One year ago, generative AI burst onto the scene and for the first time since the smartphone, people began to change the way they interact with technology. People are bringing AI to work at an unexpected scale — and now the big question is, how’s it going?

As AI becomes ubiquitous in the workplace, employees and businesses alike are under extreme pressure. The pace and intensity of work, which accelerated during the pandemic, has not eased, so employees are bringing their own AI to work. Leaders agree AI is a business imperative — and feel the pressure to show immediate ROI — but many lack a plan and vision to go from individual impact to applying AI to drive the bottom line. Amidst these challenges, it’s also important for employees to understand their rights, including how to prove age discrimination in the workplace, ensuring fair treatment and equal opportunities for all.

At the same time, the labor market is set to shift and there’s a new AI economy. While some professionals worry AI will replace their job, the data tells a more nuanced story — of a hidden talent shortage, more employees eyeing a career change, and a massive opportunity for those willing to skill up.

“AI is democratizing expertise across the workforce,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft. “Our latest research highlights the opportunity for every organization to apply this technology to drive better decision-making, collaboration — and ultimately business outcomes.”

For our fourth annual Work Trend Index, out today, we partnered with LinkedIn for the first time on a joint report so we could provide a comprehensive view of how AI is not only reshaping work, but the labor market more broadly. We surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries, identified labor and hiring trends from LinkedIn, analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals and conducted research with Fortune 500 customers. The data points to insights every leader and professional needs to know — and actions they can take — when it comes to AI’s implications for work.

1. Employees want AI at work — and won’t wait for companies to catch up.

Three in four knowledge workers (75%) now use AI at work. Employees, overwhelmed and under duress, say AI saves time, boosts creativity and allows them to focus on their most important work. While 79% of leaders agree AI adoption is critical to remain competitive, 59% worry about quantifying the productivity gains of AI and 60% worry their company lacks a vision and plan to implement it. While leaders feel the pressure to turn individual productivity gains into organizational impact, employees aren’t waiting to reap the benefits: 78% of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work. The opportunity for every leader is to channel this momentum into ROI.

2. For employees, AI raises the bar and breaks the career ceiling.

We also see AI beginning to impact the job market. While AI and job loss are top of mind for some, our data shows more people are eyeing a career change, there are jobs available, and employees with AI skills will get first pick. The majority of leaders (55%) say they’re worried about having enough talent to fill open roles this year, with leaders in cybersecurity, engineering, and creative design feeling the pinch most.

And professionals are looking. Forty-six percent across the globe are considering quitting in the year ahead — an all-time high since the Great Reshuffle of 2021 — a separate LinkedIn study found U.S. numbers to be even higher with 85% eyeing career moves. While two-thirds of leaders wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills, only 39% of users have received AI training from their company. So, professionals are skilling up on their own. As of late last year, we’ve seen a 142x increase in LinkedIn members adding AI skills like Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles and a 160% increase in non-technical professionals using LinkedIn Learning courses to build their AI aptitude.

In a world where AI mentions in LinkedIn job posts drive a 17% bump in application growth, it’s a two-way street: Organizations that empower employees with AI tools and training will attract the best talent, and professionals who skill up will have the edge.

3. The rise of the AI power user — and what they reveal about the future.

In the research, four types of AI users emerged on a spectrum — from skeptics who rarely use AI to power users who use it extensively. Compared to skeptics, AI power users have reoriented their workdays in fundamental ways, reimagining business processes and saving over 30 minutes per day. Over 90% of power users say AI makes their overwhelming workload more manageable and their work more enjoyable, but they aren’t doing it on their own.

Power users work for a different kind of company. They are 61% more likely to have heard from their CEO on the importance of using generative AI at work, 53% more likely to receive encouragement from leadership to consider how AI can transform their function and 35% more likely to receive tailored AI training for their specific role or function.

“AI is redefining work and it’s clear we need new playbooks,” said Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn. “It’s the leaders who build for agility instead of stability and invest in skill building internally that will give their organizations a competitive advantage and create more efficient, engaged and equitable teams.”

The prompt box is the new blank page

We hear one consistent piece of feedback from our customers: talking to AI is harder than it seems. We’ve all learned how to use a search engine, identifying the right few words to get the best results. AI requires more context — just like when you delegate work to a direct report or colleague. But for many, staring down that empty prompt box feels like facing a blank page: Where should I even start?

Today, we’re announcing Copilot for Microsoft 365 innovations to help our customers answer that question.

• If you’ve got the start of a prompt, Copilot will offer to auto-complete it to get to a better result, suggesting something more detailed to help ensure you get what you’re looking for. That not only speeds things up, it offers you new ideas for how to leverage Copilot’s power.
  
• Other times, you know exactly what you want — you’re just not sure how to ask. With its new rewrite feature, Copilot turns a basic prompt into a rich one with the click of a button, turning everyone into a prompt engineer.
  
• Catch Up, a new chat interface that surfaces personal insights based on your recent activity, provides responsive recommendations, like “You have a meeting with the sales VP on Thursday. Let’s get you prepared — click here to get detailed notes.”
• We also know that every role, team and function has unique needs and ways of working. To help create prompts for exactly the work you do, you’ll soon be able to create, publish and manage prompts in Copilot Lab that are expressly tailored to your closest teams.

These features will be available in the coming months, and in the future, we’ll take it a step further, with Copilot asking you questions to get to your best work yet.

LinkedIn has also made free over 50 learning courses to empower professionals at all levels to advance their AI aptitude.

Head to WorkLab for the full Work Trend Index Report, and head to LinkedIn to hear more from LinkedIn’s Chief Economist, Karin Kimbrough, on how AI is reshaping the labor market.

And for all the blogs, videos and assets related to today’s announcements, please visit our microsite.

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Satya Nadella, the Chief Executive Officer, shared the below communication to the employees of Microsoft. In light of the significant attention and discussion this announcement has garnered, it has been made publicly available as an official record.

Today, I want to talk about something critical to our company’s future: prioritizing security above all else.

Microsoft runs on trust, and our success depends on earning and maintaining it. We have a unique opportunity and responsibility to build the most secure and trusted platform that the world innovates upon.

The recent findings by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) regarding the Storm-0558 cyberattack, from summer 2023, underscore the severity of the threats facing our company and our customers, as well as our responsibility to defend against these increasingly sophisticated threat actors.

Last November, we launched our Secure Future Initiative (SFI) with this responsibility in mind, bringing together every part of the company to advance cybersecurity protection across both new products and legacy infrastructure. I’m proud of this initiative, and grateful for the work that has gone into implementing it. But we must and will do more.

Going forward, we will commit the entirety of our organization to SFI, as we double down on this initiative with an approach grounded in three core principles:

• Secure by Design: Security comes first when designing any product or service.
• Secure by Default: Security protections are enabled and enforced by default, require no extra effort, and are not optional.
• Secure Operations: Security controls and monitoring will continuously be improved to meet current and future threats.

These principles will govern every facet of our SFI pillars as we: Protect Identities and Secrets, Protect Tenants and Isolate Production Systems, Protect Networks, Protect Engineering Systems, Monitor and Detect Threats, and Accelerate Response and Remediation. We’ve shared specific, company-wide actions each of these pillars will entail — including those recommended in the CSRB’s report — which you can learn about here. Across Microsoft, we will mobilize to implement and operationalize these standards, guidelines, and requirements and this will be an added dimension of our hiring and rewards decisions. In addition, we will instill accountability by basing part of the compensation of the senior leadership team on our progress towards meeting our security plans and milestones.

We must approach this challenge with both technical and operational rigor, and with a focus on continuous improvement. Every task we take on – from a line of code, to a customer or partner process – is an opportunity to help bolster our own security and that of our entire ecosystem. This includes learning from our adversaries and the increasing sophistication of their capabilities, as we did with Midnight Blizzard. And learning from the trillions of unique signals we’re constantly monitoring to strengthen our overall posture. It also includes stronger, more structured collaboration across the public and private sector.

Security is a team sport, and accelerating SFI isn’t just job number one for our security teams – it’s everyone’s top priority and our customers’ greatest need.

If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security. In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems. This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.

Satya

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A Copilot on every desk, every device and across every role is core to Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. By bolstering the services customers know and love with our Copilot capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud, we are enabling zero-shot innovation — the ability to effectively gain value out of the box — for their businesses to increase productivity, creativity and inclusive collaboration. ISVs, digital natives, startups and the rest of our partner ecosystem are leveraging our Copilot stack to build AI solutions that are reshaping business processes across industries. We continue co-innovating directly with customers on our open cloud platform to bend the curve on innovation by identifying AI design patterns; then integrating and applying data to solve their most pressing challenges faster and more efficiently than ever before. Underpinning it all is the need for a strong cybersecurity foundation, and the work we are doing to ensure this critical imperative is met. No one is immune from bad actors, and we remain committed to transparency and trust in our approach to protecting customer and partner data. By empowering organizations with industry-leading cloud and responsible AI solutions, paired with our focus on security, we are helping them unlock opportunities that deliver pragmatic business outcomes. I am proud of the work we have done this past quarter that exemplifies our approach to enabling AI Transformation, and the success of our customers and partners across industries who have embraced it.

Just this week we announced our strategic partnership with The Coca-Cola Company to accelerate AI Transformation enterprise-wide as well as across its global network of independent bottlers, and shared news of our partnership with Cognizant to drive enterprise AI adoption for millions of users. We are expanding our work with G42 to accelerate responsible AI innovation in the United Arab Emirates and beyond while accelerating digital transformation securely across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa with expanded access to services and technologies. We are also building on our relationship with Cloud Software Group to bring joint cloud solutions and generative AI capabilities to more than 100 million people.

We continue to shape the future of industry alongside our customers to help them differentiate their businesses. At CES, we showcased how our customers and partners are innovating across the automotive and mobility industry with generative AI to solve deep business problems and create new opportunities, and revealed the Copilot key for Windows 11 PCs. At NRF, we shared new copilot templates to help retailers incorporate generative AI across the shopper journey while enhancing the experience for store associates and making AI implementation more accessible. Just recently at HIMSS, we announced Microsoft’s role as the technology enabling partner for the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network, a consortium of healthcare leaders aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles to improve the quality, safety and trustworthiness of AI in healthcare.

Enabling pragmatic AI innovation with Copilot capabilities to deliver immediate value

Companies like Amadeus, AAMI, TotalEnergies and Cushman & Wakefield are leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enrich customer interactions and advance high-priority projects. Visa employees are transforming how they work to better serve the needs of their clients and Banca Transilvania is boosting efficiency and innovation while delivering the highest quality of customer service. Emirates NBD engineers are solving their most complex problems while remaining within their development environments, and 96% of early adopters at CommBank have shared that Copilot is making them more productive. Colombia-based Cenit is experiencing rapid adoption of Copilot to empower employees to be more creative, productive and collaborative. U.K.-based law firm Clifford Chance is helping employees automate daily tasks like meeting notes, email drafts and inbox management with AI and natural language processing, while Air India built a plugin to gain real-time access to flight and operations data to empower better decision-making.

With Copilot for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Northrop & Johnson achieved a 250% increase in charter bookings while helping team members save time, boost productivity and enrich the quality of engagement with their customers. Using Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio, Cineplex is saving employees over 30,000 hours annually in manual processing times and reducing ticket refund handling time from 15 minutes to under a minute. Northern Trust is using Microsoft Copilot for Service to modernize its client relations organization, streamline employee processes and elevate the client experience. Teams at EPAM Systems are leveraging Microsoft Copilot for Sales to improve sales processes and better support its business strategies, while freeing up time to spend with customers.

Building AI design patterns that bend the curve on innovation and intelligently reason over data to solve business challenges

Icertis is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and its proprietary AI models in conjunction with its extensive data lake to uncover cost savings, enhance compliance and reduce risk across millions of legal contracts. Insurance company FWD Group is using the service to enhance customer experiences and operations across its lines of business, and Singapore-based CapitaLand Investment has saved 1 million Singapore dollars and 10,000 work hours per year with data-driven AI models. With Azure OpenAI Service as the secure foundation for its supply chain platform, Blue Yonder is harnessing AI and machine learning to provide real-time decision making for businesses across 78 countries. Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy and Publicis Sapient are making it easier for travelers to find the right vacation homes through natural language search powered by large language models within Azure OpenAI Service, and Miral is curating some of the most sought-after leisure, entertainment and tourism activities with a 24/7 AI-powered concierge. Using several AI models, Australian retailer Coles developed an edge computing platform that makes 1.6 billion informed predictions each day so customers can find exactly what they are looking for across its 850 stores.

With Microsoft Fabric, Melbourne Airport is synchronizing flight bookings and ground transportation data to project demand while maintaining efficiency, reliability and safety of its operations. Rail freight operator Aurizon is deriving better data insights from 400 sensor-equipped locomotives to enhance cost efficiency, scalability and predictive maintenance. Seair Exim Solutions is increasing export-import trade data ingestion speeds by 90% to empower its global shipping industry customers with improved insights more quickly with help from Mandelbulb Technologies, while Dener Motorsport is using Fabric and real-time analytics to help automotive engineers detect and resolve car issues within minutes — down from nearly half an hour. By hosting its data within Azure Kubernetes, Windstream is improving its custom GPT platform to help employees find the information they need faster across 100,000 indexed documents. To promote financial inclusion, Trusting Social focused on a strong data foundation paired with AI services to enable the development and deployment of solutions that assist more than 130 financial institutions across Asia. Sasfin Bank worked with Legal Interact to implement a unified document management system to analyze contract clauses and streamline legal operations and workflows using Azure Cognitive Services and Azure SQL. TomTom has deployed GitHub Copilot to its developers, resulting in 85% of the company’s engineers feeling more productive and 70% saying it enables them to focus on more satisfying work. Meesho — a leading online marketplace in India — is using a generative AI chat agent to increase inquiry resolution by 40% and customer satisfaction by 25%, while leveraging GitHub Copilot to streamline code delivery and testing for its 200+ developers.

Strengthening cybersecurity foundations with industry-leading cloud and responsible AI solutions

Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) reflects our commitment to continually advancing the built-in security of our products and services. We recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security — the industry’s first generative AI solution designed to help security and IT professionals do their work with greater speed and accuracy. In our latest Copilot for Security economic study, security analysts using the Copilot were 22% faster and 7% more accurate across all tasks, with 97% saying they want to use it again. Our ability to offer this solution to customers is bolstered by more than 100 partners such as Capgemini, Cisco and Darktrace who are committed to working with us to deliver trusted, responsible AI solutions. In collaboration with TC1 Labs, Pacifico Seguros has become the first company in Latin America to implement Copilot for Security with a Zero Trust approach, strengthening its security defenses and confidently preparing the company for future security challenges. Security professionals at Enverus are saving hours per day on low-value tasks with Copilot, allowing them to focus on strategic work and help elevate the impact of their security team. Wipro is using the solution to help employees save time and act quickly to improve outcomes across its business.

Using the Microsoft Defender security stack, Del Monte Foods increased security visibility and coverage across its IT environment, reducing security risks by 50% and improving its security response and remediation capabilities. To streamline its security operations, Jones Lang LaSalle implemented Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with help from Tanium, reducing cybersecurity spending by 20% and enhancing protection for nearly 90,000 endpoints. Türkiye-based Demirören has adopted a Zero Trust security model by unifying its security solutions to protect essential business data and enhance threat detection and response capabilities. Paytronix, a provider of customized digital experiences for restaurant and convenience store guests, improved its security profile by seamlessly migrating data for 250 million user accounts to Azure without interruption. The Audi Group’s IT department is simplifying endpoint management and safeguarding its hybrid workforce across 12 countries with enhanced security using Microsoft Intune. To ensure robust data protection and seamless access for authorized personnel, SLT-MOBITEL is using Microsoft’s AI-powered security products to fortify end-user devices and services while simplifying information security and compliance. Oregon State University and Grupo Bimbo are utilizing Microsoft data security solutions to safeguard their environments and confidently prepare for their continued adoption and deployment of AI.

Embracing AI Transformation has become a priority for organizations around the world seeking to unlock AI opportunities. Whether helping our customers adopt and scale AI with our Copilot capabilities or building unique AI strategies leveraging our open platform and partner ecosystem, we are humbled to work with you to drive pragmatic business outcomes and differentiated industry leadership. Our commitment to your success is unwavering. We will continue building upon our trusted relationships and our focus on responsibility and security so you can move forward with confidence in your AI journey. I remain inspired by what we have done — and what we will do — to help our customers and partners achieve more.

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After years of uncertainty from supply chain disruption and increased customer expectations, to changes in consumer demand and workforce shortages, manufacturing remains one of the most resilient and complex industries. Today, we are witnessing the manufacturing industry enter a transformative era, fueled by AI and new AI-powered industrial solutions. This AI-driven shift is prompting many organizations to fundamentally alter their business models and re-evaluate how to address industry-wide challenges like data siloes from disparate data estates and legacy products, supply chain visibility issues, labor shortages, and the need for upskilling employees, among others.  AI is more than just an automation tool, it’s a catalyst for innovation, efficiency and sustainability. AI innovation creates an opportunity to help manufacturers enhance time-to-value, bolster operations resilience, optimize factory and production costs and produce repeatable outcomes.

Ahead of Hannover Messe, one of the world’s largest manufacturing innovation events, Microsoft is announcing new AI and data solutions for manufacturers to help unlock innovation, enable intelligent factories, optimize operations and enhance employee productivity. The manufacturing industry has been incredibly resilient over the last decade and the infusion of new AI solutions signifies a critical transformation in this vital industry.

Unlock innovation and fuel the next generation of intelligent factories with data and AI

Manufacturing is one of the most data-intensive industries, generating an average of 1.9 petabytes worldwide every year, according to McKinsey Global Institute. And most of this data goes unused, leaving many valuable insights untapped. According to Gartner® Research, “Generative AI will transform the manufacturing industry to a level previously not available, by providing new insights and recommendations based on data and actionable information.”[1] In this era of AI, the importance of data continues to grow as organizations realize they are only scratching the surface of what’s possible.

To help customers leverage their data and insights, today, we are announcing the private preview of manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, and copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions help manufacturers unify their operational technology and information technology (IT) data estate and accelerate and scale data transformation for AI in Fabric, our end-to-end analytics SaaS-based platform. Copilot template for factory operations helps manufacturers to create their own copilots for front-line workers utilizing the unified data. Front-line employees can use natural language to query the data for knowledge discovery, training, issue resolution, asset maintenance and more. For example, if a factory plant manager wants to understand why a machine is breaking, they can query the copilot to get insights and resolve the issue in just days, instead of weeks.

As part of our private preview, Intertape Polymer Group (IPG) uses Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform to continuously transform data generated by its factory equipment into a robust data foundation for analyzing and modeling its machines, production processes and finished products. IPG is now using Sight Machine’s Factory CoPilot, a generative AI platform with an intuitive natural language chat interface, powered by the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and the copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. This tool facilitates the team’s ability to rapidly gather insights and direct work on production lines which previously operated like black boxes. Instead of working through manual spreadsheets and inaccessible data, all teammates including production, engineering, procurement and finance have better information to drive decisions on products and processes throughout the plant improving yield and reducing inventory levels.

Also in private preview, Bridgestone is partnering with Avanade to confront production challenges head-on, focusing on critical issues related to production disruptions and scheduling inefficiencies, like yield loss, which can escalate into quality issues. As a private preview customer collaborating with Avanade, Bridgestone aims to harness the power of manufacturing data solutions in Fabric and the copilot template for factory operations. Their goal is to implement a natural language query system that enables front-line workers, with different levels of experience, with insights that lead to faster issue resolution. The team is excited to establish a centralized system that efficiently gathers and presents critical information from various sources and facilitates informed decision-making and enhances  operational agility across Bridgestone’s production ecosystem.

Creating more resilient operations and supply chains

A robust data strategy must span from cloud to the shop floor to enable the level of scale and integration that will help manufacturers accelerate industrial transformation across all operations. However, gathering OT data and integrating the data into multiple solutions is not an easy task for manufacturers. Production is complex, and their sensors, machines and systems are highly varied. Each site is unique and ensuring the right data is being shared with the right person at the right time is onerous and costly. Unfortunately, these scale and integration hurdles also block the enterprise from scaling AI solutions across every shop floor or gaining global visibility across all their sites.

With this in mind, Microsoft recently launched the adaptive cloud approach, including Azure IoT Operations. Our adaptive cloud is a framework to modernize edge infrastructure across operations, like factories, to take advantage of a modern, composable and connected architecture for your applications. Our adaptive cloud approach creates the level of scale needed to repeat AI solutions across production lines and sites. Putting the adaptive cloud approach into practice, Azure IoT Operations leverages open standards and works with Microsoft Fabric to create a common data foundation for IT and OT collaboration. To find out more about our adaptive cloud approach and Azure IoT Operations, visit our Azure Blog.

Looking to increase global operational efficiency, Microsoft’s customer Electrolux Group, developed a single platform to build, deploy and manage several key manufacturing use cases. Their platform’s goal is to capture all manufacturing data, contextualize it and make it available for real time decision-making across all levels of the organization within a scalable infrastructure. To enable this, Electrolux Group is adopting a full stack solution from Microsoft that leverages the adaptive cloud approach, including Azure IoT Operations. Using this approach, Electrolux Group is looking to reduce overhead from multiple vendors, a consistent and simple way to deploy and manage multiple use cases at a site, and then the ability to scale those solutions to multiple sites with simple and consistent fleet management.

Supply chain disruption is not new; however, its complexity and the rate of change are outpacing organizations’ ability to address issues. Manufacturers are under pressure to prevent and minimize disruptions, and as a result, almost 90% of supply chain professionals plan to invest in ways to make their supply chains more resilient. To support our customers, we’re announcing the upcoming preview of a traceability add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management that will allow businesses to increase visibility into their product genealogy through the different steps of the supply chain. Traceability will also help businesses track events and attributes throughout supply chain processes and will provide an interface to query and analyze data.

Empowering front-line workers with AI tools to improve productivity,and job satisfaction

To enable intelligent factory operations, an empowered and connected workforce is key. According to the latest Work Trend Index, 63% of front-line workers do repetitive or menial tasks that take time away from more meaningful work. Additionally, 80% of front-line workers think AI will augment their ability to find the right information and the answers they need. From the office to the factory floor to the field, we are building solutions to address the unique challenges manufacturers face — by helping streamline front-line operations, enhance communication and collaboration, improve employee experience and strengthen security across shared devices.

Today we’re introducing new capabilities for Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service that help service managers and technicians efficiently find information, resolve issues while keeping customers updated at every step, and help summarize their work. Generally available, field service managers can interact with Copilot to find pertinent information about work orders using natural language in their flow of work in the Dynamics 365 Field Service web app. Additionally, available in public preview, front-line workers can configure and customize the fields Copilot uses to generate summaries within Dynamics 365 Field Service.

To further streamline collaboration among field service managers, technicians, and remote experts, Dynamics 365 Field Service users with the Field Service app in Teams can now share links to work orders that automatically expand to provide key details. This capability is generally available starting today. Should technicians need additional assistance from remote experts to resolve issues, they can simply access Dynamics 365 Remote Assist capabilities in the flow of work in Microsoft Teams with anchored spatial annotations even if the camera moves.

Microsoft ecosystem and partnerships in the era of AI

These new industry innovations in data and AI are strengthened through the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, which enables organizations to accelerate their data and AI journey by augmenting the Microsoft Cloud with industry-relevant data solutions, application templates and AI services. The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing brings the best of Microsoft and our partners to jointly accelerate the digital transformation in manufacturing.

Microsoft is a trusted co-innovation partner committed to working with enterprises to unlock the true potential of AI solutions and transform the industry.​ Our offerings can also be customized by an unmatched global ecosystem of trusted partners. This year, we’re proud to have the following valued partners demonstrate at our Hannover Messe booth: Accenture, Annata, Ansys, Avanade, AVEVA, Blue Yonder, Bosch, CapGemini, Cognite, Connected Cars DK, DSA, HERE Technologies, Hexagon, Netstar, NVIDIA, o9 Solutions, PTC, Rockwell Automation, SAP, Syntax, Sight Machine, Siemens, SymphonyAI, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Threedy, ToolsGroup and Tulip Interfaces.

We look forward to seeing you at the Microsoft Booth in Hall 17 Stand G06, where you can join guided tours, and speak with manufacturing and industrial experts from around the world.

 

_____

[1]  Gartner®, GenAI use-case prism for manufacturing, By Ellen Eichhorn, Sohard Aggarwal, July 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

 

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Strategic partnership highlights:

• Expansion of partnership between Microsoft and G42 to deliver advanced AI solutions with Microsoft Azure across various industries and markets.
• Microsoft will invest $1.5 billion in G42 for a minority stake in G42 and join its board of directors.
• Companies will support the establishment of a $1 billion fund for developers to boost AI skills in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and broader region.

Expanded strategic partnership:

Today, we announced a strategic investment in G42, a leading AI company in the UAE, to co-innovate and deliver advanced AI solutions with Microsoft Azure for various industries and markets across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

Microsoft will invest $1.5 billion in G42 for a minority stake in the company with Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President, joining G42’s board of directors — strengthening the long-standing collaboration and mutual synergies between the two companies. With the breadth of the Microsoft Cloud and its differentiated AI capabilities, the deal significantly advances G42’s strategy of delivering generative AI and next-generation infrastructure and services for a range of customers across financial services, healthcare, energy, government and education.

The commercial partnership is backed by assurances to the U.S. and UAE governments through a first-of- its-kind binding agreement to apply world-class best practices to ensure the secure, trusted, and responsible development and deployment of AI. Microsoft and G42 will work closely together to elevate the security and compliance framework of their joint international infrastructure. Both companies will move forward with a commitment to comply with U.S. and international trade, security, responsible AI, and business integrity laws and regulations. The work on these topics is governed by a detailed Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement between G42 and Microsoft that was developed in close consultation with both the UAE and U.S. governments.

Foundational to the partnership is G42’s trust and commitment in Microsoft’s cloud platform. G42 will expand its existing commitment to deploying Microsoft Cloud offerings, demonstrating confidence in Microsoft as its preferred partner to enhance services and deliver value-added solutions to its customers. With the partnership, G42’s data platform and other essential technology infrastructure will migrate to Microsoft Azure to benefit from industry-leading performance, scalability and security capabilities. Migrating to Azure will also support AI product development that allows G42 to create services that can scale to achieve faster delivery times for its customers globally. Together, we look forward to accelerating AI transformation in emerging markets and advancing equitable growth in AI globally.

Building on our technical co-innovation

G42 brings an excellent track record as a leader actively driving global progress and accessibility in AI technologies, and Microsoft and G42 have worked closely together to help optimize Cloud and AI solutions for the Middle East.

Last year, G42 was one of the first partners to commit to implementing Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty offering to UAE-based organizations. G42 is helping public sector and regulated industries to use new platform capabilities for securing sensitive data, providing access to the latest cloud and AI features available on Azure public cloud, and ensuring they comply with local privacy and regulatory requirements. G42’s deep understanding of UAE sovereignty requirements and technical capabilities are central to customizing Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty to help address customer’s specific needs.

Microsoft also announced that Jais, G42’s Arabic Large Language Model (LLM), will be available in the Azure AI Model Catalog. This model represents a significant advancement for the Arabic world in AI, offering over 400 million Arabic speakers the opportunity to explore the potential of generative AI. Jais is the world’s first Arabic LLM developed by G42 in collaboration with Cerebras, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), and Med42 LLM, a generative AI model to streamline medical reporting. The expanded partnership with Microsoft will help accelerate the adoption of G42’s groundbreaking AI products and services, such as Jais, making them available through Microsoft Azure.

Announced in March of this year, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), the UAE’s largest bank, will collaborate with Core42, a subsidiary of G42, to accelerate its digital transformation journey leveraging Microsoft Azure trusted cloud platform for enterprises. FAB will move its datacenter and workload to Azure, enabling the bank to use Core42’s sovereign controls platform, which is built on Azure and ensures the highest standards of data sovereignty and compliance with UAE regulations.

One of the leading examples of precision medicine in action is the collaboration between G42 subsidiary M42, a global health care company, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Microsoft, and the International Center for Genetic Disease (ICGD). The partners are using Terra, a scalable and secure platform for biomedical research, to enable data sharing and analysis across different institutions and countries. Terra, powered by Microsoft Azure, allows researchers to access and analyze anonymized genomic data from the Emirati Genome Program, which has completed over 500,000 whole genome sequences to date. By applying AI technologies to this rich data source, the collaborators aim to advance clinical genomic research and disease prevention, as well as support precision medicine and life science strategies globally. Find life science SEO services to reach your target audience.

Accelerating access to digital innovation in UAE and the region

Along with providing advanced AI capabilities, the partnership will benefit regions beyond the UAE in ways that will improve how enterprises experience cloud computing. By bringing expanded low latency datacenter infrastructure to emerging markets, Microsoft and G42 will help accelerate digital transformation across key industries in those regions. This will provide countries across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa with expanded access to services and technologies that will allow them to address the most challenging business concerns while ensuring the highest standards of security and privacy.

Furthermore, the partnership will also support the development of a skilled and diverse AI workforce and talent pool that will drive innovation and competitiveness for the UAE and broader region with the investment of $1 billion in a fund for developers.

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Microsoft recently announced the creation of Microsoft AI, a newly formed organization to help advance our consumer AI products and research, including Copilot. Building on that news, I’m thrilled to share that Microsoft AI is opening a new AI hub in the heart of London. Microsoft AI London will drive pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art language models and their supporting infrastructure, and to create world-class tooling for foundation models, collaborating closely with our AI teams across Microsoft and with our partners, including OpenAI. 

The new AI hub will be led by Jordan Hoffmann, an exceptional AI scientist and engineer. Prior to joining Microsoft AI, Hoffmann distinguished himself as an AI pioneer at Inflection and DeepMind, based in London. Hoffmann will be joined by a talented group of Microsoft AI team members based in our London Paddington office.   

There is an enormous pool of AI talent and expertise in the U.K., and Microsoft AI plans to make a significant, long-term investment in the region as we begin hiring the best AI scientists and engineers into this new AI hub.  

In the coming weeks and months, we will be posting job openings and actively hiring exceptional individuals who want to work on the most interesting and challenging AI questions of our time. We’re looking for new team members who are driven by impact at scale, and who are passionate innovators eager to contribute to a team culture where continuous learning is the norm.  

This is great news for Microsoft AI and for the U.K.  As a British citizen, born and raised in London, I’m proud to have co-founded and built a cutting-edge AI business here. I’m deeply aware of the extraordinary talent pool and AI ecosystem in the U.K., and I’m excited to make this commitment to the U.K. on behalf of Microsoft AI. I know – through my close work with thought leaders in the U.K. government, business community and academia – that the country is committed to advancing AI responsibly and with a safety-first commitment to drive investment, innovation and economic growth. Our decision to open this hub in the U.K. reflects this ambition.  

The Microsoft AI London hub adds to Microsoft’s existing presence in the U.K., including the Microsoft Research Cambridge lab, home to some of the foremost researchers in the areas of AI, cloud and productivity. At the same time, it builds off Microsoft’s recently announced £2.5 billion investment to upskill the U.K. workforce for the AI era and to build the infrastructure to power the AI economy, including our commitment to bring 20,000 of the most advanced GPUs to the country by 2026. 

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and extend the benefits to every person and organization across the U.K.  

The post Announcing new Microsoft AI Hub in London appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Source: The Official Microsoft Blog

Today signifies a major achievement for the entire quantum ecosystem: Microsoft and Quantinuum demonstrated the most reliable logical qubits on record. By applying Microsoft’s breakthrough qubit-virtualization system, with error diagnostics and correction, to Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware, we ran more than 14,000 individual experiments without a single error. Furthermore, we demonstrated more reliable quantum computation by performing error diagnostics and corrections on logical qubits without destroying them. This finally moves us out of the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) level to Level 2 Resilient quantum computing.

This is a crucial milestone on our path to building a hybrid supercomputing system that can transform research and innovation across many industries. It is made possible by the collective advancement of quantum hardware, qubit virtualization and correction, and hybrid applications that take advantage of the best of AI, supercomputing, and quantum capabilities. With a hybrid supercomputer powered by 100 reliable logical qubits, organizations would start to see scientific advantage, while scaling closer to 1,000 reliable logical qubits would unlock commercial advantage.

Advanced capabilities based on these logical qubits will be available in private preview for Azure Quantum Elements customers in the coming months.

A purpose-built computing platform for science

Many of the hardest problems facing society, such as reversing climate change, addressing food insecurity and solving the energy crisis, are chemistry and materials science problems. However, the number of possible stable molecules and materials may surpass the number of atoms in the observable universe. Even a billion years of classical computing would be insufficient to explore and evaluate them all.

That’s why the promise of quantum is so appealing. Scaled quantum computers would offer the ability to simulate the interactions of molecules and atoms at the quantum level beyond the reach of classical computers, unlocking solutions that can be a catalyst for positive change in our world. But quantum computing is just one layer for driving these breakthrough insights.

Whether it’s to supercharge pharma productivity or pioneer the next sustainable battery, accelerating scientific discovery requires a purpose-built, hybrid compute platform. Researchers need access to the right tool at the right stage of their discovery pipeline to efficiently solve every layer of their scientific problem and drive insights into where they matter most. This is what we built with Azure Quantum Elements, empowering organizations to transform research and development with capabilities including screening massive data sets with AI, narrowing down options with high-performance computing (HPC) or improving model accuracy with the power of scaled quantum computing in the future.

We continue to advance the state-of-the-art across all these hybrid technologies for our customers, with today’s quantum milestone laying the foundation for useful, reliable and scalable simulations of quantum mechanics.

Moving toward resilience

In an article I wrote on LinkedIn, I used a ‘leaky boat’ analogy to explain why fidelity and error correction are so important to quantum computing. In short, fidelity is the value we use to measure how reliably a quantum computer can produce a meaningful result. Only with good fidelity will we have a solid foundation to reliably scale a quantum machine that can solve practical, real-world problems.

For years, one approach used to fix this leaky boat has been to increase the number of noisy physical qubits together with techniques to compensate for that noise but falling short of real logical qubits with superior error correction rates.  The main shortcoming of most of today’s NISQ machines is that the physical qubits are too noisy and error-prone to make robust quantum error correction possible. Our industry’s foundational components are not good enough for quantum error correction to work, and it’s why even larger NISQ systems are not practical for real-world applications.

The task at hand for the entire quantum ecosystem is to increase the fidelity of qubits and enable fault-tolerant quantum computing so that we can use a quantum machine to unlock solutions to previously intractable problems. In short, we need to transition to reliable logical qubits — created by combining multiple physical qubits together into logical ones to protect against noise and sustain a long (i.e., resilient) computation. We can only obtain this with careful hardware and software co-design. By having high-quality hardware components and breakthrough error-handling capabilities designed for that machine, we can get better results than any individual component could give us. Today, we’ve done just that.

“Breakthroughs in quantum error correction and fault tolerance are important for realizing the long-term value of quantum computing for scientific discovery and energy security. Results like these enable continued development of quantum computing systems for research and development.”
Dr. Travis Humble, Director, Quantum Science Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A breakthrough for handling quantum errors

That’s why today is such a historic moment: for the first time on record as an industry, we’re advancing from Level 1 Foundational to Level 2 Resilient quantum computing. We’re now entering the next phase for solving meaningful problems with reliable quantum computers. Our qubit-virtualization system, which filters and corrects errors, combined with Quantinuum’s hardware demonstrates the largest gap between physical and logical error rates reported to date. This is the first demonstrated system with four logical qubits that improves the logical over the physical error rate by such a large order of magnitude.

As importantly, we’re also now able to diagnose and correct errors in the logical qubits without destroying them — referred to as “active syndrome extraction.” This represents a huge step forward for the industry as it enables more reliable quantum computation.

With this system, we ran more than 14,000 individual experiments without a single error. You can read more about these results here.

“Quantum error correction often seems very theoretical. What’s striking here is the massive contribution Microsoft’s midstack software for qubit optimization is making to the improved step-down in error rates. Microsoft really is putting theory into practice.”
Dr. David Shaw, Chief Analyst, Global Quantum Intelligence

A long-standing collaboration with Quantinuum

Since 2019, Microsoft has been collaborating with Quantinuum to enable quantum developers to write and run their own quantum code on ion-trap qubit technology which includes high-fidelity, full connectivity and mid-circuit measurements. Multiple published benchmark tests recognize Quantinuum as having the best quantum volumes, making them well-positioned to enter Level 2.

“Today’s results mark a historic achievement and are a wonderful reflection of how this collaboration continues to push the boundaries for the quantum ecosystem. With Microsoft’s state-of-the-art error correction aligned with the world’s most powerful quantum computer and a fully integrated approach, we are so excited for the next evolution in quantum applications and can’t wait to see how our customers and partners will benefit from our solutions especially as we move towards quantum processors at scale.”
Ilyas Khan, Founder and Chief Product Officer, Quantinuum

Quantinuum’s hardware performs at physical two-qubit fidelity of 99.8%. This fidelity enables application of our qubit-virtualization system, with diagnostics and error correction, and makes today’s announcement possible. This quantum system, with co-innovation from Microsoft and Quantinuum, ushers us into Level 2 Resilient.

Pioneering quantum supercomputing, together

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every individual and organization to achieve more. We’ve brought the world’s best NISQ hardware to the cloud with our Azure Quantum platform so our customers can embark on their quantum journey. This is why we’ve integrated artificial intelligence with quantum computing and cloud HPC in the private preview of Azure Quantum Elements. We used this platform to design and demonstrate an end-to-end workflow that integrates Copilot, Azure compute and a quantum algorithm running on Quantinuum processors to train an AI model for property prediction.

Today’s announcement continues this commitment by advancing quantum hardware to Level 2. Advanced capabilities based on these logical qubits will be available in private preview for Azure Quantum Elements in the coming months.

Lastly, we continue to invest heavily in progressing beyond Level 2, scaling to the level of quantum supercomputing. This is why we’ve been advocating for our topological approach, the feasibility of which our Azure Quantum team has demonstrated. At Level 3, we expect to be able to solve some of our most challenging problems, particularly in fields like chemistry and materials science, unlocking new applications that bring quantum at scale together with the best of classical supercomputing and AI — all connected in the Azure Quantum cloud.

We are excited to empower the collective genius and make these breakthroughs accessible to our customers. For more details on how we achieved today’s results, explore our technical blog, and register for the upcoming Quantum Innovator Series with Quantinuum.

The post Advancing science: Microsoft and Quantinuum demonstrate the most reliable logical qubits on record with an error rate 800x better than physical qubits appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Source: The Official Microsoft Blog