Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, shared the below communication today with Microsoft employees.
Marketing excellence at Microsoft is key to how we drive business growth and for the past ten years, Chris Capossela has done a terrific job as our CMO driving revenue and brand love for the company. The numerous accolades Microsoft continues to receive in terms of brand recognition and marketing awards are impressive and a testament to the strong team he has built. Chris and I have been working on his succession plan for some time, and as this new era of AI is upon us, we’ve decided this is the right time to put that plan into action.
I am pleased to announce that Takeshi Numoto is being promoted to Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, reporting to me. Takeshi has been at the heart of our Cloud transformation, he’s a fantastic systems thinker who works end-to-end across all functions from engineering to finance to operations to sales, and he’s built a great team of marketing leaders. I’m thrilled for him to step into the CMO role for Microsoft and drive our vision forward.
I’m also excited that Yusuf Mehdi is being promoted to Executive Vice President, Consumer Chief Marketing Officer. He will join the senior leadership team and report to Takeshi. Yusuf will serve as the champion of our end-user experiences and build on his work launching several of our AI-powered services to lead Microsoft Copilot product marketing. He will also continue to lead our Search, Ad, & News and Devices & Creativity Customer Solution Areas (CSAs).
And with our recently closed acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, we are doubling down on our Gaming business. To realize our growth potential, Ami Silverman and her Consumer Sales Organization will move to report to Phil Spencer, CEO of Gaming. Ami will continue to drive all our consumer sales including our Devices & Creativity CSA through our direct and partner sales channels.
After 32 years of dedicated service to our company, employees, and customers, Chris is leaving Microsoft. Over the many years we’ve worked together, I’ve known and respected Chris as a leader who has exemplified a complete, unwavering commitment to our mission and our culture. As a leader and a colleague, he’s always shown how deeply he cares about both the “what” and the “how” of driving our business forward. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work closely with him and for the significant impact he’s had on our company through marketing leadership, championing our culture and D&I, and developing world class talent that will serve us well into the future.
Please join me in congratulating Takeshi and Yusuf on their new roles and extending a big thank you to Chris for all his contributions to Microsoft.
For the past decade, we have been on a journey with our customers to help them achieve digital transformation, which is business transformation empowered by cloud technology. With increasing excitement around generative AI — both for its potential and the impact it is already having — organizational leaders are eager to prioritize adoption that takes advantage of this next wave of AI transformation. At Microsoft, we are working with our customers to pragmatically assess and develop responsible, secure AI strategies focused on maximizing their investment while yielding desired business outcomes. With our differentiated copilot capabilities, customers can take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI across the services they already know and love; and with the confidence they are building upon the most integrated, comprehensive and trusted cloud in the industry. Together with our unmatched partner ecosystem — from the ISVs helping shape industries to the digital natives that are disrupting them — we are building generative AI solutions that will unlock productivity and innovation opportunities for organizations everywhere. In many cases, we are co-innovating and co-developing custom AI solutions directly with our customers. As I look back on the past quarter, I am humbled by what we have achieved together and the incredible effort by organizations across industries to embrace AI transformation.
Grupo Bimbo developed an AI solution with an integrated copilot to help employees save time when asking about company policies.
Organizations like 3M, Prada Group and Campari have been testing copilot features in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform firsthand, while General Motors, Visa, KPMG, AGL, Data #3, Bupa, NAB, Powerlink Queensland, Rest Super and Suncorp are now part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program. Our collaboration with IBM is helping clients accelerate the deployment of generative AI with its new Azure OpenAI Service offering, and we are enabling thousands of organizations like PepsiCo, Vodafone and Voya Financial with Azure cloud services through our expanded partnership with Oracle. To empower employees across 34 countries, Grupo Bimbo developed a solution with an integrated copilot in two weeks to help prevent non-compliance and save time when asking questions about company policies. All of Microsoft’s AI-powered copilots are backed by our Copilot Copyright Commitments to extend IP and legal protection to enterprise customers who use these services, building upon our AI Customer Commitments.
Global healthcare company Sanofi is improving training and collaboration for employees in different locations with HoloLens 2.
Helping healthcare professionals and providers focus on patient care and support through secure data automation and training
By securely centralizing its data in an AI-powered intelligent data platform on Azure, Mercy is able to use generative AI to help patients schedule appointments more efficiently and better understand their lab results. Mayo Clinic is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to ease the burden of administrative demands on healthcare providers so they can focus on patient care, while Duke Health is partnering with Microsoft to responsibly and ethically harness the potential of generative AI and the Microsoft Cloud to redefine the healthcare landscape. To speed up care and improve patient experiences, MultiCare has automated its medication reconciliation process and increased efficiency by 175% with help from Microsoft and partner 3Cloud. By consolidating data such as lab results, medications and plan coverage in the cloud, Blue Shield of California is making services more accessible to members while reducing the cost of care. With help from Healthanea, France-based insurance company AXA is connecting hospitals, pharmaceuticals, health tech solutions and insurers to provide patients with reliable and accurate health information while protecting sensitive health data through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Paige and Microsoft are collaborating to transform patient care by building the world’s largest image-based AI to detect cancer with higher accuracy. To ensure patient confidentiality and automate threat reporting, Hamad Medical Corporation is working with Mannai to proactively detect and respond to cyber threats while providing real-time visibility to its executives. Sanofi is improving training and collaboration for employees in different locations with HoloLens 2 — saving two weeks of training time for its production line operators and meeting increased demand for pharmaceuticals.
In Canada, the Government of Alberta created an AI-powered tool to help firefighting duty officers make decisions and use resources more strategically.
Empowering government workers, non-profit volunteers, students and teachers to expand social impact and save costs with data and AI
Working with AltaML, the Government of Alberta has built an AI-powered tool to help firefighting duty officers become more confident in predicting and sustainably managing the risk of wildfires, creating the potential to save up to $3 million in annual operating costs. In the U.K., Aberdeen City Council is making it easier for workers to access social care data within minutes to provide faster and more accurate service to vulnerable citizens while saving more than $2 million annually on manual data collection. To help ensure seamless service to citizens and prevent cyberattacks to critical infrastructure like traffic light systems and utilities, the City of Brampton is helping its IT team improve its cybersecurity maturity and reduce attack alerts by 70% with help from partner Difenda. To quickly scale the creation of thousands of audiobooks and reduce volunteer labor, nonprofit Project Gutenberg is making its e-books more accessible to people with visual impairments by using text-to-speech capabilities in Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric. German-based Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald is using AI to help research students pre-classify wildlife images in two days instead of 30 — saving 95% on the cost of wildlife monitoring and distance measurement. Working with teachers to offer more individualized support to students, New York City Public Schools has developed a secure, custom AI-powered teaching assistant on Azure OpenAI to answer questions and give real-time feedback.
AI is being used to help make the financial services industry more efficient in a number of areas.
Providing financial services employees and customers with AI capabilities for more meaningful and personalized interactions
Ally Financial launched a proprietary platform as its foundation for generative AI innovation across the company, including live summarization of customer service calls so employees can spend more time focusing on customer interactions. With Azure OpenAI, Swiss investment firm Vontobel is boosting employee productivity in programming and data analysis, while automatic payments company Sem Parar is responding intelligently and contextually to customer inquiries to help them resolve their questions more quickly. Emirates NBD is empowering more than a thousand developers with its coding assistant leveraging the capabilities of GitHub Copilot X, while automating repetitive tasks and content generation for employees using Microsoft 365 Copilot. MetLife is helping pet parents access health records and connect with veterinary technicians more easily through its app built with AI-powered search and machine learning capabilities. With a focus on making financial services more accessible in Qatar, CWallet has saved $1 million by building its secure and compliant fintech platform on Azure to meet data regulations in the Middle East, and now plans to explore AI capabilities to simplify customer transactions.
Swedish steel manufacturer Epiroc is helping automate complex processes for its global employees.
Equipping manufacturing workers with AI-driven data and insights to improve customer support and streamline complex operations
Using Azure OpenAI, electrical equipment manufacturer ABB is integrating generative AI into its platform and applications to provide industry executives, specialists and engineers with real-time insights for better decision making and increased productivity. To reduce waiting time for customers, Dubai-based BMW Group importer AGMC is building an AI solution to more quickly locate and transport vehicles from its largest service center. By creating a scalable AI platform in Azure, Swedish steel manufacturer Epiroc is helping automate complex processes for its global employees to ensure consistent quality of its products, increase efficiency and reduce waste. Printer and imaging company Lexmark has improved its technician support efficiency by 20% with AI-driven predictive modelling, contributing to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction ratings. Xiaomi has developed an AI service bot with Power Virtual Agents to handle customer questions more efficiently and is better using Azure Translator to quickly generate product manuals in multiple languages. Indian textile company Arvind is leveraging the integrated AI capabilities of Power Apps to reduce sampling errors by 90%, production errors by 70% and order turnaround time by 30%.
INSPIRE Environmental is using Azure AI and machine learning to reduce costs and client turnaround time for image analysis of ocean data.
Enhancing employee productivity and providing customers with AI-enhanced solutions across professional services
Lumen Technologies is empowering employees across organizations with Microsoft 365 Copilot, making it easier for customer service teams to access repair manuals and helping sales teams summarize actionable steps from customer communications. In France, consulting firm Arthur D. Little is unifying its complex, unsorted data while maintaining data confidentiality and maximizing human capital — helping its consultants prepare for client meetings faster and curate presentation content in 50% less time. Jacobs Solutions is making it easier for staff to access and share high-quality data by integrating Microsoft Fabric with its end-to-end platform for seamless data management and advanced AI capabilities. INSPIRE Environmental is reducing costs and client turnaround time for image analysis of complex ocean data using Azure AI and machine learning. By leveraging Azure OpenAI, Orca Security is speeding up response times to customers and increasing data security while meeting regulatory compliance, Amadeus is working with Microsoft and Accenture to assist corporate travelers with trip logistics through its interactive assistant — as well as building a plug-in for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and professional services firm Atera is helping IT technicians focus on high value work while improving efficiency by 10x with its AI-powered platform.
Today’s AI advancements have also generated new opportunities for digital natives to build upon their cloud-first strategies and shape the future of industry. To combat and identify cyber financial crime behaviors, SymphonyAI developed an AI assistant to help investigators securely and automatically collect, collate and summarize financial and third-party information. By applying AI capabilities across thousands of interactions each day, CallMiner is unlocking insights that empower organizations with a better understanding of the customer journey. Striving to be a leader in empathetic personal intelligence, Inflection AI is developing an AI chatbot that helps people accelerate development while reducing downtime. Building upon its cloud-based solution on Azure, Elastic is giving customers more focused answers to search queries by combining internal company knowledge with context from actual documents. With Azure OpenAI and Azure Cognitive Services, DeepBrain AI is cutting down chatbot development time and reducing manual processes while increasing language understanding and translation capabilities; while Commerce.AI has already started driving up to 50% increases in productivity for clients with its consumer sentiment analytics solutions.
We have a collective opportunity to put generative AI to work to help solve the biggest challenges facing organizations, industries and society today. Microsoft is helping customers and partners prioritize work and pragmatically innovate with generative AI to meet their most pressing business needs. From our unwavering commitment to building products responsibly and securely to how we engage with our customers and partners, I am proud of the trust we have forged along the way. Whether you are leveraging our copilot capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud, working with our partners to apply industry-specific cloud and AI solutions or seeking to co-innovate and co-develop to build custom solutions, I look forward to working alongside you to accelerate your AI transformation.
Microsoft’s campus in Herzliya, Israel. Photo: Amit Geron Photography
Kathleen Hogan, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, shared the below communication today with Microsoft employees.
I am profoundly saddened by the horrific terrorist attacks in Israel this weekend and the atrocities we continue to watch unfold. Together with the senior leadership team (SLT), I want to express my deepest sympathy for those who have been killed, injured, lost loved ones, and all those impacted by this violence. Together we condemn this hatred and brutality. To everyone impacted, please know we are all with you in our hearts and in our actions, and we will continue to do everything we can to support you and keep you safe.
The outpouring of support from so many of you worldwide is heartfelt and needed now, and many of you are asking how you can help. Since the attacks unfolded on Saturday, we have been focused on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and their overall wellbeing. Many teams across Microsoft — including our Crisis Management Team — have been activated and are working to assist employees. Our SLT is in direct contact with our local leaders in Israel and our employee communities, to offer support and to understand how best to help employees and their families during this unimaginable time.
We have nearly 3,000 employees in Israel directly impacted. We have Jewish employees around the world who are also experiencing grief, fear and anxiety as hatred and vitriol increase. We have Palestinian employees globally who are deeply concerned for the safety of their loved ones in the region and stand against these acts of terrorism.
We have many resources to help. Microsoft CARES provides mental and emotional wellbeing programs. In addition, we are responding quickly to support those impacted by these tragic events, assessing their needs and providing benefits such as adding virtual support groups. We will continue to listen and determine what other resources are needed.
Microsoft Philanthropies has activated a giving opportunity for eligible employees who wish to support relief efforts. Additionally, Microsoft’s Disaster Response is connecting with local organizations to support first responders with digital technology and services and will help as they receive further requests for assistance.
Microsoft employees show great care, empathy and allyship for each other. Thank you for checking in on your colleagues, listening, and showing support. Thank you to the many employees in Israel volunteering to address urgent community needs and leveraging their AI, cybersecurity, data and research expertise to help. And thank you to local leadership in Israel for coordinating efforts with the SLT and being there for our employees.
Across the company, let us stand together in our shared humanity.
Every industry depends on unique insights to achieve their goals, and unlocking the power of data is the key to an organization’s success. This is especially true in healthcare, where data has the potential to do so much good – from improving health outcomes and enhancing patient and clinician experiences to driving better organizational performance for healthcare systems. When a patient’s or the population’s health is at the center of the decision-making process, having the right data strategy in place can have a life-changing impact on people’s lives.
Healthcare data continues to grow rapidly, and organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume, greater variety and increased velocity. According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals produce 50 petabytes of siloed data per year – that’s equivalent to approximately 10 billion music files. Ninety-seven percent of this data goes unused, leaving many valuable insights locked away. Putting all this data to good use is the key to unlocking clinical and operational breakthroughs that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of patients and their healthcare journey. And in the new era of AI, the importance of data continues to grow as organizations realize that without a solid data strategy, they are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI.
At the HLTH 2023 conference, we’re introducing new data and AI solutions and capabilities that will help healthcare organizations stay focused on improving patient and clinician experiences while delivering quality care more efficiently and at a lower cost. Together, these new solutions offer healthcare organizations a unified, safe and responsible approach to their data and AI strategy and enable them to take advantage of the breadth and scale of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Unifying data analytics to drive business value and better patient care In May of this year, we unveiled Microsoft Fabric – an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI. Today, through the power of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we are introducing the first industry-specific data solutions in Fabric that unify data and insights through one common architecture and experience. Now available in preview, the healthcare data solutions in Fabric eliminate the costly, time-consuming process of stitching together a complex set of disconnected, multimodal health data sources – text, images, video, etc. – and provides a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze and visualize data-driven insights across their organization.
Microsoft Fabric gives healthcare organizations:
The ability to combine data from previously siloed sources across their organization, such as electronic health records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), labs systems, claims systems and medical devices. The solution brings structured, unstructured, imaging and medical device data into the Fabric data lake with open data standards using FHIR, DICOM and MedTech services, providing customers with one common architecture. Additionally, connectors and converters make it easier to transform FHIR, DICOM and MedTech data from one format to another or build pipelines for specific use cases.
A multimodal data foundation that allows them to build standardized, scalable solutions that help accelerate the process of uncovering impactful clinical and operational insights and ultimately drive better patient care. Fabric helps create a single data estate where health data can live and be used to build and run AI models, as well as derive insights.
Standard capabilities like Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics enable clinical research and patient outreach analytics help provide more personalized engagement with patients.
A new de-identification service will allow organizations to de-identify clinical data, keeping patient-protected health information (PHI) private by using machine learning models to extract, redact or surrogate identifiers while unlocking insights from unstructured data, such as doctor’s notes, medical documents and clinical trial studies.
In addition, through healthcare-specific pre-built classification rules, labels and data glossaries in Microsoft Purview (preview), healthcare organizations can govern, protect and manage their entire data estate.
Organizations across the healthcare spectrum can benefit from Microsoft Fabric, with early adopters already planning to leverage the analytics platform to help advance some of their most prominent use cases:
Northwestern Medicine, Chicago’s premier integrated academic health system, will leverage the healthcare data solutions in Fabric to integrate clinical data across a variety of sources, meet regulatory mandates for information exchange, and unlock insights with data and AI, helping further their patients-first mission with high quality and timely care.
Arthur Health plans to use Fabric to power predictive care stage models in partnership with Quisitive for the Ontario Workers Network (OWN). OWN is a provincial network of hospitals, including Ottawa Hospital, and has experienced clinicians that provide world-class care for workers in their own communities.
SingHealth, Singapore’s largest network of public healthcare institutions, aims to harness the power of Fabric’s healthcare data solutions for its underlying data infrastructure. This will help to transform the delivery of healthcare to provide excellent care and services to the population and patients, empowering them to take care of their own health and healthcare.
Microsoft Fabric is a step forward in solving the healthcare industry’s longstanding disparate data problem. Learn more about the healthcare data solutions in Fabric here.
New AI capabilities that empower patients and simplify medical jargon Within Azure AI services, we are releasing new healthcare capabilities that will help organizations maximize the value of AI to increase positive impact on patient outcomes:
Helping clinicians and researchers make informed decisions – Azure AI Health Insights is a cognitive service that provides prebuilt models that perform analysis and provide inferences that can be reviewed and used by clinicians and researchers to facilitate patient care during important healthcare scenarios.
We are launching three new models in preview, including patient timeline, which uses generative AI to extract key events from unstructured data, such as medications, diagnosis and procedures, and organizes them chronologically to give clinicians a more accurate view of a patient’s medical history to better inform care plans. Clinical report simplification uses generative AI to give clinicians the ability to take medical jargon and convert it into simple language while preserving the full essence of the clinical information so that it can be shared with others, including patients. Radiology insights provides quality checks through feedback on errors and inconsistencies. The model also identifies follow-up recommendations and clinical findings within clinical documentation with measurements (sizes) documented by the radiologist.
Bringing generative AI to healthcare chatbots and virtual assistants – This new preview capability in Azure AI Health Bot provides out-the-box healthcare intelligence that can be customized and connected into existing workflows, using answers from a healthcare organization’s own content sources, as well as leveraging generative AI to provide answers from credible sources like the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Extracting and labeling medical data to identify meaningful insights – Text Analytics for health, an Azure AI Language service, applies machine learning intelligence to extract and label essential medical information from a variety of unstructured texts. Newly released industry open source templates include population health, patient population Q&A using Azure OpenAI Service, clinical trials patient cohorts and mass historic data processing.
AI-powered solutions empower clinicians to deliver quality, personalized care U.S. health systems are turning to AI-powered solutions to alleviate administrative burden and the resulting clinician burnout, which rose to 53% among physicians in 2023 compared to 42% in 2018, according to Medscape’s 2023 survey. To address this burnout, and empower clinicians to focus on delivering high-quality personalized care, we announced the general availability of Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Copilot, formerly known as DAX Express.
DAX Copilot, part of the larger Nuance Dragon family of solutions used by more than 550,000 users worldwide, allows clinicians to create draft clinical summaries automatically and securely in seconds from exam room or telehealth conversations for immediate review and entry in the EHR.
Atrium Health was the first to deploy Nuance DAX Copilot, with plans to expand licenses across its enterprise of 40 hospitals and more than 1,400 care locations. Physicians are already reporting saving meaningful time in their documentation tasks for each patient visit. In particular, Atrium Health clinicians are reporting that physicians are already saving up to 40 minutes per day with this advanced documentation technology. Additionally, 68% have recognized an improved experience providing care.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare in the era of data and AI These new industry innovations in data and AI are strengthened through Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which enables healthcare organizations to accelerate their data and AI journey by augmenting the Microsoft Cloud with industry relevant data solutions, application templates and AI services. Our offerings can also be customized by an unmatched global ecosystem of trusted partners. We work with leading ISVs and system integrators so that our healthcare customers have complete solutions that address their unique business challenges.
Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we are making it easier for healthcare organizations to create connected experiences at every point of care, provide tools that foster collaboration, empower the healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from clinical and operational data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry.
I recently highlighted how generative AI technology is opening doors for organizations to imagine new ways to solve challenges, while unlocking innovation and delivering greater business value for those who adopt it. Organizations with modern data estates fortified with the Microsoft Cloud are already accelerating their AI transformation; and as many business leaders seek to keep pace they are turning to Microsoft and our partner ecosystem for industry expertise, scale and copilot capabilities.
Microsoft has built a foundation of successfully delivering AI solutions for many years. Now, we are infusing generative AI capabilities across the services customers know and love, while remaining committed to helping them apply it responsibly and securely. With so many compelling AI opportunities to discover, it is important leaders across industries understand how to successfully use this groundbreaking technology to meet their business imperatives.
At our kickoff experience in New York City last month, we highlighted Microsoft’s copilot technology and learned from customers about the business results and productivity gains they are realizing today. I am pleased to announce additional dates for Microsoft Envision | The Tour — an in-person experience bringing together senior decision makers and industry experts in AI. Attendees will leave feeling equipped with the latest information to begin — or build upon — their AI transformation.
Please join us on Oct. 18 as we continue the tour in London, where Satya Nadella will discuss the opportunity for organizations around the world to transform every aspect of their business with AI. To register and learn more about upcoming dates across Mumbai, Sydney, Mexico City, Paris and Tokyo, visit: Microsoft Envision | The Tour.
I look forward to connecting with you as we begin one of the most exciting and pivotal years for technology in our lifetimes.
The Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty represents a significant advancement at the intersection of global demand for innovation and evolving national policies regarding data privacy and control. It ushers in a new era for governments worldwide, providing a secure avenue for modernizing their technology infrastructure and workflows.
Today, we are announcing public preview of the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. Furthermore, we are announcing our planned general availability of the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty for this December. This solution will enable governments to meet their compliance, security and policy requirements while harnessing the cloud to deliver value to their citizens.
Since the inception of the cloud, government customers have faced limitations with digital transformation, in part because of the need for controls to meet specific national and regional requirements. Over recent years, innovators within global governments have asked for alternatives to the heavy capital expense and operational costs of a legacy approach, both to reduce the overhead of owning and operating datacenters and to facilitate modernization. Additionally, evolving policy decisions such as the European Commission’s EU-U.S. Adequacy Decision in July 2023 under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now provide legal support for continued adoption of hyperscale cloud computing by government customers within the EU.
With these two trends converging in the public sector, and with specific requirements varying by country, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is grounded in a repeatable best-practice approach that can be leveraged to assist with complex regulation achievements. This solution features industry-leading data sovereignty and encryption controls, enabling governments to easily create solutions tailored to help address regional and national requirements.
A principled approach to digital sovereignty
At Microsoft, we believe in transparency so that people and organizations can control their data and have meaningful choices in how it’s used. We empower and defend the data privacy choices of every person who uses our products and services.
Our principled approach to digital sovereignty in the cloud builds on our principled approach to data privacy in the cloud. We understand that sovereignty can mean different things for different scenarios, and as we work with customers and partners around the world the common thread is a need to determine for themselves where their data resides and how it’s protected, including who has access to that data.
For most government needs, the security, privacy and compliance capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud already deliver on their requirements, regulations and standards — the additional capabilities we’re providing with the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty are designed specifically for countries with jurisdictional requirements around sensitive data. With all Microsoft Cloud solutions, customers benefit from industry-leading cybersecurity, along with the broadest compliance and more regions than any other cloud provider.
A keystone offering for national requirements
Our collaboration with partners who deeply understand national requirements enables us to provide a global solution for local requirements. These requirements are often complex due to a layered landscape of evolving policy, trends and regulations. The solutions Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty delivers have been validated by governments and their partners as a preferred way to unlock cloud value. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with many of our pilot customers and wanted to share a glimpse into how two of them are using this solution.
In the Netherlands, the National Cyber SecurityCentre (NCSC), a leader in cyber security guidelines and advisories, including those related to secure cloud adoption, is working to establish a cloud center of excellence enabling compliant and rapid cloud adoption. To this end, NCSC is currently piloting Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty with sovereign landing zones and built-in policy initiatives to meet the Dutch BIO regulation. In the NCSC’s own words,
“The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is piloting avenues to adopt and use secure, robust public cloud offerings,” says Arnoud van Petersen, CIO & Head of IT Services at NCSC-NL. “Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, with its specialized features like sovereign landing zones, and well-developed security and AI capabilities provide a solution that fits our strategy of enabling cloud innovation without compromising sovereign controls.”
InSpark, (a subsidiary of Royal KPN), is a fully dedicated Microsoft Cloud Incubator for mission-critical infrastructures for the government and enterprises. InSpark is working to provide a compliant and repeatable approach to meet the demands of Dutch public sector customers, such as the Municipality of Amsterdam, with Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.
“At Municipality of Amsterdam, Cloud for Sovereignty will enable us to leverage cloud capabilities for processes that use or create sensitive information. By migrating from an on-premises datacenter to the cloud in compliance with the relevant classification within the Dutch BIO regulation, this enables us to efficiently offer modern services and ultimately improve the experiences of our citizens,” says Patrick Scholte, Director Platforms & Development, Municipality of Amsterdam.
A sampling of other regional and global partners:
In Sweden, Atea is at the forefront of exploring new potentials of leveraging technology and functionality through the public cloud while incorporating additional security measures provided by Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. With these enhanced capabilities for managing sensitive data in the cloud, Atea is empowering public customers to deliver digital services and assisting government agencies in improving citizens’ digital experiences. Additionally, Atea supports customer use cases enabling advanced predictive healthcare by utilizing Microsoft Cloud for Sovereign technology to analyze highly sensitive data.
In the United Arab Emirates, G42 enables the UAE public sector and regulated industries clients to use new platform capabilities for securing data and workloads, providing access to the latest cloud and AI features available on Azure and helping them comply with local privacy and regulatory requirements.
In Italy, Leonardo is part of the consortium that delivers the Polo Strategico Nazionale (PSN), which translates as “National Strategic Hub,” that aims to provide a centralized, secure and compliant set of cloud services for public administrations in Italy, ranging from central entities like the ministries, down to regional and local governments such as health agencies and Leonardo is using Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty to deliver solutions for multiple customers that leverage the economies of scale, security levels and pace of innovation that today are only available with hyperscale clouds.
According to recent research from Accenture, European enterprises are increasingly embracing sovereign cloud, with 37% already invested and 44% planning to invest in the next two years. With 137 countries enacting some form of data protection and sovereignty laws, Accenture can use Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty to support governments with a sound sovereign cloud strategy to establish control of their data while unlocking new sources of value in the digital realm.
Landing tailored policies with sovereign controls
Our intent with the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is to unlock cloud innovation for governments through tailored sovereign controls, and our technical approach is grounded in repeatable best practices designed to help customers achieve their regional and national requirements.
With the start of the public preview today, we’re releasing:
The Sovereign Landing Zone and policy initiative now available on GitHub, which instantiates guardrails for sovereign cloud environments for customer workloads, enabling customers to leverage best practices for secure and consistent environments while supporting their efforts to meet evolving local regulations.
Transparency Logs, available to eligible customers, provides customers with visibility into key operational activities of Microsoft engineers to support customer service and service reliability issues.
Automated workload templates for Azure Confidential Computing and Azure Lighthouse as examples for building workloads using these technologies for sovereign environments to speed learning and adoption.
As we turn the corner into a new era for government innovation in the cloud, we look forward to continuing to serve customer needs for preferred solutions that facilitate innovation while helping meet their various compliance, security and policy requirements.
We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology. With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action. At Microsoft, we think about this as having a copilot to help navigate any task. We have been building AI-powered copilots into our most used and loved products – making coding more efficient with GitHub, transforming productivity at work with Microsoft 365, redefining search with Bing and Edge and delivering contextual value that works across your apps and PC with Windows.
Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life.
Copilot will begin to roll out in its early form as part of our free update to Windows 11, starting Sept. 26 — and across Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365 Copilot this fall. We’re also announcing some exciting new experiences and devices to help you be more productive, spark your creativity, and to meet the everyday needs of people and businesses.
With over 150 new features, the next Windows 11 update is one of our most ambitious yet, bringing the power of Copilot and new AI powered experiences to apps like Paint, Photos, Clipchamp and more right to your Windows PC.
Bing will add support for the latest DALL.E 3 model from OpenAI and deliver more personalized answers based on your search history, a new AI-powered shopping experience, and updates to Bing Chat Enterprise, making it more mobile and visual.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be generally available for enterprise customers on Nov. 1, 2023, along with Microsoft 365 Chat, a new AI assistant that will completely transform the way you work.
Additionally, we introduced powerful new Surface devices that bring all these AI experiences to life for you, and they are available for pre-order beginning today.
New Windows 11 Update delivers over 150 new features, including bringing the power of Copilot to the PC
Today, we’re thrilled to share our next step toward making Windows the destination for the best AI experiences – with a new update that delivers our most personal experience yet coming on Sept. 26.
Here’s a look at some of what’s new in the latest update for Windows 11:
YouTube Video
Copilot in Windows (in preview) empowers you to create faster, complete tasks with ease and lessens your cognitive load – making once complicated tasks, simple. We’ve made accessing the power of Copilot seamless as it’s always right there for you on the taskbar or with the Win+C keyboard shortcut providing assistance alongside all your apps, on all screen sizes at work, school or at home.
Paint has been enhanced with AI for drawing and digital creation with the addition of background removal and layers as well as a preview of Cocreator that brings the power of generative AI to the Paint app.
Photos has also been enhanced with AI including new features to make editing your photos a breeze. With Background Blur you can make the subject of your photo stand out quickly and easily. The Photos app automatically finds the background in the photo, and with a single click, instantly highlights your subject and blurs out the background. We’ve improved search, with photos stored in OneDrive (home or personal) accounts, you can now quickly find the photo you’re looking for based on the content of the photo. You can also now find photos based on the location where they were taken.
Snipping Tool now offers more ways to capture content on your screen – with this update you can now extract specific text content from an image to paste in another application or, you can easily protect your sensitive information with text redaction by using text actions on the post capture screen. And, with the addition of sound capturing using audio and mic support, it’s easier to create compelling videos and content from your screen.
Clipchamp, now with auto compose, helps you with scenes suggestions, edits and narratives based on your images and footage automatically so you can create and edit videos to share with family, friends, and social media like a pro.
Notepad will start automatically saving your session state allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return. Notepad will automatically restore previously open tabs as well as unsaved content and edits across those open tabs.
With the new Outlook for Windows, you can connect and coordinate your various accounts (including Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and more) in one app. Intelligent tools help you write clear, concise emails and seamlessly attach important documents and photos from OneDrive. To learn more, visit this link.
Modernized File Explorer, we are introducing a modernized File Explorer home, address bar and search box all designed to help you more easily access important and relevant content, stay up to date with file activity and collaborate without even opening a file. Also coming to File Explorer is a new Gallery feature designed to make it easy to access your photo collection.
New text authoring experiences to voice access and new natural voices in Narrator, continuing our ongoing commitment to making Windows 11 the most accessible version of Windows yet.
Windows Backup makes moving to a new Windows 11 PC easier than ever. With Windows Backup, transitioning most files, apps and settings from one PC to another, is seamless so everything is right where you left it, exactly how you like it.
These experiences, including Copilot in Windows and more will start to become available on Sept. 26 as part of our latest update to Windows 11, version 22H2.
Bing and Edge are redefining how we interact with the web
Today, we’re announcing new features in Bing and Edge to supercharge your day powered by the latest models delivering the most advanced capabilities for AI available. You can use Bing Chat today with Microsoft Edge or at bing.com/chat. Features will begin to roll out soon.
Personalized answers. Now, your chat history can inform your results. For example, if you’ve used Bing to track your favorite soccer team, next time you’re planning a trip it can proactively tell you if the team is playing in your destination city. If you prefer responses that don’t use your chat history, you can turn this feature off in Bing settings.
Copilot in Microsoft Shopping. From Bing or Edge, you can now more quickly find what you’re shopping for online. When you ask for information on an item, Bing will ask additional questions to learn more, then use that information to provide more tailored recommendations. And you can trust you’re getting the best price – in fact, in the last 12 months, shoppers have been offered more than $4 billion in savings on Microsoft Edge. Soon, you’ll also be able to use a photo or saved image as the starting point for shopping.
DALL.E 3 model from OpenAI in Bing Image Creator. DALL.E 3 delivers a huge leap forward with more beautiful creations and better renderings for details like fingers and eyes. It also has a better understanding of what you’re asking for, which results in delivering more accurate images. We’re also integrating Microsoft Designer directly into Bing to make editing your creations even easier.
Content Credentials. As we continue to take a responsible approach to generative AI, we’re adding new Content Credentials which uses cryptographic methods to add an invisible digital watermark to all AI-generated images in Bing – including time and date it was originally created. We will also bring support for Content Credentials to Paint and Microsoft Designer.
Bing Chat Enterprise Updates. Since its introduction just two months ago, more than 160 million Microsoft 365 users now have access to Bing Chat Enterprise at no additional cost and the response has been incredible. Today we’re announcing that Bing Chat Enterprise is now available in the Microsoft Edge mobile app. We’re also bringing support for multimodal visual search and Image Creator to Bing Chat Enterprise. Boost your creativity at work with the ability to find information using images and creating them.
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Transforming work with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise and Windows
In March, we showed you what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do in the apps millions of people use every day across work and life – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams – using just your own words. After months of learning alongside customers like Visa, General Motors, KPMG and Lumen Technologies, we’re excited to share that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be generally available for enterprise customers on Nov. 1.
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Today, we’re also introducing a new, hero experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Microsoft 365 Chat. You saw a glimpse of Microsoft 365 Chat in March, then called Business Chat — but rapid advancements over the last few months have taken it to a whole new level. Microsoft 365 Chat combs across your entire universe of data at work, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, plus the web. Like an assistant, it has a deep understanding of you, your job, your priorities and your organization. It goes far beyond simple questions and answers to give you a head start on some of your most complex or tedious tasks — whether that’s writing a strategy document, booking a business trip, or catching up on emails.
Over the past few years, the pace and volume of work have only increased. On a given workday, our heaviest users search for what they need 18 times, receive over 250 Outlook emails and send or read nearly 150 Teams chats.[1] Teams users globally are in three times more meetings each week than they were in 2020.[2] And on Windows, some people use 11 apps in a single day to get work done. [3] Microsoft 365 Chat tames the complexity, eliminates the drudgery and helps you reclaim time at work. Preview customers can access it today on Microsoft365.com, Teams, or in Bing when signed in with their work account. In the future you’ll be able to access it wherever you see the Copilot icon when signed in with your work account.
To empower you at work, we’re also introducing new capabilities for Copilot in Outlook, Word, Excel, Loop, OneNote and OneDrive. Bing Chat Enterprise —the first entry point into generative AI for many companies — is getting a few upgrades. And as part of our big Windows 11 update, Windows 365 Switch and Windows 365 Boot will be generally available making it even easier to access your Windows Cloud PC. This will help employees achieve more, while making it easier for IT to deploy, manage and secure. Check out the Microsoft 365 blog to learn more about how Microsoft 365, Bing Chat Enterprise and Windows are transforming the way we work.
Unleashing personal productivity and creativity with Designer and Copilot in Microsoft 365
Designer, the newest addition to our family of Microsoft 365 consumer apps, helps you quickly create stunning visuals, social media posts, invitations, and more using cutting-edge AI. Today, we’re showing some powerful new features, many of which will be powered by OpenAI’s Dall.E 3. Generative expand uses AI to extend your image beyond its borders, generative fill adds a new object or background, and generative erase can remove unwanted objects.[4] Dall.E 3 will also soon power the image generation experience in Designer, making it easy to add original, higher quality images to your design in seconds.
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We’re also integrating Designer into Microsoft 365 Copilot for consumers — starting with Word. Designer uses the context of your document to propose visuals to choose from; you can make it more personal by uploading your own photos too. And within moments, you can transform a text-heavy document with custom graphics. We’re starting to test Microsoft 365 Copilot with a small group of Microsoft 365 consumer subscribers and look forward to expanding the preview to more people over time. Seventy percent of creators tell us one of the most difficult parts of the creation process is just getting started.[5] With creative tools like Designer, plus Bing Image Creator, Clipchamp and Paint, you can now have an immediate visual draft of almost anything — with a few simple prompts.
Introducing new Surface devices available for pre-order beginning today for people and businesses
There is no better stage to bring to life all of the incredible AI experiences from across Microsoft than our new Surface devices. Surface is at the forefront of device performance and processor technology. We have been investing in silicon advancements to augment this next wave of AI innovation, unlocking experiences like Windows Studio Effects in Surface Pro 9 with 5G and continuing to increase performance to run the latest AI models with powerful devices like the new Surface Laptop Studio 2.
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The new Surface Laptop Studio 2 is the most powerful Surface we’ve ever built. Turbocharged with the latest Intel® Core processors and cutting-edge NVIDIA® Studio tools for creators-with up to 2x more graphics performance than MacBook Pro M2 Max, [6] Surface Laptop Studio brings together the versatility to create and the power to perform — a stunning 14.4″ PixelSense Flow touchscreen display and flexible design with three unique postures. And with new customizations brought to the haptic touchpad to improve accessibility – we’re proud to call it the most inclusive touchpad on any laptop today.
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The new Surface Laptop Go 3 will turn heads with its balance of style and performance. It’s our lightest and most portable Surface Laptop, with a touchscreen display, and packed with premium features like an incredible typing experience and a Fingerprint Power Button, and it comes in four stylish colors. With Intel® Core i5 performance, all-day battery life, and robust RAM and storage options, it’s the perfect everyday laptop and stage for the latest AI tools from Microsoft.
Surface Go 4 for Business is our most portable Surface 2-in-1. This fall, the new Surface Go will be available exclusively for organizations to meet the growing needs of frontline workers and educators. We can’t wait to see how it will help businesses modernize and make their users more productive.
Surface Hub 3 is the premier collaboration device built for hybrid work, designed end-to-end by Microsoft. The Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows experience is familiar and intuitive on a brilliant 50” or 85” screen. The 50” Surface Hub 3 brings entirely new ways to co-create with Portrait, Smart Rotation and Smart AV. AI-enhanced collaboration tools – like Cloud IntelliFrame and Copilot in Whiteboard – shine on Surface Hub 3.
3D printable Adaptive Pen Grips for Surface Pen have been added to our lineup of adaptive accessories enabling more people to engage in digital inking and creation than before. They are available for purchase through Shapeways or as downloadable plans for 3D printing. To hear more about how we’re taking steps to close the disability divide, check out our video.
To pre-order one of our incredible new Surface devices, visit Microsoft.com, Bestbuy.com, and our Surface for Business page and blog to learn more about all of today’s new products.
The new era of AI with Copilot from Microsoft is here – and it’s ready for you
We believe that Microsoft is the place where powerful, useful AI experiences come together – simply, securely and responsibly – into the products you use most. Today, we showed you how we are not only increasing the usefulness of these experiences, but we are expanding them. From Windows 11 as the destination for the best AI experiences to empower people using it at work, school and home. To Microsoft 365, the most trusted productivity suite on the planet. To Bing and Edge, the most innovative search engine and browser available. All of it coming together on Windows 11 PCs like Surface. And with Copilot helping you get things done, helping you create and connect to people you care about or the world around you. We can’t wait to see what you can do with these experiences.
[3] Data reflects the top 20% Windows devices by app volume per day.
[4] Generative erase in Microsoft Designer is generally available to try today, with generative expand and fill coming soon.
[5] Survey of 941 creators commissioned by Microsoft in June 2022.
[6] Tested by Microsoft in September 2023 using CineBench 2024 GPU benchmark comparing Surface Laptop Studio 2 with RTX 2000 Ada Generation to MacBook Pro14” with M2 Max 19 12 core / 30 core configuration.
) Copilot
