us to scale and deliver those technologies to every organization and every person on the planet. We anticipated some remarkable innovation in this area, and in just over a year we have been amazed by the results and impact partners are achieving around the world. 

Here are some of the ways Microsoft partners are developing differentiated solutions and helping customers transform their business processes across industries.  

Accenture, together with Avanade, is working with Amadeus to develop a generative AI-powered interactive assistant using Microsoft technologies, including GPT models from Azure Open AI Service, Microsoft 365 and Teams, to allow corporate travelers to orchestrate complex travel-related tasks using only natural language.  

Anthology Inc is providing AI-powered innovation for higher education through its student success and lifecycle engagement solution that is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365. 

The Atlassian product suite — including Confluence, Trello, Jira and Atlas — improves productivity and collaboration. As part of the Microsoft Copilot Early Access Program, Atlassian enhanced its apps to empower users to track tasks, resolve issues and manage projects seamlessly.  

Companies use Blue Yonder for end-to-end supply chain management. Blue Yonder, built on Azure, uses AI and ML to provide real-time decision-making power and workflows that help businesses fulfill orders and respond quickly to shifting market conditions.  

CallMiner’s AI-driven platform empowers organizations to ingest and analyze every conversation that happens in the contact center and beyond to uncover insights, act, and drive transformational change.  

Datadog integrates with all major Azure services, including Azure OpenAI Service. Now customers can better optimize costs, troubleshoot issues and monitor the performance of their AI-powered applications.  

EY worked with Microsoft to create a generative AI chatbot to answer payroll questions from employees across the 159 countries and 49 languages that EY clients encompass.  

Icertis Contract Intelligence Copilots are providing customers with assistive and generative natural language capabilities that cut through legalese and turn contracts into interactive assets that deliver insights and automation to drive businesses forward.   

Intapp is enabling thousands of financial and professional services firms to harness the intelligence of their professionals through AI-powered software solutions.  

LTI Mindtree is leveraging generative AI, powered by GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service, to accelerate the migration of legacy apps from on-premises to the cloud. Their methodology automates the creation of new cloud architecture, code conversion and documentation generation, resulting in an average reduction of 46 percent in migration time.   

Sight Machine works with manufacturers to make their businesses stronger, more sustainable and more resilient. To better support manufacturers’ data accessibility needs, Sight Machine used Azure OpenAI Service to harness generative AI (GPT-4) and to develop Factory Copilot. 

Veeam Software, recently announced an extended, five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to innovate new solutions for protecting customers by integrating Veeam’s product family and Microsoft Copilot and AI services. 

Looking ahead: unlimited opportunities for AI innovation 

We have seen tremendous progress as partners seize the moment and turn the promise of AI into a reality around the world. Today, we have moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale in ways no one could have imagined just a few months ago. 

Microsoft is infusing AI across every layer of its tech stack, creating new ways to power organizations and industries, and unlocking new opportunities to deliver transformational value to customers.  

Key to making all this a reality are the capabilities, services, product innovation and depth of industry knowledge delivered by our partners. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our partners enable us to deliver on that commitment, in every customer segment, every geography, every day.  

 

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[i] “Solutions Partner” refers to a company that is a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program and may offer software, services, and/or solutions to customers. Reference to “Solutions Partner” in any content, materials, resources, web properties, etc. and any associated designation should be not interpreted as an offer, endorsement, guarantee, proof of effectiveness or functionality, a commitment or any other type of representation or warranty on the part of Microsoft. All decisions pertaining to and related to your business needs including but not limited to strategies, solutions, partner selection, implementation, etc. rest solely with your business.   

[ii] A certification is (A) specific to the solution’s interoperability with Microsoft products and (B) based on self-attestation by the solution owner. Solutions are only certified as of the date the solution is reviewed. Solution functionality and capability are controlled by the solution owner and may be subject to change. The inclusion of a solution in marketplace and any such designations should not be interpreted as an offer, endorsement, guarantee, proof of effectiveness or functionality, a commitment or any other type of representation or warranty on the part of Microsoft. All decisions pertaining and related to your business needs including but not limited to strategies, solutions, partner selection, implementation, etc. rest solely with your business. 

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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, shared the below communication today with Microsoft employees.

I want to share an exciting and important organizational update today. We are in Year 2 of the AI platform shift and must ensure we have the capability and capacity to boldly innovate.

There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond. Let us use this opportunity to build world-class AI products, like Copilot, that are loved by end-users! This is about science, engineering, product, and design coming together and embracing a learning mindset to push our innovation culture and product building process forward in fundamental ways.

In that context, I’m very excited to announce that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan are joining Microsoft to form a new organization called Microsoft AI, focused on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research.

Mustafa will be EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI, and joins the senior leadership team (SLT), reporting to me. Karén is joining this group as Chief Scientist, reporting to Mustafa. I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions.

Karén, a Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Inflection, is a renowned AI researcher and thought leader, who has led the development of some of the biggest AI breakthroughs over the past decade including AlphaZero.

Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft. They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making.

At our core, we have always been a platform and partner-led company, and we’ll continue to bring that sensibility to all we do. Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI. We will continue to build AI infrastructure inclusive of custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI’s foundation model roadmap, and also innovate and build products on top of their foundation models. And today’s announcement further reinforces our partnership construct and principles.

As part of this transition, Mikhail Parakhin and his entire team, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge; and Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team will move to report to Mustafa. These teams are at the vanguard of innovation at Microsoft, bringing a new entrant energy and ethos, to a changing consumer product landscape driven by the AI platform shift. These organizational changes will help us double down on this innovation.

Kevin Scott continues as CTO and EVP of AI, responsible for all-up AI strategy, including all system architecture decisions, partnerships, and cross-company orchestration. Kevin was the first person I leaned on to help us manage our transformation to an AI-first company and I’ll continue to lean on him to ensure that our AI strategy and initiatives are coherent across the breadth of Microsoft.

Rajesh Jha continues as EVP of Experiences & Devices and I’m grateful for his leadership as he continues to build out Copilot for Microsoft 365, partnering closely with Mustafa and team.

There are no other changes to the senior leadership team or other organizations.

We have been operating with speed and intensity and this infusion of new talent will enable us to accelerate our pace yet again.

We have a real shot to build technology that was once thought impossible and that lives up to our mission to ensure the benefits of AI reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly. I’m looking forward to doing so with you.

Satya

The post Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Each quarter, I share a collection of customer and partner stories from around the world that highlight the incredible technological advancements shaping the future of industry. As a partner of choice, we are committed to helping organizations accelerate AI Transformation to unlock opportunities and realize material business value. Our ability to bend the curve on AI innovation is allowing us to live truer to our mission than ever before: to empower our customers and partners to achieve more.

I am sharing an additional blog this quarter because we are seeing so much inspiring AI Transformation and pragmatic innovation with our customers. Their impressive results are benefiting employees, businesses, and industry, and I would like to expand on a handful of stories that crystallize the tangible impact AI is having on organizations that embrace it:

Digital financial services firm Ally Financial is leveraging Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service to reduce manual tasks for its customer service associates, freeing up time for them to reinvent how they engage with customers. Previously, associates needed to take notes and write summaries after every call, which competed with the amount of time and attention they could give to their customers. By using generative AI to automate manual tasks, Ally empowered its associates to deliver a better, more personal experience while protecting vital customer data through a production-ready solution in only eight weeks. The new solution has cut associates’ post-call effort by 30% while capturing critical information automatically with over 85% accuracy — even finding details they may have previously missed in their conversations.

Global travel technology provider Amadeus deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 to help empower its workforce, beginning with early adoption across a subset of employees. More than 90% of these employees are regularly using Copilot to save time drafting emails, summarize meetings and actions, and more effectively search for information across the web and internal assets. Now, the company is rolling out the solution across its wider workforce so employees around the world can benefit from its time-saving options to focus on more strategic tasks.

Global life sciences leader Bayer is using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to deliver productivity and collaboration benefits across its Crop Science, Pharmaceutical and Consumer Health divisions. With more than 700 use cases identified, they are already seeing a big impact from its implementation. Copilot is helping to summarize communications and expedite the search for information, saving employees hundreds of hours. Bayer also developed the Model Store — a Copilot plugin leveraging the Microsoft Teams platform — to search for information using natural language to close communication gaps between data scientists and laboratory researchers, locate the source of data faster, reduce barriers to finding information and help collaborate with the expert source. For example, Copilot helped a U.S. researcher identify a predictive model already developed by a researcher in Germany, preventing a duplicate model from being developed and saving two to three months of work.

Multinational brewer Carlsberg unified its developer organization around an integrated platform using GitHub Enterprise — reducing their toolchain from six tools to a single platform. This allowed for the seamless and effective integration of GitHub Copilot, which enhanced the synergy in their workflow and removed development roadblocks by providing valuable coding suggestions. Copilot adoption has been overwhelmingly positive, enhancing productivity across teams and proving to be a valuable learning tool for cloud developers by easing the learning curve required when working with new languages and platforms.

One of the top media companies in the world, Dentsu, is using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to revolutionize workflows, support its talent and help rethink its services across a growing number of channels. By reducing and removing tactical tasks, employees can focus on the strategic part of their work to collaborate creatively. Employees are saving 30-40 minutes a day using Copilot for tasks such as summarizing chats, generating presentations and building executive summaries. They are reinvesting their time to focus on more thoughtful work without interruption, while having content served up within their workflows. Employees are now averaging 30-60 minutes less time on first drafts of messaging and 80% say they have a very positive view of Copilot.

Food industry giant Grupo Bimbo turned to Microsoft’s Azure AI technologies — including Azure OpenAI Service, Form Recognizer and Cognitive Search — to develop a copilot solution in two weeks that helped employees make queries about company policies. The copilot for internal control and risk management employs advanced AI technology to seamlessly convey information in a synthesized format, complemented by readily accessible reference links that pinpoint the exact sources of global policy. It can also respond in all languages where the company has collaborators and operations, no matter what language the query is originally made in. The primary benefit for the company has been its ability to promote compliance across 34 countries. Now, they are replicating the technology to build a copilot product that empowers all individuals and departments. For example, the copilot is helping their communications team draft emails, craft content for social media, propose images for marketing products, translate text and more.

U.S. healthcare organization Providence faced a deluge of incoming messages that required triage and interfered with the time providers needed to spend with their patients. Providence clinicians, informaticists and AI specialists developed a tool based on Azure OpenAI Service named ProvARIA to classify messages, direct them to the appropriate caregiver and free providers to focus on patient care. Providence piloted the tool with four separate clinics representing 27 different doctors and nurse practitioners, funneling all electronic communications into a centralized inbox in a single office. A group of medical assistants worked together to address the messages, processing about 10,000 messages in one month with a 35% improvement in turnaround time. Other groups within Providence enthusiastically joined the pilot, introducing efficiencies that allowed clinics to manage messages with fewer medical assistants — a boon when the limited number of qualified medical assistants is in high demand. Providence medical assistants are now processing 5,000 messages per day, covering 145 Providence clinics and 650 providers. The most profound outcome is one that cannot be measured, and one that had not been anticipated: caregivers have gained peace of mind knowing they have the time and focus to help all patients who need it.

One of the largest digital telco companies in Asia, Telkomsel, needed a way to ensure its customer support team was not overwhelmed by sharply rising demand. The company upgraded a virtual assistant within two weeks with Azure OpenAI Service to improve interactions across its 159 million mobile subscriber base and 8.5 million fixed broadband customers. The virtual agent is helping customer support agents deal with more complex issues without the distraction of routine inquiries and is reducing burnout from facing long call queues. By infusing light-hearted humor and emoticons into the conversation, the new virtual assistant “Veronika” intelligently combines the latest information from multiple FAQs to supply more insightful answers with a personal touch. Telkomsel has scaled the solution to handle up to 5 million transactions per month while delivering the robust security it requires. Since its introduction, self-service interactions have risen from 19% to 45%, with a 140% increase in average messages per user. Customer service agents who used to handle 8,000 calls a day now handle 1,000, freeing up time to increase their cross-selling efforts.

Leading telecommunications and technology company Telstra has scaled its AI adoption following promising pilots of generative AI solutions with front-line team members. Leveraging the Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service capabilities, two pilot programs were developed: One Sentence Summary and Ask Telstra. Using Azure OpenAI Service’s large language models, One Sentence Summary transforms customer notes, interactions and transactions into a concise summary of a customer’s recent history and status. The solution enhances the efficiency and quality of interactions, reducing the need for customers to repeat information. Ninety percent of employees using the tool saved time and increased effectiveness, resulting in 20% less follow-up contact. Ask Telstra enables employees to search the company’s extensive internal knowledge base quickly and easily for information, powered by Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search. Employees were able to gather information faster and more easily for customers, with over 80% agreeing the technology had a positive impact on customer interactions. Now the company is rolling out the pilots across all contact centers and store teams throughout 2024.

To pursue its digital transformation efforts, global multi-energy company TotalEnergies launched Microsoft Copilot to provide employees with a secure AI chat solution based on internal data. After a successful test phase across 300 employees, the company also launched Copilot for Microsoft 365 for their employees, resulting in improved operational efficiency and user adoption. The company is also focused on a new program to support and enhance employee skilling to get the most out of these new AI tools, including implementation of low code-no code solutions with Microsoft Power Platform.

To alleviate an overwhelming workload for doctors and medical staff in major cities across Vietnam, VinBrain introduced an AI platform into hospital workflows: DrAid. Operating on an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data system, DrAid harnesses Microsoft technologies —including Azure OpenAI Service —to aid physicians in diagnostic processes, treatment planning and the efficient management of burgeoning medical records. This platform is the first and only AI-driven X-ray diagnostic tool in Southeast Asia to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification, propelling Vietnam into the top six nations globally with FDA-approved AI products for chest X-ray diagnostics. Comprehensive screening is achieving an accuracy rate of up to 95%, and advanced imaging capabilities allow for the detection of liver cancer tumors as small as 5mm to help facilitate early-stage intervention and curative treatment. The tool is also reducing initial screening times by 80-85% and lowering time to analyze cases from 30 minutes to 5 minutes per case.

Leading manufacturer Volvo Group needed the ability to extract data from images — such as photographs, stamps and printed text with handwritten notes over it — and translate documents to and from multiple languages to help its workers streamline invoices and claims document processing. Built on Microsoft Azure, Volvo created a six-week pilot program with a solution using Microsoft Azure AI services and AI Document Intelligence. After a four-month production timeline, they launched a solution that simplified document processing and meets the objectives of data extraction that has saved employees more than 10,000 manual hours — about 850-plus manual hours per month. Now, employees are enjoying their work more, with additional time to focus on innovation and tasks related to their specific skill sets.

To scale digital platforms to more than 300 million businesses, public sector organizations and consumers across Europe and Africa, Vodafone is leveraging Microsoft’s generative AI to provide highly personalized and differentiated customer experiences across multiple channels. Their investment is already reinventing how Vodafone engages with customers and accelerating digital transformation. Early testing shows that AI-powered assistants are reducing average handling times and providing AI-generated responses with greater accuracy. Thanks to faster and more accurate responses, the company is also improving customer satisfaction scores.

I hope you find these stories of AI Transformation as promising and inspiring as I do. I invite you to read my January pre-earnings blog to learn more about how customers and partners are unlocking AI opportunity across industries: Embracing AI Transformation: How customers and partners are driving pragmatic innovation to achieve business outcomes with the Microsoft Cloud. I remain grateful for the opportunity we have at Microsoft to help our customers and partners realize pragmatic business value with AI, and look forward to finding ways we can help your organization achieve more.

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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Just over a year ago, the healthcare industry was energized by the debut of generative AI and the promise this new technology held for delivering real-world outcomes that positively impact clinicians, patients, health systems, and the broader health and life sciences ecosystem. Since then, it has been a catalyst for the development of new use cases, opening possibilities for an entirely new era of innovation — and this shows no signs of slowing down. We continue to see AI adoption within healthcare grow, with 79% of healthcare organizations reporting that they’re currently using AI technology, according to a Microsoft-commissioned study through IDC[i]. AI also has a demonstrable business value, with healthcare organizations realizing a return on their AI investments within 14 months, along with an average return of $3.20 for every $1 they invest in AI[ii].

Working alongside healthcare organizations, Microsoft is making the promise of AI real by empowering the industry to tackle its biggest challenges and create a real difference in the lives of clinicians and patients. At the 2024 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition, we are highlighting how providers are adopting generative AI solutions and the impact the technology is making.

• Stanford Medicine and Microsoft announced the enterprise-wide deployment of Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience Copilot (DAX Copilot), providing conversational, ambient and generative AI to Stanford Medicine’s clinicians. This deployment aligns with Stanford Medicine’s mission to alleviate physician burnout and enhance patient care by streamlining administrative tasks. Stanford Medicine’s commitment to innovation, coupled with DAX Copilot’s ability to automate clinical documentation, has led to significant improvements in efficiency and patient-focused care. DAX Copilot enables healthcare organizations to adopt AI-powered clinical documentation applications at scale, leveraging existing investments in our trusted and extensible Dragon solutions. Stanford Health Care clinicians who used DAX Copilot reported through a preliminary survey that 96% of physicians stated that it was easy to use, and 78% reported that it expedited clinical notetaking. About two-thirds reported that DAX Copilot saved time.
• WellSpan Health announced its widespread adoption of DAX Copilot, enhancing patient-physician interactions during exam room and telehealth visits. Leveraging generative AI, DAX Copilot automates clinical note drafting, allowing physicians to focus entirely on patients without the distraction of manual documentation. WellSpan’s decision to adopt DAX Copilot builds upon its successful use of Nuance solutions to streamline clinical workflows and improve patient care. Surveys indicate high satisfaction among physicians and patients, with DAX significantly improving the quality of interactions and reducing documentation burdens. This initiative reflects WellSpan’s commitment to delivering exceptional care experiences and addressing physician burnout by providing innovative tools to enhance efficiency and personalize care delivery.
• Providence and Microsoft announced a strategic collaboration aimed at accelerating AI innovation in healthcare. Leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Azure as a standard platform, the collaboration focuses on delivering AI-powered applications to improve interoperability, generate clinical insights and enhance care delivery. Past successes from this relationship include Providence’s migration to cloud solutions and the adoption of AI-powered applications like Nuance’s DAX Copilot. By leveraging their combined expertise, the collaboration aims to rapidly scale existing solutions and create more personalized experiences for patients and clinicians. Through this initiative, Providence aims to transform healthcare delivery and improve outcomes by harnessing the power of the cloud and advanced AI technologies.

Reinforcing our commitment to Responsible AI

As incredible as AI – and all its potential – is, the important role clinicians play in determining its use and enabling responsible AI guidelines is vital. That’s why we remain steadfast in our commitment to our Responsible AI principles, which help to ensure safe, fair and responsible use of the technology. As part of this ongoing commitment, Microsoft has joined a consortium of healthcare leaders to announce the formation of the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), creating one of the first health AI networks aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles to improve the quality, safety and trustworthiness of AI in health.

Serving as the technology-enabling partner for TRAIN, Microsoft is working with members that include AdventHealth, Advocate Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Duke Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mass General Brigham, MedStar Health, Mercy, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwestern Medicine, Providence, Sharp HealthCare, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Vanderbilt University Medical Center – to share best practices and provide tools to enable measurement of outcomes associated with the implementation of AI. Additionally, OCHIN, which serves a national network of community health organizations with solutions, expertise, clinical insights and tailored technologies, and TruBridge, a partner and conduit to community healthcare, will work with TRAIN to help ensure that every organization, regardless of resources, has access to the benefits the network offers.

Additionally, we continue to take the necessary steps to ensure healthcare organizations can implement technology in compliance with the highest levels of security and privacy in mind. We recently announced the preview of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, which enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize their disparate healthcare data in a single unified store where analytics and AI workloads can operate at-scale. We are also pleased to share that Fabric now supports HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance, allowing our U.S. healthcare industry customers and partners to compliantly use Fabric to store, process and analyze data.

Driving innovation through the Microsoft partner ecosystem

Microsoft’s unmatched global ecosystem of trusted partners is one of the key components that helps drive our innovation forward. This week, Cognizant announced that its TriZetto Assistant on Facets will leverage Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Semantic Kernel to provide access to generative AI within the TriZetto user interface. This new collaboration will help increase productivity and efficiency for healthcare payers and providers, while ensuring timely responses and improved care for patients.

Additionally, Microsoft for Startups announced a new collaboration with the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Physician Innovation Network. The Physician Innovation Network is a powerful match-making tool developed by the AMA to connect physicians, care team members, business liaisons and entrepreneurs in a shared mission to enhance healthcare. The collaboration extends the reach of the Physician Innovation Network to all startup founders in the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, so whether they’re driven to improve healthcare, collaborate with industry leaders or learn from healthcare experts, they will have access to a unique space for connection and innovation.

Without a doubt, these are incredibly exciting times, and we are proud to see our customers and partners adopting Microsoft’s generative AI solutions and putting them to use in the real world to make a meaningful impact in the lives of clinicians and patients.  We look forward to continuing to play a leading role in fostering innovation with generative AI, and empowering healthcare providers and partners across the entire health and life sciences industries with leading-edge and responsible AI technologies that contribute to better experiences and outcomes in healthcare.

 

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[i] IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Microsoft, The Business Opportunity of AI: How Leading Organizations Around the World Are Using AI to Drive Impact Across Every Industry, IDC #US51364223, Nov. 2023.

[ii] IDC Resource Map Document: IDC Business Value of AI Survey, sponsored by Microsoft, IDC #US51331223, Nov. 2023.

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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Today we kick off the 14^th Microsoft Ability Summit, an annual event to bring together thought leaders to discuss how we accelerate accessibility to help bridge the Disability Divide.

There are three key themes to this year’s summit: Build, Imagine, and Include. “Build” invites us to explore how to build accessibly and inclusively by leaning on the insights of disabled talent. “Imagine” dives into best practices for architecting accessible buildings, events, content and products. And “Include” highlights the issues and opportunities AI presents for creators, developers and engineers.

Katy Jo Wright and Dave McCarthy discuss Katy Jo’s journey living with the complex disability, Chronic Lyme Disease. Get insights from deaf creator and performer Leila Hanaumi; international accessibility leaders Sara Minkara, U.S. Special Advisor on International Disability Rights, U.S. Department of State; and  Stephanie Cadieux, Chief Accessibility Officer, Government of Canada. And we’ll be digging into mental health with singer, actor and mental health advocate, Michelle Williams.

We’ll also be launching a few things along the way.

Advancing accessible technology

Accessible technology is crucial to empowering the 1.3 billion-plus people with disabilities globally. With this new chapter of AI, the possibilities are growing, as is the responsibility to get it right. We are learning where AI can be impactful, from the potential to shorten the gap between thoughts and action, to making it easier to code and create. But there is more to do, and we will continue to leverage every tool in the technology toolbox to advance accessibility.

Today we’ll be highlighting the latest technology and tools from Microsoft to help achieve this goal including:

• Copilot for Windows, making accessibility easier. Beginning late March 2024, new accessibility skills are being enabled in Windows. Ask Copilot for Windows to launch Live Captions, Narrator and other accessibility features. More: Windows Blog
• M365 empowering creators to build accessible content. Including Accessibility Assistant, a set of tools to help creators produce accessible content available today in Insider preview for Word and sharing that Outlook and PowerPoint are coming soon! Ales Holecek will also be sharing some examples and early research on neurodiversity and M365 Copilot which reduces time to create content and shortens the gap between thoughts and action.
• Azure AI for Accessibility, today sharing six new examples including:
  • Seeing AI is now available in an additional 14 languages (total 33) and will be rolling out the latest generative AI models, including richer descriptions of images and chat capability for photos and documents.
  • Azure AI Audio Description solution accelerator, new upcoming solution accelerator that uses Azure GPT-4 Turbo with Vision to describe videos for people who are blind or low vision. WPP will be demonstrating how this works, and the solution accelerator is now open for sign-ups.

Technology can also help tackle long enduring challenges, like finding a cure for ALS (Motor Neuron Disease). With Azure, we are proudly supporting ALS Therapy Development Institute (TDI) and Answer ALS to almost double the clinical and genomic data available for research. In 2021, Answer ALS provided open access to its research through an Azure Data Portal, Neuromine. This data has since enabled over 300 independent research projects around the world. The addition of ALS TDI’s data from the ongoing ALS Research Collaborative (ARC) study will allow researchers to accelerate the journey to find a cure.

We will also be previewing some of our ongoing work to use Custom Neural Voice to empower people with ALS and other speech disabilities to have their voice. We have been working with the community including Team Gleason for some time and are committed to making sure this technology is used for good and plan to launch later in the year.

Accessibility as a fundamental right

To build inclusively in an increasingly digital world, we need to protect fundamental rights and will be sharing partnerships advancing this across the community throughout the day.

This includes:

• A discussion with Ilene Arenberg and Tanya Harris on access to competitive integrated employment and economic equity, talking about the workplace and fair compensation.
• The British Association for Supported Employment (BASE) will share their work to support disabled, neurodivergent and disadvantaged people in the U.K. to find and maintain careers. They have been growing digital skills using Microsoft Teams and community training to modernize the supported employment sector.
• The Hunger Project will talk about the importance of connectivity as a foundation to accessibility. It is working with community partners in Malawi and around the world to provide access to connectivity and support for accessible spaces, training materials and digital accessibility.
• Rijksmuseum will discuss their partnership with the blind and low vision community to bring detailed text descriptions to over 1 million pieces of art using Azure AI Computer Vision and Azure OpenAI. This video brings the experience to life.

Next steps, accelerating your accessibility journey

All through the Ability Summit, industry leaders will be sharing their learnings and best practices. Today we are posting four new Microsoft playbooks, sharing our learnings from working on our physical, event and digital environment. This includes a new Mental Health toolkit, with tips for product makers to build experiences that support mental health conditions, created in partnership with Mental Health America. And “Building Accessible Campus,” with best practices from our Global Workplace Services team, responsible for our global building footprint including the new Redmond headquarters campus.

Please join us to watch content on demand via www.aka.ms/AbilitySummit. Technical support is always available via Microsoft’s Disability Answer Desk.  Thank you for your partnership and commitment to build a more accessible future for people with disabilities around the world.

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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Today we’re announcing the public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Finance, the newest Copilot offering designed for business functions that extends Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and revolutionizes how finance teams approach their daily work. Copilot for Finance joins Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, now generally available, to provide AI-powered, role-based workflow automation, recommendations and guided actions in the flow of work.

Finance departments are critical partners in strategic decisions impacting the direction of a company. Eighty percent of finance leaders and teams face challenges to take on more strategic work outside the operational portions of their roles[1]. However, 62% of finance professionals say they are stuck in the drudgery of data entry and review cycles [2]. Copilot for Finance can help free up time for finance to play more of a strategic role in delivering counsel and insights to the business by streamlining financial tasks, automating workflows and providing insights in the flow of work.

Copilot for Finance includes Copilot for Microsoft 365, which means it supercharges Excel, Outlook and other widely used productivity apps with workflow and data-specific insights for the finance professional. Copilot for Finance draws on essential context from your existing financial data sources, including traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP, and the Microsoft Graph.

In public preview today, Copilot for Finance introduces several key features to enhance financial operations:

• Helps financial analysts quickly conduct a variance analysis in Excel using natural language prompts to review data sets for anomalies, risks and unmatched values. This type of analysis helps finance provide strategic insights to business leaders about where it is meeting, exceeding or falling short of planned financial outcomes and why.
• Simplifies the reconciliation process in Excel with automated data structure comparisons and guided troubleshooting to help move from insight to action, which helps ensure the reliability and accuracy of financial records.
• Provides a complete summary of relevant customer account details in Outlook, such as balance statements and invoices, to expedite the collections process.
• Enables customers to turn raw data in Excel into presentation-ready visuals and reports ready to be shared across Outlook and Teams.

Customers transforming business operations with Microsoft Copilot

The Copilot offerings designed for business functions help workers tackle a common problem: getting from insights to impact – with the relevant data and workflows specific to their roles. The latest Work Trend Index survey revealed that people are drowning in data. Roughly a quarter of their day is spent searching for information – roughly 50% of the information they consume each day is deemed necessary for their job, and a recent survey found roles like sales, finance and supply chain have role-specific needs from their data.

Copilot helps break down information and application silos while actively deriving insights, recommendations and guidance from a variety of data sources — all in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, businesses can further customize Copilot for business processes inside of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and its role-based extensions.

Copilot for Sales is already helping sellers at more than 30,000 organizations. Companies including dentsu, Lumen Technologies, Northern Trust, Schneider Electric, Visa and hundreds more are empowering their employees with Copilot across their sales, service and finance departments.

Here is what a few of the companies had to say:

• “Artificial intelligence is transforming the way businesses operate and thrive. At dentsu, we are constantly searching for ways to bring the power of generative AI to all our employees with a framework defined on ethical and responsible AI principles. Building on the existing use cases we’ve defined to empower our workforce with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales, we are excited to participate in the preview of Microsoft Copilot for Finance. We see potential for Copilot for Finance to accelerate the impact of our finance professionals by optimizing routine processes, and we anticipate efficiency gains will free up finance capacity to focus on performance across our organization.” – Carolyn Isaacs, Global Director Finance Services, dentsu
• “Northern Trust’s digital workplace transformation is rooted in empowering our employees with technology that enhances and optimizes the services that they provide our clients. Deploying Microsoft Copilot for Service is a milestone in this transformation journey and we are excited for the potential of this AI-powered solution to help modernize our client relations organization, streamline processes for our employees, and elevate our client experience.” – Shaelyn Otikor SVP, Head of Global Digital Workplace Strategy, Asset Servicing, Northern Trust
• “Building on our 30-year history of embracing AI, Visa is on a journey to roll out generative AI across our entire company to empower our employees and develop new solutions to serve and protect our cardholders, merchants and the broader ecosystem. We’ve seen our employees embrace the broad rollout of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, and we’re excited to continue to bring employees new ways to take advantage of the technology, transforming the ways in which we work and how we service our clients.” – Don Hobson, Chief Information Officer, Visa

At Microsoft, we are also an AI-powered organization, leveraging Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service to improve seller and agent workflows and transform customer experiences:

• Microsoft Copilot for Sales empowers sellers to close deals faster with AI-assisted insights and recommendations. Our study of Microsoft sellers who use Copilot for Sales at least weekly found it makes them more productive, saving an average of 90 minutes per week – and 67% reported it allowed them to spend more time with customers.
  • “We have seen firsthand that an AI-powered sales organization is a more successful sales organization. Not only has Copilot for Sales helped our global sales team simplify tasks and save time, but it has also strengthened our customer relationships with AI-supported insights and recommendations that are personalized and tailored to each customer.” – Judson Althoff, Microsoft EVP and Chief Commercial Officer
• Microsoft Copilot for Service is modernizing the contact center with AI to enhance service experiences and boost agent productivity. In Microsoft’s customer service department – one of the largest in the world – there has been a 12% reduction in average case handling times (the time actively spent on resolving customer cases via chat) in two different customer support business areas while using similar capabilities in Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The benefits and use cases from our own Copilot deployment will continue to shape Copilot for Service and its capabilities.
  • “Generative AI has been a game-changer for our own contact center at Microsoft. Agents spend less time searching for information, allowing them to focus more time on helping customers solve complex challenges. Moreover, newer agents experience significant benefits, feeling more confident and capable in their roles. This has led to reduced onboarding times and increased job satisfaction.” – Mala Anand, Microsoft CVP Customer Experience & Success
• Microsoft Copilot for Finance streamlines financial processes and surfaces insights for better-informed decision making. Microsoft’s world-class finance organization has long prioritized adoption of AI and automation tools to modernize operations, reduce financial risk and support the company’s priorities with strategic insights. The team has helped inform the Copilot for Finance product capabilities and roadmap.
  • “Our finance organization is just like any other – looking for technology to help us do our work in a more efficient and impactful way – and we’re excited to track our journey as customer zero of Microsoft Copilot for Finance” – Cory Hrncirik, Modern Finance Lead, Microsoft

Companies of all sizes are moving beyond AI experimentation and embracing Microsoft Copilot to strategically empower those closest to their customer interactions and critical operations to create new business value. To get started with the new Copilot for Finance, visit: aka.ms/CopilotforFinancePreview.

 

 

[1] Future of Finance Trends | Microsoft Dynamics 365

[2] Metric of the Month: Time Allocation in Finance | CFO

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Source: The Official Microsoft Blog