Microsoft News Network

Two things can be true at the same time.

In the case of AI, it is absolutely true that the industry is moving incredibly fast and evolving quickly. It’s also true that hundreds of thousands of customers are using Microsoft AI technology today and, by making early bets on the platform, are seeing big benefits now and future-proofing their ability to benefit from the next big wave of AI improvements.

Microsoft Ignite is our annual event that spotlights the updates and creations that enable customers, partners and developers to unleash the full potential of Microsoft’s technology and change the way we approach work.

This year, we are announcing about 80 new products and features, including new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot, additions to the Copilot + AI stack and new Copilot+ devices offerings. Underpinning each of these innovations is our commitment to security. Since launching our Secure Future Initiative (SFI) one year ago, we have made security the No. 1 job of every employee at Microsoft, dedicated 34,000 engineers to this focus and, at Ignite, we will announce innovations that are rooted in our SFI principles: secure by design, secure by default and secure operations.

More than 200,000 people have registered to join us for this year’s Ignite, with more than 14,000 attendees at our in-person events in Chicago. Attendees can choose from more than 800 sessions, demos and expert-led labs from Microsoft and our partners. Most of the Ignite content will be available on demand for those who can’t attend the live event.

Copilot momentum

Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work, and we have seen the momentum grow as more organizations are moving to Copilot and deploying it to great success. All up, nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot.

That echoes an industry trend: A recent IDC study showed that generative AI is on the rise, with 75% adoption among companies surveyed in 2024. In addition, for every $1 invested, companies are realizing a return of $3.70, and leaders are saying they are realizing as much as a $10 return, according to the study.

The investments that Microsoft has made in Copilot are paying dividends for our customers.

We recently highlighted some of the more than 200 customer stories of accelerated AI Transformation, with Copilot helping many of them spark innovation and transform their organization for the better. Several examples include:

• Intelligent power management company Eaton leveraged Microsoft 365 Copilot to help streamline and automate operations, improve data access, centralize knowledge and empower teams to focus on higher-value tasks. One immediate challenge addressed through Copilot focused on the manual, time-consuming documentation process in Eaton’s Finance operations. Copilot helped Eaton document over 9,000 standard operating procedures (SOPs), resulting in an 83% time savings for each SOP.
• Consulting firm McKinsey & Company is creating an agent to speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%. The agent automates complex processes, such as identifying the right expert capabilities and staffing teams and acts as a single place where colleagues can ask questions and request follow-ups. By streamlining tasks and reducing manual inputs, this agent could potentially save consultants many hours, allowing them to spend more time with clients.

Boosting productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft is continuing to supercharge productivity with new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot designed to help simplify the workday.

Copilot Actions, now in private preview, enable anyone to automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts, whether it’s getting a daily summary of meeting actions in Microsoft Teams, compiling weekly reports or getting an email upon return from vacation that summarizes missed meetings, chats and emails.

Anyone can easily set up Actions right in their Microsoft 365 app, allowing users to focus on more impactful work, save time and boost productivity.

New agents in Microsoft 365 are designed to help scale individual impact and transform business process. At Ignite we will introduce:

• Agents in SharePoint: These natural language AI assistants are grounded on relevant SharePoint sites, files and folders to make it easy to find answers from that content, and to make quicker decisions as a result. Now generally available, every SharePoint site will include an agent tailored to its content. Users can also create customized agents scoped to select SharePoint files, folders or sites with as little as one click.
• Interpreter: This agent in Teams helps users overcome language barriers by enabling real-time, speech-to-speech interpretation in meetings. Available in public preview in early 2025, meeting participants will also have the option to have the agent simulate their personal voice.
• The Employee Self-Service Agent: An agent available in private preview in Business Chat expedites answers for the most common policy-related questions and simplifies action-taking on key HR and IT-related tasks — like helping employees understand their benefits or request a new laptop. It can be customized in Copilot Studio to meet an organization’s unique needs.
• Other agents in public preview take real-time meeting notes in Teams and automate project management from start to finish in Planner.

Copilot + AI Stack

The Copilot stack empowers users to build more ambitious products by leveraging advanced technology at each layer of the stack. To create a unified experience where customers can design, customize and manage AI applications and agents, we are introducing Azure AI Foundry, which gives customers access to all existing Azure AI services and tooling, plus new capabilities like:

• Azure AI Foundry SDK, now available in preview, provides a unified toolchain for designing, customizing and managing AI apps and agents with enterprise-grade control and customization. With tools that help organizations responsibly scale their applications, Foundry also provides 25 prebuilt app templates and a simplified coding experience they can access from familiar tools like GitHub, Visual Studio and Copilot Studio.
• Azure AI Foundry portal (formerly Azure AI Studio), now available in preview, is a comprehensive visual user interface to help developers discover AI models, services and tools. With a new management center experience that brings essential subscription information into a single dashboard, the portal also helps IT admins, operations and compliance teams manage AI applications at scale.
• Azure AI Agent Service, coming soon to preview, will enable professional developers to orchestrate, deploy and scale enterprise-ready agents to automate business processes.

We also continue to back up our Trustworthy AI commitments with new tools. Today we’re announcing AI reports and risk and safety evaluations for images to help organizations ensure AI applications are safe and compliant. AI reports will help organizations improve observability, collaboration and governance for AI apps and fine-tuned models, while evaluations for image content will help customers assess the frequency and severity of harmful content in their app’s AI-generated outputs.

Copilot+ devices

As organizations move more workloads to the cloud to enhance security and flexibility, Microsoft is expanding its Cloud PC solution by introducing the first in a new class of devices purpose-built to connect securely to Windows 365 in seconds.

Windows 365 Link is the simple, secure, purpose-built device for Windows 365. It is in preview now and will become generally available for purchase starting in April 2025 in select markets with an MSRP of $349, allowing users to work securely in a familiar Windows desktop in the Microsoft Cloud with responsive, high-fidelity experiences.

Windows 365 Link is secure by design. The device has no local data, no local apps and admin-less users so corporate data stays protected within the Microsoft Cloud.

Other new capabilities for Copilot+ PCs for commercial customers include harnessing the power of inbuilt native processing units (NPUs) to deliver local AI. With improved Windows Search, and the new Recall experience (preview), finding what you need on your PC is easier than ever by just describing what you are looking for. These features are releasing first to our Windows Insider community on Copilot+ PCs before rolling out more broadly to our customers.

BlackRock momentum

Four years ago, BlackRock, one of the world’s pre-eminent asset management firms, formed a strategic alliance with Microsoft to move its Aladdin platform to Microsoft Azure. With this foundation on Azure, BlackRock rolled out generative AI tools for global clients with Aladdin Copilot. Through generative AI, Aladdin Copilot serves to strengthen the connective tissue across the platform, leveraging Microsoft technology to help users receive answers instantly to unlock new efficiencies and discover important business insights even faster. Aladdin Copilot makes BlackRock’s Aladdin platform even more intelligent and responsive. That results in enhanced productivity, enables scale and keeps users more informed.

BlackRock’s move to Azure and launch of Aladdin Copilot are just two of the many ongoing milestones in a long-term partnership that also includes an enterprise-wide deal for 24,000 seats of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Today, about 60% of BlackRock’s Copilot user population is leveraging Copilot on a weekly basis. Additionally, BlackRock also recently made the choice to move its on-prem CRM solution to the cloud with Dynamics 365, citing its native integration with Teams and Outlook as one of its primary decision-making factors.

Strength in security

We know that the threat landscape is rapidly evolving, and it’s imperative that we stay ahead of bad actors. At Microsoft we believe that security is a team sport, and we are stronger when we partner as a security community to share information, collaborate and stop bad actors.

In that spirit, and as part of our Secure Future Initiative (SFI), at Ignite we are announcing the largest public security research event in history: the Zero Day Quest. This event, which focuses on AI and cloud security, will offer the largest award pool in the industry at $4 million, in addition to our existing $16 million annual bounty program. This competition aims to attract the world’s best security minds to tackle high-impact scenarios critical to our customers’ security, with award multipliers, starting today.

As the threat landscape has changed, we have seen rapid evolution in the way attackers exploit weaknesses within systems — particularly by navigating graph relationships between identities, files and devices to uncover attack paths. Attackers thinking in graphs cause wider damage from the first point of intrusion. Traditional security products, with limited visibility into these graph relationships, are often better suited to protect specific devices or mediums — like laptops or inboxes — rather than the full scope of potential attack surface.

Today’s Microsoft Security Exposure Management launch is a pivotal step in transforming cybersecurity with savvy data and AI-based strategies. The power of incorporating Microsoft graph data, in context with data from customers’ other third-party security tools, creates a powerful single pane of glass to visualize attack paths before threat actors do. With computing power and cloud-scale performance to distill powerful real-time mapping of assets and evolving risks, Exposure Management assists security teams in preventing intrusions and provides IT, operations and risk leaders with real-time data to support cyber risk decision-making.

This is only a small section of the many exciting features and updates we will be announcing at Ignite. As a reminder, you can view keynote sessions from Microsoft executives including Satya Nadella, Rajesh Jha, Scott Guthrie, Charlie Bell and Vasu Jakkal, live or on-demand.

Plus, you can get more on all these announcements by exploring the Book of News, the official compendium of all today’s news.

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As fans of books, especially in their physical format, it is our great pleasure to launch 8080 Books, an imprint of Microsoft. Our first title, No Prize for Pessimism, is authored by Sam Schillace, deputy chief technology officer at Microsoft, and is available today. Our second title, Platform Mindset, by Marcus Fontoura, will be available later this year.  

Computing has become an essential ingredient to almost every endeavor on our planet, and, as students of both Microsoft and technology, our goal with 8080 Books is to publish original research, ideas and insights at the intersection of science, technology and business, and, in doing so, to help advance discourse on this important landscape.   

The name of our imprint takes its inspiration from the 8080 microprocessor — a foundation for the company’s earliest software breakthroughs. Not coincidentally, 8080 is also the last four digits of Microsoft’s corporate headquarters phone number.   

With a combined tenure of, well, let’s just say a long time, we’re both acutely aware of the rich well of talent at Microsoft from which we can draw upon and publish under the 8080 Books imprint over time. However, our intention is that we will seek to use this not just as a platform for Microsoft authors but also to showcase minds and ideas from outside of the company.  

While we are not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts, our website does provide more details about our plans, such as evaluating out of print titles that we feel remain relevant to today’s leaders, and why we feel the time is right to launch this imprint.  

We hope you enjoy our launch title, which is available here, and we look forward to hearing your feedback, questions and ideas as we embark on this new adventure.  

For anyone in the Puget Sound area, we invite you to Schillace’s first reading and signing at Brick & Mortar Books, on Wednesday, Dec. 11 in Redmond, Washington. Check here for details. Space is limited. 

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Every day, NASA’s satellites orbit Earth, capturing a wealth of information that helps us understand our planet. From monitoring wildfires to tracking climate change, this vast trove of Earth Science data has the potential to drive scientific discoveries, inform policy decisions and support industries like agriculture, urban planning and disaster response.

But navigating the over 100 petabytes of collected data can be challenging, which is why NASA has collaborated with Microsoft to explore the use of a custom copilot using Azure OpenAI Service to develop NASA’s Earth Copilot, which could transform how people interact with Earth’s data.

Geospatial data is complex, and often requires some level of technical expertise to navigate it. As a result, this data tends to be accessible only to a limited number of researchers and scientists. As NASA collects more data from new satellites, these complexities only grow and may further limit the potential pool of people able to draw insights and develop applications that could benefit society.

Recognizing this challenge, NASA embarked on a mission to make its data more accessible and user-friendly. Through NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer, the agency seeks to democratize data access, breaking down technical barriers to empower a diverse range of audiences, from scientists and educators to policymakers and the general public.

The challenge: Navigating the complexity of data

NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program is responsible for collecting an incredible variety of data from spaceborne sensors and instruments. This data spans everything from atmospheric conditions to land cover changes, ocean temperatures and more. However, the sheer scale and complexity of this information can be overwhelming. For many, finding and extracting insights requires navigating technical interfaces, understanding data formats and mastering the intricacies of geospatial analysis — specialized skills that very few non-technical users possess. AI could streamline this process, reducing time to gain insights from Earth’s data to a matter of seconds.

This issue isn’t just a matter of convenience; it has real-world implications. For example, scientists who need to analyze historical data on hurricanes to improve predictive models, or policymakers who want to study deforestation patterns to implement environmental regulations, may find themselves unable to easily access the data they need. This inaccessibility affects a broad array of sectors, including agriculture, urban planning and disaster response, where timely insights from spaceborne data could make a significant difference.

Moreover, as new satellites with new instruments continue to launch and collect more data, NASA is constantly faced with the challenge of building new tools to manage and make sense of this growing repository. The agency explored emerging technologies that could not only streamline data discovery but also broaden accessibility, enabling more people to engage with the data and uncover new insights.

The solution: AI-powered data access through Microsoft Azure

To address these challenges, NASA IMPACT worked with Microsoft to develop an AI-driven customer copilot, called Earth Copilot, which could simplify data access and encourage a wider range of users to interact with its Earth Science data. Together, they built the proof of concept AI model that leverages Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and advanced AI capabilities to transform how users can search, discover and analyze NASA’s geospatial data.

The key to NASA’s Earth Copilot lies in the integration of cloud-based technologies like Azure OpenAI Service, which provides access to powerful AI models and natural language processing capabilities that enable developers to integrate intelligent, conversational AI into their applications. This approach allows NASA to integrate AI into its existing data analysis platform — VEDA. These technologies together make it easier for users to search, discover and analyze Earth Science data

By combining these technologies, Earth Copilot enables users to interact with NASA’s data repository through plain language queries. Instead, they can simply ask questions such as “What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?” or “How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in the US?” AI will then retrieve relevant datasets, making the process seamless and intuitive.

“Azure’s robust suite of services, including machine learning, data analytics and scalable cloud infrastructure, powers this AI prototype,” said Juan Carlos López, former NASA engineer and current Azure Specialist at Microsoft. “We’ve designed the system to handle complex queries and large datasets efficiently, ensuring that users can quickly find the information they need without getting bogged down by technical complexities. Our goal was to create a seamless, scalable solution that could evolve as NASA’s data, tools and applications grow.”

Democratizing data for open science

The collaboration between NASA IMPACT and Microsoft has resulted in a solution that democratizes access to spaceborne data, enabling a broader range of users to engage with NASA’s science data. This has significant benefits for the scientific community, as researchers can now spend less time on data retrieval and more on analysis and discovery. For example, climate scientists can quickly access historical data to study trends, while agricultural experts can gain insights into soil moisture levels to improve crop management.

Educators and teachers can use real-world examples to engage students in Earth Science, fostering curiosity and encouraging the next generation of scientists and engineers. Policymakers can leverage the data to make informed decisions on critical issues like climate change, urban development and disaster preparedness, ensuring they have the most accurate information at their fingertips.

“The vision behind this collaboration was to leverage AI and cloud technologies to bring Earth’s insights to communities that have been underserved, where access to data can lead to tangible improvements,” said Minh Nguyen, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. “By enabling users to interact with the data through simple, plain language queries, we’re helping to democratize access to spaceborne information.”

The development of this AI prototype aligns with NASA’s Open Science initiative, which aims to make scientific research more transparent, inclusive and collaborative. By removing barriers to data discovery, NASA and Microsoft are setting the stage for a new era of discovery, where insights are not confined to a select few but can be explored and expanded by anyone curious about the world.

Looking ahead: Bridging the gap between data and insights

At the moment, the NASA Earth Copilot is available to NASA scientists and researchers to explore and test its capabilities. Any responsible deployment of AI technologies requires rigorous assessments to ensure the data and outputs cannot be misused. After a period of internal evaluations and testing, the NASA IMPACT team will explore the integration of this capability into the VEDA platform.

This collaboration exemplifies how technology can empower people, drive innovation and create positive change. Solutions like this will be essential in ensuring the benefits of data are shared widely, enabling more people to engage with, analyze and act upon information that shapes our world.

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Across every industry, AI is creating a fundamental shift in what’s possible, enabling new use cases and driving business outcomes. While organizations around the world recognize the value and potential of AI, for AI to be truly effective it must be tailored to specific industry needs.

Today, we’re announcing adapted AI models, expanding our industry capabilities and enabling organizations to address their unique needs more accurately and effectively. In collaboration with industry partner experts like Bayer, Cerence, Rockwell Automation, Saifr, Siemens Digital Industries Software, Sight Machine and more, we’re making these fine-tuned models, pre-trained using industry-specific data, available to address customers’ top use cases.

Underpinning these adapted AI models is the Microsoft Cloud, our platform for industry innovation. By integrating the Microsoft Cloud with our industry-specific capabilities and a robust ecosystem of partners, we provide a secure approach to advancing innovation across industries. This collaboration allows us to create extensive scenarios for customers globally, with embedded AI capabilities — from industry data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to AI agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio to AI models in Azure AI Studio — that enable industries to realize their full potential.

Introducing adapted AI models for industry

We’re pleased to introduce these new partner-enabled models from leading organizations that are leveraging the power of Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models (SLMs). These models will be available through the Azure AI model catalog, where customers can access a wide range of AI models to build custom AI solutions in Azure AI Studio, or directly from our partners. The models available in the Azure AI model catalog can also be used to configure agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio, a platform that allows customers to create, customize and deploy AI-powered agents, which can be applied to an industry’s top use cases to address its most pressing needs.

• Bayer, a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of healthcare and agriculture, will make E.L.Y. Crop Protection available in the Azure AI model catalog. A specialized SLM, it is designed to enhance crop protection sustainable use, application, compliance and knowledge within the agriculture sector. Built on Bayer’s agricultural intelligence, and trained on thousands of real-world questions on Bayer crop protection labels, the model provides ag entities, their partners and developers a valuable tool to tailor solutions for specific food and agricultural needs. The model stands out due to its commitment to responsible AI standards, scalability to farm operations of all types and sizes and customization capabilities that allow organizations to adapt the model to regional and crop-specific requirements.
• Cerence, which creates intuitive, seamless and AI-powered user experiences for the world’s leading automakers, is enhancing its in-vehicle digital assistant technology with fine-tuned SLMs within the vehicle’s hardware. CaLLM Edge, an automotive-specific, embedded SLM, will be available in the Azure AI model catalog. It can be used for in-car controls, such as adjusting air conditioning systems, and scenarios that involve limited or no cloud connectivity, enabling drivers to access the rich, responsive experiences they’ve come to expect from cloud-based large language models (LLMs), no matter where they are.
• Rockwell Automation, a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation, will provide industrial AI expertise via the Azure AI model catalog. The FT Optix Food & Beverage model brings the benefits of industry-specific capabilities to frontline workers in manufacturing, supporting asset troubleshooting in the food and beverage domain. The model provides timely recommendations, explanations and knowledge about specific manufacturing processes, machines and inputs to factory floor workers and engineers.
• Saifr, a RegTech within Fidelity Investments’ innovation incubator, Fidelity Labs, will introduce four new models in the Azure AI model catalog, empowering financial institutions to better manage regulatory compliance of broker-dealer communications and investment adviser advertising. The models can highlight potential regulatory compliance risks in text (Retail Marketing Compliance model) and images (Image Detection model); explain why something was flagged (Risk Interpretation model); and suggest alternative language that might be more compliant (Language Suggestion model). Together, these models can enhance regulatory compliance by acting as an extra set of review eyes and boost efficiency by speeding up review turnarounds and time to market.
• Siemens Digital Industries Software, which helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform, is introducing a new copilot for NX X software, which leverages an adapted AI model that enables users to ask natural language questions, access detailed technical insights and streamline complex design tasks for faster and smarter product development. The copilot will provide CAD designers with AI-driven recommendations and best practices to optimize the design process within the NX X experience, helping engineers implement best practices faster to ensure expected quality from design to production. The NX X copilot will be available in the Azure Marketplace and other channels.
• Sight Machine, a leader in data-driven manufacturing and industrial AI, will release Factory Namespace Manager to the Azure AI model catalog. The model analyzes existing factory data, learns the patterns and rules behind the naming conventions and then automatically translates these data field names into standardized corporate formats. This translation makes the universe of plant data in the manufacturing enterprise AI-ready, enabling manufacturers to optimize production and energy use in plants, balance production with supply chain logistics and demand and integrate factory data with enterprise data systems for end-to-end optimization. The bottling company Swire Coca-Cola USA plans to use Factory Namespace Manager to efficiently map its extensive PLC and plant floor data into its corporate data namespace.

We also encourage innovation in the open-source ecosystem and are offering five open-source Hugging Face models that are fine-tuned for summarization and sentiment analysis of financial data.

Additionally, last month we announced new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio. These state-of-the-art multimodal medical imaging foundation models, created in partnership with organizations like Providence and Paige.ai, empower healthcare organizations to integrate and analyze a variety of data types, leveraging intelligence in modalities other than text in specialties like ophthalmology, pathology, radiology and cardiology.

Accelerating transformation with industry agents

Microsoft also offers AI agents that are purpose-built for industry scenarios. Available in Copilot Studio, these agents can be configured to support organizations’ industry-specific needs. For example, retailers can use the Store Operations Agent to support retail store associates and the Personalized Shopping Agent to enhance customers’ shopping experiences. Manufacturers can use the Factory Operations Agent to enhance production efficiency and reduce downtime by enabling engineers and frontline workers to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues.

All this AI innovation wouldn’t be possible without a solid data estate, because AI is only as good as the data it’s built upon. By ensuring data is accurate, accessible and well integrated, organizations can unlock deeper insights and drive more effective decision-making with AI. Microsoft Fabric, a data platform built for the era of AI, helps unify disparate data sources and prepares data for advanced analytics and AI modeling. It offers industry data solutions that address each organization’s unique needs and allows them to discover, deploy and do more with AI.

At the forefront of addressing industry needs securely

At the core of our AI strategy is a commitment to trustworthy AI. This commitment encompasses safety, security and privacy, ensuring that AI solutions are built with the highest standards of integrity and responsibility. Trustworthy AI is foundational to everything we do, from how we work with customers to the capabilities we build into our products.

At Microsoft, we combine industry AI experience, insights and capabilities with a deep understanding of customer challenges and objectives. Along with a trusted ecosystem of experienced partners, we unlock the full potential of AI for each industry and business. Our goal is not just to offer or implement AI tools but to help customers succeed by embedding AI into the very core of what each industry does.

AI transformation is here, and Microsoft is at the forefront of this revolution. As we continue to navigate this new era of innovation, it’s clear that AI will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of business across all industries and that Microsoft will continue to lead the way. To learn more about how customers in a variety of industries are transforming with AI, visit How real-world businesses are transforming with AI.

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One of the highlights of my career has always been connecting with customers and partners across industries to learn how they are using technology to drive their businesses forward. In the past 30 years, we’ve seen four major platform shifts, from client server to internet and the web to mobile and cloud to now—the next major platform shift to AI.  

As today’s platform shift to AI continues to gain momentum, Microsoft is working to understand just how organizations can drive lasting business value. We recently commissioned a study with IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI, to uncover new insights around business value and help guide organizations on their journey of AI transformation. The study found that for every $1 organizations invest in generative AI, they’re realizing an average of $3.70 in return—and uncovered insights about the future potential of AI to reshape business processes and drive change across industries.  

Today, more than 85% of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft AI solutions to shape their future. In working with organizations large and small, across every industry and geography, we’ve seen that most transformation initiatives are designed to achieve one of four business outcomes:  

1. Enriching employee experiences: Using AI to streamline or automate repetitive, mundane tasks can allow your employees to dive into more complex, creative and ultimately more valuable work.
2. Reinventing customer engagement: AI can create more personalized, tailored customer experiences, delighting your target audiences while lightening the load for employees.
3. Reshaping business processes: Virtually any business process can be reimagined with AI, from marketing to supply chain operations to finance, and AI is even allowing organizations to go beyond process optimization and discover exciting new growth opportunities.
4. Bending the curve on innovation: AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development, reducing the time to market and allowing companies to differentiate in an often crowded field.

In this blog, we’ve collected more than 200 of our favorite real-life examples of how organizations are embracing Microsoft’s proven AI capabilities to drive impact and shape today’s platform shift to AI. We hope you find an example or two that can inspire your own transformation journey.

Enriching employee experiences

Generative AI is truly transforming employee productivity and wellbeing. Our customers tell us that by automating repetitive, mundane tasks, employees are freed up to dive into more complex and creative work. This shift not only makes the work environment more stimulating but also boosts job satisfaction. It sparks innovation, provides actionable insights for better decision-making and supports personalized training and development opportunities, all contributing to a better work-life balance. Customers around the world have reported significant improvements in employee productivity with these AI solutions:

1. Access Holdings Plc adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, integrating generative AI into daily tools and, as a result, writing code now takes two hours instead of eight, chatbots launch in 10 days instead of three months and presentations are prepared in 45 minutes instead of six hours.
2. Adobe is connecting Adobe Experience Cloud workflows and insights with Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver generative-AI powered capabilities that enable marketers to increase collaboration, efficiency and creativity.
3. Amadeus empowers its teams to focus their time and skills on value-added tasks with Microsoft 365 Copilot, by summarizing email threads, chat or transcripts and summing up information from diverse sources.
4. ANZ has invested in Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Copilot in Microsoft Edge to boost productivity and innovation across its workforce.
5. Asahi Europe & International (AEI) has adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, saving employees potentially 15% of time previously spent on administrative tasks.
6. AXA developed AXA Secure GPT, a platform powered by Azure OpenAI Service that empowers employees to leverage the power of generative AI while targeting the highest level of data safety and responsible use of the tool.
7. Axon Enterprise developed a new AI tool with Azure OpenAI Service called Draft One, resulting in an 82% decrease in time spent on reports, which freed up officers to engage more with their community.
8. Aztec Group enhanced productivity and client experience by trialing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 300 staff, uncovering “unlimited” use cases and plans for a wider rollout.
9. Bader Sultan & Bros. Co. W.L.L implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance employee productivity and speed up customer response times.
10. Bancolombia is using GitHub Copilot to empower its technical team, achieving a 30% increase in code generation, boosting automated application changes to an average of 18,000 per year, with a rate of 42 productive daily deployments.
11. BaptistCare Community Services is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to save employees time as they navigate workforce shortage challenges, allowing them to focus more on the people they care for.
12. Barnsley Council was recognized as “Double Council of the Year in 2023” for its implementation of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which modernized operations and reduced administrative tasks, leading to improved job satisfaction and increased creativity.
13. BlackRock purchased more than 24,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses spanning all employees, functions and locations, helping improve the Copilot experience, including codeveloping new features and functions.
14. British Heart Foundation is testing Microsoft 365 Copilot and in its initial test, users estimate that Microsoft 365 Copilot could save them up to 30 minutes per day.
15. Buckinghamshire Council deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot with staff reporting productivity improvements, quality enhancements and time savings, which are enabling the different teams to do more with less.
16. Campari Group adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to help employees integrate it into their workflow, resulting in time savings of about two hours a week from the support of routine activities such as email management, meeting preparation, content creation and skill acquisition.
17. Capita is using GitHub Copilot for productivity improvements as well as improvements in developer satisfaction, recruitment and retention.
18. CDW used Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve work quality for 88% of users, enabling 77% to complete tasks faster and increasing productivity for 85% of users.
19. Chi Mei Medical Center is lightening workloads for doctors, nurses and pharmacists with a generative AI assistant built on Azure OpenAI Service.
20. E.ON is focused on Germany’s energy transition, leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to manage the complex grid in real-time, increasing productivity and efficiency for its workforce.
21. Enerijisa Uretim has adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline meeting summaries, reformat documents and compile reports, enabling employees to concentrate on more strategic and fulfilling activities instead of spending six hours in meetings.
22. EPAM is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to consolidate information and generate content and documents.
23. Farm Credit Canada implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot, which resulted in time savings on routine tasks for 78% of users, with 30% saving 30 to 60 minutes per week and 35% saving over an hour per week, allowing employees to focus on more value-added tasks.
24. Finastra used Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate tasks, enhance content creation, improve analytics and personalize customer interactions, with employees citing a 20% to 50% time savings.
25. Four Agency Worldwide increased employee productivity using Microsoft 365 Copilot to generate ideas for creative work and support administrative-heavy processes, data analysis and report generation, allowing staff to focus on outreach and less time doing paperwork.
26. Goodwill of Orange County developed an AI-powered app using Azure AI capabilities to help more people, including those with developmental, intellectual and physical disabilities, work in unfilled e-commerce positions.
27. Honeywell employees are saving 92 minutes per week—that’s 74 hours a year! Disclaimer: Statistics are from an internal Honeywell survey of 5,000 employees where 611 employees responded.
28. Insight employees using Copilot are seeing four hours of productivity gained per week from data summarization and content creation.
29. Joos uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to grow its brand with worldwide collaboration by streamlining meetings, optimizing presentations and improving communications.
30. Kantar is harnessing the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot by reducing costly, time-consuming IT processes and boosting productivity for employees.
31. KPMG Australia is using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search and Microsoft Copilot 365 to perform advanced text analysis of dozens of client source documents to identify full or partial compliance, or noncompliance, in a fraction of the time required for manual assessments.
32. LGT is launching Microsoft Copilot LGT to improve efficiency, showing users save an average of an hour a week even in the pilot phase.
33. Lotte Hotels & Resorts has been creating a new work culture that allows employees to work more efficiently and focus on the nature of the work by adopting Microsoft Power Platform for automation.
34. MAIRE is leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate routine tasks, saving over 800 working hours per month, freeing up engineers and professionals for strategic activities while supporting MAIRE’s green energy transition by reducing their carbon footprint.
35. McDonald’s China chose Microsoft Azure AI, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Search to transform its operations, resulting in a significant increase in AI adoption, consumption and retention from 2,000 to 30,000 employee transactions monthly.
36. McKnight Foundation adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot for all staff, saving time, increasing productivity and freeing space to focus on strategic priorities.
37. Morula Health is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance productivity, streamline medical writing tasks and ensure data security, ultimately improving efficiency and client satisfaction.
38. Motor Oil Group is achieving remarkable efficiency gains by integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot into its workflows, with staff spending minutes on tasks that used to take weeks.
39. Nagel-Group uses Azure OpenAI Service to help employees quickly access information which saves time, creates efficiency and transparency, and leads to higher-quality answers overall.
40. National Australia Bank is leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot for daily productivity and data analysis and insights and Microsoft Copilot for Security to quickly analyze millions of security event logs and allow engineers to focus on more important areas.
41. NFL Players Association integrated Azure AI Services and Azure App Service into their video review process, reducing review time by up to 73%, significantly increasing efficiency and enhancing player safety through consistent rule enforcement.
42. O2 Czech Republic boosts productivity and streamlines meetings with Microsoft 365 Copilot, revolutionizing how information is shared and making automation a part of daily work.
43. Onepoint developed a secure conversational agent based on Azure OpenAI, which delivers productivity gains of between 10% and 15% across all business lines.
44. Orange Group has over 40 use cases with Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot across business functions to support employees in their day-to-day tasks, enabling them to concentrate on higher value-added activities.
45. Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve staff report productivity by saving one to two hours a week, or simple formatting tasks down to a matter of seconds, enabling more resources to deliver frontline services.
46.  PA Consulting transformed its sales operations with Microsoft 365 Copilot, so its people can invest more time on the activities that have the biggest impact for clients and maximize the strategic value they provide.
47. Petrobras used Azure OpenAI Service to create ChatPetrobras, which is streamlining workflows, reducing manual tasks and summarizing reports for its 110,000 employees.
48. Petrochemical Industries Company automates work processes to save time with Microsoft 365 Copilot from weeks to days, hours to seconds.
49. PKSHA Technology is optimizing their time on critical work by increasing efficiency in meeting preparations, data analytics and ideation with the help of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
50. Providence has collaborated with Nuance and Microsoft to accelerate development and adoption of generative AI-powered applications, helping improve care quality and access and reduce physician’s administrative workloads.
51. RTI International adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to gain productivity wherever possible, allowing staff to focus on their areas of expertise, delivering even better science-backed solutions for clients.
52. Sandvik Coromant is using Microsoft Copilot for Sales to drive efficiency and accuracy, shaving at least one minute off each transaction, allowing sellers and account managers to focus their expertise on responding to customers’ needs with analysis, creativity and adaptability.
53. Sasfin Bank built a solution on Microsoft Azure that centralized 20,000 documents to analyze contract clauses and provide real-time snapshots, moving guesswork into data-driven decision-making.
54. Scottish Water implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot, reducing mundane tasks to a minimum and thus freeing up time for employees to work on the more meaningful tasks.
55. Shriners Children’s developed an AI platform allowing clinicians to easily and securely navigate patient data in a singular location, enhancing patient care and improving the efficiency of their healthcare services.
56. Siemens is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to improve efficiency, cut downtime and address labor shortages.
57. Softchoice employees are experiencing firsthand how Microsoft 365 Copilot can transform daily workflows, realizing productivity gains of 97% reduction in time spent summarizing technical meetings and up to 70% less time spent on content creation.
58. Syensqo utilized Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to develop a custom AI chatbot in three months, which improved their internal data management, decision-making and overall efficiency.
59. Teladoc Health uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to revolutionize its telehealth operations, automating routine tasks, boosting efficiency and increasing productivity.
60. Telstra developed two cutting-edge generative AI tools based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service: 90% of employees are using the One Sentence Summary tool, which resulted in 20% less follow-up customer contact, and 84% of customer service agents are using the Ask Telstra solution.
61. Topsoe achieved 85% AI adoption among office employees in seven months, significantly enhancing productivity and business processes.
62. Torfaen County Borough Council utilized Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline back-office processes, resulting in significant time savings and enhanced productivity for both business and children’s services teams, with further rollouts planned.
63. Trace3 leveraged Microsoft Copilot to streamline and enhance processes across the business and with clients, such as reducing the time it takes HR recruiting managers to respond to applicants within a couple of days instead of several weeks.
64. Unilever is reinventing their marketing process with Copilot, saving time on briefing tasks, automatically pulling in relevant market data, content and insights to accelerate campaign launches.
65. Uniper SE implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce time spent on manual and repetitive tasks and help workers focus on more pressing work, such as developing enhanced solutions to speed up the energy transition.
66. Unum Group built a custom AI application to search 1.3 terabytes of data with 95% accuracy using Azure OpenAI Service.
67. Virgin Atlantic adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot and is seeing real business benefits, including productivity improvements, enabling new ways of working.
68. Visier built a generative AI assistant that leverages Azure AI and Azure OpenAI Services to deliver workforce analytics and actionable insights for more than 50,000 customers.
69. Virtual Dental Care developed an AI application Smart Scan that leverages Microsoft Azure to reduce paperwork for mobile dental clinics in schools by 75% and frees dentists to devote more time to patient care.
70. Zakladni Skola As Hlavkova adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot and saw a 60% improvement in handling administrative documents, decreased lesson preparation from hours to a few minutes, increased inclusivity and enhanced communication with students and parents.

Reinventing customer engagement

We’ve seen great examples of how generative AI can automate content creation, ensuring there’s fresh and engaging materials ready to go. It personalizes customer experiences by crunching the numbers, boosting conversion rates. It makes operations smoother, helping teams launch campaigns faster. Plus, it drives innovation, crafting experiences that delight customers while lightening the load for staff. Embracing generative AI is key for organizations wanting to reinvent customer engagements, stay ahead of the game and drive both innovation and efficiency.

71. Absa has adopted Microsoft Copilot to streamline various business processes, saving several hours on administrative tasks each day.
72. Adobe leverages Microsoft Azure to streamline the customer experience, harnessing the power of the connected cloud services and creating a synergy that drives AI transformation across industries.
73. Acentra Health developed Medscribe, a web application that uses Azure OpenAI Service to generate draft letters in a secure, HIPPA-compliant enclave that responds to customer appeals for healthcare services within 24 hours, reducing the time spent on each appeal letter by 50%.
74. Alaska Airlines is using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Defender and GitHub to ensure its passengers have a seamless journey from ticket purchase to baggage pickup, and it has started leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to unlock more business value for its customer care and contact centers.
75. Ally Financial is using Azure OpenAI Service to reduce manual tasks for its customer service associates, freeing up time for them to engage with customers.
76. BMW Group optimizes the customer experience, connecting 13 million active users to their vehicles with the MyBMW app on Azure, which supports 450 million daily requests and 3.2TB of data processing.
77. Boyner has tripled its e-commerce performance using Microsoft Azure, seeing a rise in customer satisfaction, engagement, conversion rate and revenue.
78. Bradesco Bank integrated Microsoft Azure into its virtual assistant, BIA, resulting in reduced response time from days to hours, improving operational efficiency and client satisfaction.
79. Capgemini Mexico integrated GitHub Copilot to support scalable AI implementations, which has led to improved customer experiences and increased efficiency.
80. Capitec Bank uses Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling their AI-powered chatbot to assist customer service consultants in accessing product information more efficiently, saving significant time for employees each week.
81. Cdiscount is leveraging GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service to enhance developer efficiency, optimize product sheet categorization and improve customer satisfaction.
82. Cemex used Azure OpenAI Service to launch Technical Xpert, an AI tool used by sales agents to provide instant access to comprehensive product and customer solution information, significantly reducing search time by 80%.
83. Chanel elevated their client experience and improved employee efficiency by leveraging Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service for real-time translations and quality monitoring.
84. City of Burlington created two AI-powered solutions: MyFiles system using Microsoft Power Platform for building permits and CoBy, a 24/7 customer support assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio.
85. City of Madrid created an AI virtual assistant with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, offering tourists accurate, real-time information and personalized responses in 95-plus languages.
86. Cognizant is making performance management more effective and meaningful with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to help clients across industries envision, build and run innovative digital enterprises.
87. Coles Group has leveraged Microsoft Azure to enhance its digital presence and improve customer engagement, rolling out new applications to its stores six times faster without disrupting workloads.
88. Commercial Bank of Dubai used Microsoft Azure to upgrade its application infrastructure, improving transaction security and speed so individual customers can now open an account and start banking in about two minutes.
89. Dubai Electricity and Water Authority has significantly improved productivity and customer satisfaction by integrating multiple Microsoft AI solutions, reducing task completion time from days to hours and achieving a 98% customer happiness rate.
90. Elcome uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve the customer experience, reducing response times from 24 hours to eight hours.
91. elunic developed shopfloor.GPT based on Azure OpenAI, leading to increased productivity for customers and saving 15 minutes per request.
92. Estée Lauder Companies is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to create closer consumer connections and increase speed to market with local relevancy.
93. First National Bank (FNB) is using Microsoft Copilot for Sales to help bankers create professional, thoughtful emails in 13 native South African languages, to enhance customer interactions, streamline communications and reinforce its commitment to innovation and customer service.
94. Flora Food Group migrated to Microsoft Fabric to offer more detailed and timely insights to its customers, enhancing service delivery and customer satisfaction.
95. Groupama deployed a virtual assistant using Azure OpenAI Service that delivers reliable, verified and verifiable information, and boasts an 80% success rate.
96. International University of Applied Sciences (IU) adopted Azure OpenAI Service to revolutionize learning with a personalized study assistant that can interact with each student just like a human would.
97. Investec is using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to enhance the bank’s client relationships, estimating saving approximately 200 hours annually, ultimately boosting sales productivity and delivering a personalized, seamless customer experience.
98. Linum is using Microsoft Azure to train their text-to-video models faster and more efficiently without losing performance or wasting resources.
99. Lumen Technologies is redefining customer success and sales processes through the strategic use of Microsoft 365 Copilot, enhancing productivity, sales, and customer service in the global communications sector.
100. McKinsey & Companyis creating an agent to reduce the client onboarding process by reducing lead time by 90% and administrative work by 30%.
101. Meesho leveraged Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot to enhance customer service and software development, resulting in a 25% increase in customer satisfaction scores and 40% more traffic on customer service queries.
102. Milpark Education integrated Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio and in just four months, improved efficiency and accuracy of student support, decreasing the average resolution time by 50% and escalations by more than 30%.
103. NC Fusion chose a comprehensive Microsoft solution to make marketing engagement activities easier and accurately target the best audience segments.
104. Medgate, a telehealth subsidiary of Otto Group developed a medical Copilot powered by Azure OpenAI which summarizes consultations, supports triage and provides real-time translations.
105. Pacific Gas & Electric built a chatbot using Microsoft Copilot Studio that saves $1.1 million annually on helpdesk support.
106. Pockyt is using GitHub Copilot and anticipates a 500% increase in productivity in the medium to long term as they continue adapting AI and fine-tuning their software development life cycle.
107. South Australia Department for Education launched an AI-powered educational chatbot to help safeguard students from harmful content while introducing responsible AI to the classrooms.
108. Sync Labs is using Microsoft Azure to create AI-driven solutions that have led to a remarkable 30x increase in revenue and a 100x expansion of their customer base.
109. Syndigo is using Azure to accelerate digital commerce for its customers by more than 40% and expand its customer base.
110. Telkomsel created a virtual assistant with Azure OpenAI Service, resulting in a leap in customer self-service interactions from 19% to 45%, and call volume dropped from 8,000 calls to 1,000 calls a day.
111. Torrens University chose to use Azure OpenAI to uplift its online learning experience, saving 20,000 hours and $2.4 million in time and resources.
112. Trusting Social integrated Microsoft Azure services to launch AI-driven agents that are changing how banks function and transforming their customer’s banking experience.
113. University of California, Berkeley used Azure OpenAI Service to deploy a custom AI chatbot that supports student learning and helps students with complex coursework.
114. University of Sydney created a self-serve AI platform powered by Azure OpenAI Service, to enable faculty to build custom chatbots for enhancing student onboarding, feedback, career simulation and more.
115. Van Lanschot Kempen is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce the time needed for daily tasks, freeing up time to invest in that crucial personal connection.
116. Virgin Money built an award-winning virtual assistant using Copilot Studio to help build customers’ confidence in their digital products and services.
117. VOCALLS automates over 50 million interactions per year, resulting in a 78% reduction in average handling time aside from a 120% increase in answered calls.
118. Vodafone Group is leveraging Microsoft’s AI solutions, including Azure AI Studio, OpenAI Service, Copilot and AI Search, to achieve a 70% resolution rate for customer inquiries through digital channels and reduce call times by at least one minute.
119. Walmart is using Azure OpenAI Service to deliver a helpful and intuitive browsing experience for customers designed to serve up a curated list of the personalized items a shopper is looking for.
120. Weights & Biases created a platform which runs on Microsoft Azure that allows developers to keep records, log successes and failures and automate manual tasks.
121. World2Meet is providing better customer service and operations with a new virtual assistant powered by Microsoft Azure.
122. Xavier College is modernizing its student information systems on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure to unlock powerful insights, fostering innovation and data-driven decision making.
123. Zavarovalnica Triglav implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure OpenAI Service to streamline its operations with automated responses and smart rerouting of customer enquiries.

Reshaping business process

Transforming operations is another way generative AI is encouraging innovation and improving efficiency across various business functions. In marketing, it can create personalized content to truly engage different audiences. For supply chain management, it can predict market trends so companies can optimize their inventory levels. Human resources departments can speed up the hiring process, while financial services can use it for fraud detection and risk assessments. With generative AI, companies are not just refining their current processes, they’re also discovering exciting new growth opportunities.

124. Accelleron used Microsoft Power Platform to support numerous business applications and simplify processes for service agents and employees, resulting in the onboard of new agents in 30 minutes, compared to two days for other solutions.
125. Accenture developed an AI-powered financial advisor that leverages RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure to enhance their infrastructure and integrate financial data.
126. Atomicwork leverages Azure OpenAI to bring together three power capabilities: a conversational assistant, a modern service management system and a workflow automation platform.
127. Blink Ops fully embraced generative AI to build the world’s first Security Automation Copilot with more than 8,000 automated workflows to help any Security/IT task through prompts.
128. Chalhoub Group is using Microsoft Fabric to modernize its data analytics and streamline its data sources into one platform, increasing agility, enhancing analytics and accelerating processes.
129. Cineplex is developing innovative automation solutions for finance, guest services, and other departments, saving the company over 30,000 hours a year in manual processing time.
130. ClearBank moved its services to Microsoft Azure to gain scalability and efficiency, pushing out 183% more monthly system releases, gaining both scalability and efficiency.
131. Danske Statsbaner increases productivity up to 30% with help from Microsoft AI solutions.
132. Eastman implemented Microsoft Copilot for Security, realizing the benefits of accelerated upskilling, step-by-step guidance for response and faster threat remediation.
133. Fast Shop migrated to Microsoft Azure, creating a self-service culture of access to data, eliminating delays, reducing costs and increasing leadership satisfaction with data while providing more agility in reporting.
134. Florida Crystals adopted a value-added solution across Microsoft products including Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce telecom expenses and automate industrial process controls.
135. GHD is reinventing the RFP process in construction and engineering with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
136. GovDash is a SaaS platform that leverages artificial intelligence to streamline the entire business development lifecycle for government contracting companies using Azure OpenAI.
137. Grupo Bimbo is deploying Microsoft’s industrial AI technologies to modernize its manufacturing processes, optimizing production and reducing downtime, driving significant cost savings and empowering global innovation.
138. Insight Canada implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline business operations, realizing a 93% productivity gains in functions including sales, finance and human resources.
139. Intesa Sanpaolo Group enhanced its cybersecurity with AI-enabled Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Copilot for Security, resulting in faster threat detection, increased productivity and reduced storage costs.
140. Kaya deployed a custom implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI to modernize its supply chain, leading to enhanced visibility, improved planning and streamlined inter-department operations.
141. Lionbridge Technologies, LLC is using Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service to accelerate its delivery times and improve quality, reducing project turnaround times by up to 30%.
142. LTIMindtree integrated Microsoft Copilot for Security, offering automated incident response, integrated threat intelligence and advanced threat analysis.
143. Mania de Churrasco used Microsoft Azure, Power Platform and Microsoft 365 to achieve high efficiency, security and scalability in its operations, in addition to improving its data intelligence, which indirectly participated in a 20% increase in sales year on year.
144. National Bank of Greece built an Azure-powered Document AI solution to transform its document processing, improving the bank’s accuracy to 90%.
145. Nest Bank has revolutionized its operations by integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service, resulting in doubled sales and increased daily transactions from 60,000 to 80,000, showcasing the transformative impact of generative AI in the financial sector.
146. Network Rail modernized their data analytics solution with Microsoft Azure, helping engineers understand data 50% faster than before and improve efficiency, passenger experiences and safety—all while saving costs.
147. Nsure developed an AI-powered agent that uses Copilot Studio and Power Automate to reduce manual processing time by 60% while also reducing associated costs by 50%.
148. Oncoclínicas implemented Microsoft Azure to transform its entire data ecosystem with a web portal and mobile application that performs all image processing and storage.
149. Pacifico Seguros has adopted Microsoft Copilot for Security to optimize its security operations and anticipate and neutralize threats more efficiently and effectively.
150. Parexel adopted Azure Databricks and Microsoft Power BI, achieving an 85% reduction in data engineering tooling costs, a 30% increase in staff efficiency and a 70% reduction in time to market for data product delivery.
151. Paysafe used Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline meetings, information management, and document creation, addressing language barriers, eliminating time-consuming tasks, and boosting creativity along the way.
152. Planted is integrating Azure OpenAI to manage everyday tasks more efficiently and facilitate the search for information for innovative process development.
153. Presidio realized dramatic productivity gains saving 1,200 hours per month on average for the employees using Microsoft 365 Copilot and created 70 new business opportunities.
154. Qatar Charity used Copilot Studio to increase its call center efficiency, reducing average handle time by 30%, increasing customer satisfaction by 25% and achieving a 40% reduction in IT maintenance costs.
155. Saphyre uses Microsoft Azure and AI to provide an intelligent cloud-based solution that automates and streamlines financial trading workflows around client and counterparty life cycle management, reducing manual efforts by 75%.
156. Swiss International Air Lines migrated and modernized with Microsoft Azure, achieving up to 30% cost savings, a remarkable boost in platform stability along with enhanced security visibility.
157. ZEISS Group uses Microsoft Fabric to create a secure and trusted data supply chain that can be shared effortlessly across a range of business units.
158. ZF Group builds manufacturing efficiency with over 25,000 apps and 37,000 unique active users on Power Platform.

Bending the curve on innovation

Generative AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development. It’s helping companies come up with new ideas, design prototypes, and iterate quickly, cutting down the time it takes to get to market. In the automotive industry, it’s designing more efficient vehicles, while in pharmaceuticals, it’s crafting new drug molecules, slashing years off R&D times. In education, it transforms how students learn and achieve their goals. Here are more examples of how companies are embracing generative AI to shape the future of innovation.

159. Air India has incorporated Microsoft 365 Copilot into multiple departments, unlocking a new realm of operational insights that not only provide critical data on flight punctuality and operational hurdles but also empower proactive, collaborative decision making.
160. Agnostic Intelligencedeployed Azure OpenAI Service to eliminate time-consuming tasks, saving users up to 80% of their time and enabling IT managers to focus on innovation and quality assurance.
161. Albert Heijn is using Azure OpenAI for everything from customer personalization to demand forecast and food waste projects, making it easier for its customers to change their lifestyle.
162. Amgen is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to boost productivity and has the potential to speed up drug development and support advancements in their business processes.
163. APEC leverages Microsoft Azure and deep neural network algorithms to develop an app that enables healthcare providers to capture retinal images, increasing the accuracy to identify Retinopathy of Prematurity (RoP) to 90%.
164. ASOS is using Azure AI Studio to help customers discover new looks with genuine shopping insights, personalized conversations, naturalism and even humor to enliven the shopping journey.
165. Auburn University is incorporating Microsoft Copilot to promote AI literacy, accessibility, and collaboration, with the aim to expand educational and economic opportunities for its entire academic community with AI-centric tools.
166. B3 launched an AI assistant using Azure OpenAI Service that aids 10,000 users a day to answer Brazilians’ questions about how to start investing.
167. Basecamp Research aims to build the world’s largest database of national biodiversity and apply AI and machine learning to advance bioscience.
168. Bayer is using Microsoft Copilot to contribute to feeding a growing global population and helping people lead healthier, disease-free lives.
169. Brembo leveraged Azure OpenAI to develop ALCHEMIX, a solution to generate innovative compounds for its brake pads, drastically reducing the development time of new compounds from days to mere minutes.
170. Canary Speech can now train new vocal models in as little as two months and handle millions of transactions per month with Microsoft Azure.
171. CapitaLand simplified internal processes, increasing efficiency to more than 10,000 worker days saved per year and deployed Azure OpenAI Service to build the first AI hospitality chatbot for its lodging business.
172. Cassidy is using Azure OpenAI Service to enhance efficiency across various industries, supporting over 10,000 companies.
173. Coca-Cola is implementing Azure OpenAI Service to develop innovative generative AI use cases across various business functions, including testing how Microsoft 365 Copilot could help improve workplace productivity.
174. Denso is developing “human-like” robots using Azure OpenAI Service as the brain to help robots and humans work together through dialogue.
175. eFishery is using Azure OpenAI for farmers to get the data and insights on fish and shrimp farming, including more precise feeding and water quality monitoring.
176. EY developed an application that automatically matches and clears incoming payments in SAP, resulting in an increase from 30% to 80% in automatically cleared payments and 95% matched payments, with estimated annual time savings of 230,000 hours globally.
177. FIDO is using Azure OpenAI Service to develop an AI tool that uses sound to pinpoint leaky pipes, saving precious drinking water.
178. Georgia Tech is using Azure OpenAI Service to enhance the electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, achieving rapid data classification and predictive modeling, highlighting the reliability of networked chargers over non-networked ones.
179. GigXR developed a solution to create the intelligence for specific AI patients using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and other Azure services.
180. GoTo Group is significantly enhancing productivity and code quality across its engineering teams by adopting GitHub Copilot, saving over seven hours per week and achieving a 30% code acceptance rate.
181. GovTech used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create LaunchPad, sparking more than 400 ideas and 20 prototypes, laying the foundation for the government to harness the power of generative AI.
182. H&R Block is using Azure AI Studio and Azure OpenAI Service to build a new solution that provides real-time, reliable tax filing assistance.
183. Haut.AI provides skin care companies and retailers with customizable, AI-based skin diagnostic tools developed with the help of Microsoft AI.
184. Helfie is building a solution that caters to healthcare providers who can arm their patients with an application to more quickly and accurately access the care they need.
185. Hitachi will implement Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot to create innovative solutions for the energy, mobility and other industries.
186. Icertis is providing AI-based tools that will recognize contract language and then build algorithms to automatically choose the right approach based on the content of the contract.
187. ITOCHU is using Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio to evolve its data analytics dashboard into a service that provides immediate recommendations by automatically creating evidence-based product proposals.
188. IU International University of Applied Sciences (IU) is using the power of Azure OpenAI Service to develop Syntea, an AI avatar integrated into Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, making learning more personalized, autonomous and flexible.
189. Khan Academy has partnered with Microsoft to bring time-saving and lesson-enhancing AI tools to millions of educators.
190. Lufthansa Group developed an animated 3D avatar called Digital Hangar to help guide passengers from initial travel inspiration to flight booking through an exchange with an avatar in natural language.
191. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is using Azure OpenAI Service to help accelerate digital innovation in power plants.
192. Molslinjen has created an AI analytics toolbox that has reduced fuel emissions, improved customer satisfaction and brought in millions of additional revenue.
193. Novo Nordisk recently published initial results with predictive AI models for advanced risk detection in cardiovascular diseases, including an algorithm that can predict patients’ cardiovascular risk better than the best clinical standards.
194. Paige.AI​ is using AI and Microsoft Azure to accelerate cancer diagnoses with data from millions of images.
195. Pets at Home created an agent to help its retail fraud detection team investigate suspicious transactions.
196. Plan Heal is using Microsoft AI to create solutions that enable patients to monitor and report health metrics so care providers can better serve them.
197. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is testing a new battery material that was found in a matter of weeks, not years, as part of a collaboration with Microsoft.
198. Rijksmuseum is harnessing the power of Copilot to make art accessible at scale by joining forces with Microsoft to improve and expand the art experience for blind and low-vision community members.
199. Royal National Institute of Blind People is using Azure AI Services to develop an AI-based solution that quickly and accurately converts letters to braille, audio, and large print formats.
200. Schneider Electric provides productivity-enhancing and energy efficiency solutions and is using a whole suite of AI tools to hasten its own innovation and that of its customers.
201. SPAR ICS created an award-winning, AI-enabled demand forecasting system achieving 90% inventory prediction accuracy.
202. Suzuki Motor Corporation is adopting Azure OpenAI Service for data security, driving company-wide use with five multipurpose apps.
203. Tecnológico de Monterrey created a generative AI-powered ecosystem built on Azure OpenAI Service with the goal to personalize education based on the students’ needs, improve the learning process, boost teachers’ creativity and save time on tedious tasks.
204. TomTom is using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Kubernetes Service to revolutionize the driver experience.
205. Unilever is partnering with Microsoft to identify new digital capabilities to drive product innovation forward, from unlocking the secrets of our skin’s microbiome to reducing the carbon footprint of a multibillion-dollar business.
206. Unity used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to build Muse Chat, an AI assistant that can guide creators through common questions and help troubleshoot issues to make game development easier.
207. University of South Florida is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to alleviate the burden of repetitive, time-consuming tasks so faculty and staff can spend this time creatively solving problems, conducting critical research, establishing stronger relationships with peers and students and using their expertise to forge new, innovative paths.
208. Visma has developed new code with GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Microsoft Visual Studio as much as 50 percent faster, contributing to increased customer retention, faster time to market and increased revenue.
209. Wallenius Wilhelmsen is implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot and using Microsoft Viva to drive sustainable adoption, streamlining processes, empowering better decision making and cultivating a culture of innovation and inclusion.
210. Wipro is committed to delivering value to customers faster and improving the outcomes across the business by investing $1 billion in AI and training 200,000 employees on generative AI principles with Microsoft Copilot.

Read more:

• Get the study: Business Opportunity of AI | Microsoft
• Explore Microsoft AI solutions: Artificial Intelligence Solutions | Microsoft AI
• Assess your AI readiness: AI Readiness Wizard – Microsoft Adoption
• Build a strategic plan for AI: AI Strategy Roadmap | Microsoft AI

IDC InfoBrief: sponsored by Microsoft, 2024 Business Opportunity of AI, IDC# US52699124, November 2024

The post How real-world businesses are transforming with AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

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In 2024, generative AI emerged as a key driver for business outcomes across every industry. Already this new generation of AI is having an incredible impact on our world — yet companies and industries are just scratching the surface of what’s possible as they continue to develop new use cases across every role and function.

To help guide organizations on their AI transformation journey, Microsoft recently commissioned a new study through IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI. IDC’s findings show that when organizations truly commit to and invest in AI, the return on investment (ROI) potential grows significantly.

According to IDC, the study’s findings reflect a tipping point as AI gains momentum across industries. As companies worldwide go deeper with AI, Microsoft customers continue to deploy innovative new solutions and discover how tools like Copilot can transform their day-to-day work. In telecommunications, Lumen Technologies estimates Copilot is saving sellers an average of four hours a week, equating to $50 million annually. In healthcare, Chi Mei Medical Center doctors now spend 15 minutes instead of an hour writing medical reports, and nurses can document patient information in under five minutes. Pharmacists are now able to double the number of patients they see per day. In retail, AI models help Coles predict the flow of 20,000 stock-keeping units to 850 stores with remarkable accuracy, generating 1.6 billion predictions daily.

IDC’s 2024 top 5 trends for AI

IDC’s findings align with what Microsoft is seeing as we work with companies across industries to deploy AI. We’ve highlighted more than 200 of our top AI customer stories to show a sampling of how AI is already driving impact today. Below is a look at the top trends we’re seeing in IDC’s study and the impact of those trends on organizations working with AI today.

#1 Enhanced productivity has become table stakes. Employee productivity is the No. 1 business outcome that companies are trying to achieve with AI. The study shows that 92% of AI users surveyed are using AI for productivity, and 43% say productivity use cases have provided the greatest ROI. While productivity is a top goal, generative AI use cases that are close behind include customer engagement, topline growth, cost management and product or service innovation — and nearly half of the companies surveyed expect AI to have a high degree of impact across all those areas over the next 24 months.

Customer snapshot:

At the global marketing and advertising agency dentsu, employees are already saving 15 to 30 minutes a day using Copilot for tasks such as summarizing chats, generating presentations and building executive summaries.

“Copilot has transformed the way we deliver creative concepts to our clients, enabling real-time collaboration. Agility, security and uniqueness are crucial, but our goal is to lead this transformation company-wide, from top to bottom.”

— Takuya Kodama, Business Strategy Manager at dentsu

#2 Companies are gravitating to more advanced AI solutions. In the next 24 months, more companies expect to build custom AI solutions tailored directly to industry needs and business processes, including custom copilots and AI agents. This shows a growing maturity in AI fluency as companies realize the value of out-of-the-box use cases and expand to more advanced scenarios.

Customer snapshot:

Siemens has developed the Siemens Industrial Copilot, which has eased the challenges caused by increasing complexity and labor shortages for dozens of customers in different industries.

“In full appreciation of GenAI’s transformational potential, it’s important to remember that production does not have an ‘undo’ button. It takes diligence and effort to mature AI to industrial-grade quality. The Siemens Industrial Copilot for Engineering significantly eases our customers’ workload and addresses the pressing challenges of skill shortages and increasing complexity in industrial automation. This AI-powered solution is a game-changer for our industry with over 50 customers already using it to boost efficiency and tackle labor shortages.”

— Boris Scharinger, AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries

#3 Generative AI adoption and value is growing across industries. Even though it is relatively new to the market, generative AI adoption is rapidly expanding — 75% of respondents report current usage up from 55% in 2023. The ROI of generative AI is highest in Financial Services, followed by Media & Telco, Mobility, Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, Energy, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Education. Overall, generative AI is generating higher ROI across industries.

Customer snapshot:

Providence has leveraged AI to extend and enhance patient care, streamline processes and workflows and improve the effectiveness of caregivers.

“Whether we’re partnering with organizations on the leading edge of this technology — like Microsoft — and building bespoke solutions through Azure OpenAI Service, advancing clinical research to help cancer patients receive personalized and precise treatments faster, or ‘hitting the easy button’ and adopting established technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot or DAX Copilot, we have successfully stayed on the forefront of this tech revolution. For example, physicians who use DAX Copilot save an average of 5.33 minutes per visit, and 80% of physicians have reported lower cognitive burden after using DAX Copilot.”

— Sarah Vaezy, EVP, Chief Strategy and Digital Officer at Providence

#4 AI leaders are seeing greater returns and accelerated innovation. While companies using generative AI are averaging $3.7x ROI, the top leaders using generative AI are realizing significantly higher returns, with an average ROI of $10.3. In addition to the enhanced business value, leaders are also on an accelerated path to build and implement new solutions — 29% of leaders implement AI in less than 3 months versus 6% of companies in the laggard category.

Customer snapshot:

Södra is an international forest industry group that processes forest products from 52,000 owners into renewable, climate-smart products for international market. Every day Södra collects and interprets climate impact data to make thousands of decisions for every part of the value chain.

“With innovative AI technology from Microsoft, our business experts and data scientists have been able to help make us more sustainable while also improving revenue significantly.”

— Cristian Brolin, Chief Digital Officer at Södra

#5 Looking ahead: Skilling remains a top challenge. Thirty percent of respondents indicated a lack of specialized AI skills in-house, and 26 percent say they lack employees with the skills needed to learn and work with AI. This dovetails with findings from the Microsoft and LinkedIn 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, which found that 55 percent of business leaders are concerned about having enough skilled talent to fill roles.

That is why over the past year we have helped train and certify over 14 million people in more than 200 countries in digital skills. And we are committed to working in partnership with governments, educational institutions, industry and civil society to help millions more learn to use AI.

Customer snapshot:

The University of South Florida (USF) is partnering with Microsoft to streamline processes and enhance innovation for all aspects of university operations with AI.

“We’re giving students a leg up to do amazing things with AI as part of tomorrow’s workforce. Our focus on generative AI not only drives operational efficiency but also empowers our community to unlock new levels of creativity and impact, further positioning USF as a leader in AI adoption, which includes being among the first universities in the nation to form a college dedicated to AI, cybersecurity and computing.”

— Sidney Fernandes, CIO & VP of Digital Experiences at University of South Florida

AI’s growing economic impact

While companies today are largely implementing out-of-the-box generative AI solutions and seeing significant ROI, more than half of those surveyed expect to build custom industry and line-of-business applications in the next 24 months — demonstrating that today’s ROI is quickly becoming tomorrow’s competitive edge.

“We are at an inflection point of autonomous agent development and are beginning an evolution from using just off-the-shelf assistants and copilots that support knowledge discovery and content generation to custom AI agents to execute complex, multistep workflows across a digital world,” says Ritu Jyoti, GVP/GM, AI and Data Research at IDC. “With responsible technology usage and workplace transformation, IDC predicts that business spending to adopt AI will have a cumulative global economic impact of $19.9 trillion through 2030 and drive 3.5% of global GDP in 2030.”

Key findings from IDC’s The Business Opportunity of AI study include:

• Generative AI usage jumped from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024.
• For every $1 a company invests in generative AI, the ROI is $3.7x.
• The top leaders using generative AI are realizing an ROI of $10.3.
• On average, AI deployments are taking less than 8 months and organizations are realizing value within 13 months.
• Within 24 months, most organizations plan to expand beyond pre-built AI solutions to advanced AI workloads that are customized or custom-built.
• The ROI of generative AI is highest in Financial Services, followed by Media & Telco, Mobility, Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, Energy, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Education.
• 43% say productivity use cases have provided the greatest ROI.
• The primary way that organizations are monetizing AI today is through productivity use cases. In the next 24 months, a greater focus will be placed on functional and industry use cases.
• The top barrier when implementing AI is the lack of both technical and day-to-day AI skills.

Learn how to fuel your AI journey

IDC’s study, which included more than 4,000 business leaders and AI decision-makers around the world, also identifies the top barriers organizations face when implementing AI. As businesses integrate new solutions, they navigate important considerations such as data privacy, responsible use and the need for investment in both technology and skills.

No matter where you are in your cloud and AI transformation journey, Microsoft can help. To learn more about how customers across industries are shaping their AI transformation with Microsoft, please visit Microsoft’s AI in Action page. For more on how to get started in your AI transformation journey, visit Microsoft AI.

IDC InfoBrief: sponsored by Microsoft, 2024 Business Opportunity of AI, IDC# US52699124, November 2024

The post IDC’s 2024 AI opportunity study: Top five AI trends to watch appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

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Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning.

When I look to the next phase of Microsoft, both in terms of our scale and our massive opportunity ahead, it’s clear that we need to continue adding exceptional talent at every level of the organization to increase our depth and capability across our business priorities – spanning security, quality, and AI innovation.

With that context, I’m excited to share that Jay Parikh is joining Microsoft as a member of the senior leadership team (SLT), reporting to me. Jay was the global head of engineering at Facebook (now Meta) and most recently was CEO of Lacework. He has an impressive track record, with a unique combination of experiences building and scaling technical teams that serve both commercial customers and consumers. His deep connections across the start-up and VC ecosystems, coupled with his leadership roles at Akamai and Ning, will bring valuable perspective to Microsoft.

Over the years I’ve known Jay, I’ve admired him as a technology leader and respected engineer with a deep commitment to driving innovation and striving for operational excellence. His focus extends beyond technology, with his passion for and dedication to developing people, fostering a strong culture, and building world-class talent, all in service of delivering faster value to customers and driving business growth. In fact, there are very few leaders in our industry with Jay’s experience in leading teams through the rapid growth and scale required to support today’s largest internet businesses.

As he onboards, Jay will immerse himself in learning about our company priorities and our culture and will spend time connecting with our senior leaders and meeting with customers, partners, and employees around the world. We will share more on his role and focus in the next few months.

Please join me in welcoming Jay to Microsoft.

Satya

The post Microsoft names Jay Parikh as a member of the senior leadership team appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

The pace of AI innovation today continues to be extraordinary, and at Microsoft we are focused on helping organizations embrace it. By providing our customers with the most advanced AI technology across every product we build — combined with our unparalleled partner ecosystem and co-innovation approach — we are helping them make real progress in ways that matter. I am proud to share over 100 customer stories from this quarter alone showing how we are helping customers accelerate AI Transformation — no matter where they are on their journey.

Recently during the Microsoft AI Tour, I spoke with customers who shared ways they are adopting Copilots to empower human achievement, democratize intelligence and realize significant business value. I also discussed the concept of an AI-first business process and the differentiation you can drive when bringing together the power of Copilots and human ambition with the autonomous capabilities of an agent. I was inspired by the outcomes our customers have achieved through pragmatic innovation and the progress they are making to evolve the future of industry. I am pleased to share ten stories from the past quarter that illustrate how Copilots have yielded results for our customers, while highlighting AI Transformation experiences in their own words.

Accenture and Avanade have a long history of helping customers implement cutting-edge solutions, with internal testing a key factor in their ability to deliver customizable Microsoft solutions with deep expertise. Putting Microsoft 365 Copilot into the hands of employees helped them realize ways to increase productivity, with 52% of employees seeing a positive impact on the quality of their work, 31% reporting less cognitive fatigue and 84% finding Copilot’s suggestions fair, respectful and non-biased. Accenture also piloted GitHub Copilot to help build better solutions faster with developers spending less time debugging, resulting in 95% of developers reporting they enjoyed coding more.

“Using our extensive Microsoft technology expertise and practical learnings from our own experience implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot, our solutions empower clients to fully tap into Microsoft AI capabilities.”

Veit Siegenheim, Global Future of Work Lead at Avanade

Nigerian multinational financial services group Access Holdings Plc. serves more than 56 million customers across 18 countries. As the business grew and transitioned from a small bank to a major holding company, it adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to address challenges in data management, meeting productivity and software development. With the integration of Copilot into daily tools, the company significantly enhanced efficiency and engagement across the business. Writing code now takes two hours instead of eight, chatbots can be launched in 10 days instead of three months and presentations can be prepared in 45 minutes instead of six hours. Copilot has also driven a 25% increase in staff engagement during meetings.

“To inspire everyone in the organization to take advantage of AI, we knew we had to integrate AI into the tools people use every day. Microsoft 365 Copilot made the most sense and was a natural fit for us.”

Lanre Bamisebi, Executive Director IT and Digitalization at Access Holdings, Plc.

To improve resident services and reinvent customer engagement, the City of Burlington, Ontario, embraced AI and low-code tools to develop new online services that transform and automate internal processes. In just eight weeks, the city utilized Copilot Studio to develop and launch a custom copilot designed to help residents quickly find answers to frequently asked questions. The city also developed a portal that streamlines building permit reviews and enables customers to track the status of their own applications. As a result, the average time it takes to process a permit approval decreased from 15 weeks to 5-7 weeks, allowing more time for city employees to evaluate complex submissions.

“Our staff and citizens do not have to worry about mundane tasks as much anymore. Now they’re able to have rich, collaborative conversations about how to creatively solve problems, making for a much more fulfilling and rewarding work and customer experience.”

Chad MacDonald, Executive Director and Chief Information Officer at the City of Burlington

Finastra empowers financial institutions with leading software for lending, payments, treasury, capital markets and universal banking. To transform its marketing processes, the company used Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate tasks, enhance content creation, improve analytics and personalize customer interactions. Since integrating Copilot, the team reduced time-to-market for campaigns from three months to less than one. Copilot also significantly reduced the time marketers spend generating and gathering insights from each campaign, with employees citing a 20%-50% time savings across tasks like full-funnel analysis, supply management analysis and budget management.

“Copilot makes you more effective because you get better insights, and it makes you more efficient because you can produce results faster. It also makes work more meaningful and fun because your team can focus on what matters — strategy, creativity and everything that sets you apart from the competition.”

Joerg Klueckmann, Head of Corporate Marketing and Communications at Finastra

GoTo Group provides technology infrastructure and solutions across Indonesia. It is bending the curve on innovation by significantly enhancing productivity and code quality across its engineering teams by adopting GitHub Copilot. With real-time code suggestions, chat assistance and the ability to break down complex coding concepts, the company has saved over seven hours per week and achieved a 30% code acceptance rate within the first month. With 1,000 engineers already using GitHub Copilot, the tool allows them to innovate faster, reduce errors and focus more time on complex tasks to deliver greater value to their users.

“GitHub Copilot has significantly reduced syntax errors and provided helpful autocomplete features, eliminating repetitive tasks and making coding more efficient. This has allowed me to focus on the more complex elements in building great software.”

Nayana Hodi, Engineering Manager at GoTo Group

South Africa’s Milpark Education faced operational challenges when shifting to online learning due to legacy systems slowing down student interactions and support. Through close collaboration with Enterprisecloud, Milpark migrated its back-office infrastructure to Azure within three months, replacing its legacy student admissions system with an extensible, integrated digital platform powered by technologies such as Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio. In just four months, the educational institution improved efficiency and accuracy of student support, decreasing the average resolution time by 50% and escalations by more than 30%.

“Using Copilot, agents are now able to use generative AI to rapidly get up to speed on case details and respond to students using standardized templates that help them provide more personalized and professional responses. The results speak for themselves.”

Shaun Dale, Managing Director at Enterprisecloud

For over two decades, Teladoc Health has been offering a broad spectrum of services to patients using virtual care services — from primary care to chronic condition management. After the rapid growth of telehealth adoption post-pandemic, operational efficiency was instrumental in managing internal processes and external client interactions. By deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot and using Copilot in Power Automate, the company has reshaped business processes to help employees realize greater time savings while enhancing the client experience. The Copilots and agents helped employees save five hours per week and thousands of enterprise hours annually by eliminating mundane daily processes and fostering better cross-department communications, while also helping new employees get set up to run their workflows 20% faster.

“Copilot is changing the way we work. It’s not just about saving time; it’s about enhancing the quality of our work, allowing us to focus on what truly matters: delivering exceptional care to our members.” 

Heather Underhill, SVP Client Experience & Operations at Teladoc Health

International energy company Uniper adopted a single-cloud strategy with Azure as its foundation to drive rapid AI innovation. To help its employees focus on using core competencies, the company implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce time spent on manual and repetitive tasks, and help workers focus on more pressing work, such as developing enhanced solutions to speed up the energy transition. Its in-house auditors have already increased productivity by 80% by using Copilot to create plans and checklists. Uniper is also using Copilot for Security to help identify risks twice as fast and take appropriate action sooner.

“As an operator of critical infrastructure, we have to contend with a growing number of reports of phishing and attacks by hackers. AI can help us implement a sensible way of managing the sheer number of threats.”

Damian Bunyan, CIO at Uniper

British telecommunications company Vodafone has transformed its workplace productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot, already seeing strong ROI from its adoption. In early trials, Copilot saved employees an average of three hours per week by using the tool to draft emails, summarize meetings and search for information. Copilot is also enriching the employee experience, with 90% of users reporting they are eager to continue using Copilot and 60% citing improved work quality. For Vodafone’s legal and compliance team, Copilot has significantly accelerated the processes of drafting new contracts, reducing the time required to complete this work by one hour. As a result of these efficiency gains, Vodafone is rolling out Copilot to 68,000 employees.

“Our AI journey is focusing on three areas: operational efficiency inside the organization; rewiring the business to provide an enhanced customer experience; and unlocking growth opportunities through new products and services that we can create around generative AI. Copilot will help drive all three.”

Scott Petty, Chief Technology Officer at Vodafone

Wallenius Wilhelmsen, a global leader in roll-on/roll-off shipping and vehicle logistics, is empowering better decision-making while fostering a culture of innovation and inclusion with AI tools. After participating in an early access program, the company broadly adopted Microsoft Copilot 365 to help streamline processes, enhance data management and improve communication across its 28 countries. To help strengthen Copilot immersion and realize value faster, they introduced a seven-week Microsoft Viva campaign to teach, communicate and measure Copilot adoption. The campaign resulted in 80% of employees using Copilot, with some teams realizing time savings of at least 30 minutes per day. The company also uses Copilot Dashboard to manage usage and gather user feedback, helping demonstrate ROI and measure results outside of time savings alone.

“Copilot changes the way we think and work while keeping us curious and open to embracing opportunities. I think that is the sort of benefit that is not so measurable, but important. So, my time management and structured approach to my everyday work life has been enhanced with Copilot and Viva.”

Martin Hvatum, Senior Global Cash Manager at Wallenius Wilhelmsen

I believe that no other company has a better foundation to facilitate your AI Transformation than Microsoft. As we look ahead to Microsoft Ignite, I am excited by the latest innovation we will announce as a company, and the customer and partner experiences we will share. We remain committed to driving innovation that creates value in ways that matter most to our customers, and believe we are at our best when we serve others. There has never been a better opportunity for us to accomplish our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more than now, and I look forward to the ways we will partner together to help you achieve more with AI.

AI Customer Stories from FY25 Q1

Accelleron: Accelleron turbocharges IT support solutions and resolution times with Power Platform

Agnostic Intelligence: Agnostic Intelligence transforms risk management with Azure OpenAI Service, achieving up to 80% time savings

Alaska Airlines: How Alaska Airlines uses technology to ensure its passengers have a seamless journey from ticket purchase to baggage pickup

Allgeier: Allgeier empowers organizations to own and expand data operations

ANZ Group: ANZ launches first-of-its-kind AI Immersion Centre in partnership with Microsoft

Asahi Europe & International: Asahi Europe & International charts new paths in employee productivity with Microsoft Copilot

Auburn University: Auburn University empowers thousands of students, faculty and staff to explore new ways of using AI with Microsoft Copilot

Avanade: Avanade equips 10,000 employees with Microsoft Fabric skills to help customers become AI-driven and future-ready

Azerbaijan Airlines: Azerbaijan Airlines expands data access to increase efficiency by 70% with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Aztec Group: Aztec Group uses Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enhance the client experience whilst powering efficiencies

Bader Sultan: Bader Sultan uses Microsoft Copilot to boost productivity and serve clients faster

BaptistCare: BaptistCare supports aging Australians and tackles workforce shortages through Microsoft 365 Copilot

Barbeque Mania!: Barbecue Mania! centralizes your data with Microsoft Azure and saves $3.5 million over 5 years

Bank of Montreal: Bank of Montreal reduces costs by 30% with Azure

BlackRock: How BlackRock’s ‘flight crew’ helped Copilot for Microsoft 365 take off

Capita: Capita uses GitHub Copilot to free developers and deliver faster for customers

Cassidy: Cassidy and Azure OpenAI Service: Making AI simple for all

Cdiscount: Cdiscount, Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot join forces for e-commerce

Celebal: Celebal drives custom business transformations with Microsoft Fabric

Chalhoub Group: Chalhoub Group’s People Analytics team speeds reporting with Microsoft Fabric

ClearBank: ClearBank processes 20 million payments a month — up from 8,000 — with platform built on Azure

Cloud Services: Faster with Fabric: Cloud Services breaks new ground with Microsoft

Coles Supermarkets: Coles Supermarkets embraces AI, cloud applications in 500-plus stores with Azure Stack HCI​

Commercial Bank of Dubai: Commercial Bank of Dubai: innovating a future proof banking platform with Microsoft Azure

CPFL: CPFL expands its data repository by 1500% with Mega Lake project on Microsoft Azure

Cummins: Cummins uses Microsoft Purview to automate information governance more efficiently in the age of AI

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA): DEWA pioneers the use of Azure AI Services in delivering utility services

Digi Rogaland: Digi Rogaland prioritizes student safety with Bouvet and Microsoft Fabric

Eastman: Eastman catalyzes cybersecurity defenses with Copilot for Security

E.ON: A modern workspace in transition: E.ON relies on generative AI to manage data floods with Copilot for Microsoft 365

EPAM Systems: Efficiency inside and out: EPAM streamlines communications for teams and clients with Copilot for Microsoft 365

EY: EY redefines sustainability performance management with Microsoft

Fast Shop: Fast Shop consolidated its data platform on Microsoft Azure and is now ready for the era of AI

FIDO Tech: AI tool uses sound to pinpoint leaky pipes, saving precious drinking water

Florida Crystals Corporation: Telecom expenses for Florida Crystals dropped 78% with Teams Phone and Teams Rooms

Four Agency: Four Agency innovates with Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver better work faster

Fractal: Fractal builds innovative retail and consumer goods solutions with Microsoft’s AI offerings including Azure OpenAI Service

GE Aerospace: GE Aerospace launches company-wide generative AI platform for employees

Georgia Tech Institute for Data Engineering and Science: Georgia Tech is accelerating the future of electric vehicles using Azure OpenAI Service

Hitachi Solutions: Hitachi Solutions transforms internal operations with Microsoft Fabric

IBM Consulting: How IBM Consulting drives AI-powered innovation with Fabric expertise

iLink Digital: Transforming user-driven analytics with Microsoft Fabric

Insight Enterprises: Insight Enterprises achieves 93% Microsoft Copilot use rate, streamlining business operations to pave the way for customer success

Intesa Sanpaolo: Intesa Sanpaolo accrues big cybersecurity dividends with Microsoft Sentinel, Copilot for Security

ITOCHU Corporation: ITOCHU uses Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Studio to evolve its data analytics dashboard into a service delivering instant recommendations

IU International University of Applied Sciences (IU): IU revolutionizes learning for its students with the AI study buddy Syntea and Azure OpenAI Service

John Cockerill: John Cockerill engages pro developers to build enterprise-wide apps with Power Platform

Kaya Limited: Kaya Limited elevates customer experience and operational efficiency with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI

LexisNexis: LexisNexis elevates legal work with AI using Copilot for Microsoft 365

Lionbridge: Lionbridge disrupts localization industry using Azure OpenAI Service and reduces turnaround times by up to 30%

Lotte Hotels & Resorts: Hotelier becomes a citizen developer, building a smart work culture based on Power Platform and hyper-automated work environment

Lumen Technologies: Microsoft and Lumen Technologies partner to power the future of AI and enable digital transformation to benefit hundreds of millions of customers

LS ELECTRIC: LS ELECTRIC uses data to optimize power consumption with Sight Machine and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

MAIRE: MAIRE, transforming the energy sector and an entire company culture with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Mandelbulb Technologies: Early-adopter Mandelbulb Technologies finds success with Fabric

McKnight Foundation: McKnight Foundation accelerates its mission and supports community partners with Microsoft 365 Copilot

MISO: MISO undergoes a digital transformation with Microsoft Industry Solutions Delivery

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI): Recognizing the essence of AI and building the future with clients: MHI’s DI to create proprietary architecture using Azure OpenAI Service

Molslinjen: Molslinjen develops an AI-powered dynamic pricing strategy with Azure Databricks

National Australia Bank: National Australia Bank invests in an efficient, cloud-managed future with Windows 11 Enterprise

Nagel-Group: Works agreements and contracts: Nagel-Group uses Azure OpenAI Service to help employees find information

NC Fusion: Elevating experiences with AI, from productivity to personalization

National Football League Players Association: The National Football League Players Association and Xoriant use Azure AI Services to provide protection to players across 32 teams

Northwestern Medicine: Northwestern Medicine deploys DAX Copilot embedded in Epic within its enterprise to improve patient and physician experiences

Oncoclínicas: Oncoclínicas creates web portal and mobile app to store clinical and medical procedures with Azure Cognitive Services

PA Consulting: PA Consulting saves hours a week with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales

Parexel: Parexel speeds operational insights by 70% using Microsoft Azure, accelerating data product delivery and reducing manual work

Petrochemical Industries Company (PIC): From weeks to days, hours to seconds: PIC automates work processes to save time with Microsoft 365 Copilot

PKSHA Technology: PKSHA leans on Copilot for Microsoft 365 as part of their team

Planted: Planted combines economic growth and environmental sustainability — with Microsoft Azure OpenAI

Profisee: Profisee eliminates data siloes within Microsoft Fabric

Programa De Atención Domiciliaria: The Home Care Program in Panama helped more than 17,000 people with the power of Microsoft Power Automate

PwC: PwC scales GenAI for enterprise with Microsoft Azure AI

QNET: QNET increases security response efficiency 60 percent with Microsoft Security Solutions

RTI International: Research nonprofit RTI International improves the human condition with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Rijksmuseum: Rijksmuseum transforms how art lovers engage with the museum, with Dynamics 365

Sandvik Coromant: Sandvik Coromant hones sales experience with Microsoft Copilot for Sales

Share.Market: Share.Market redefines the investment experience with Microsoft Azure

Simpson Associates: Simpson Associates spurs justice for at-risk communities with Azure AI

Softchoice: Softchoice harnesses Microsoft Copilot and reduces content creation time by up to 70%, accelerating customer AI journeys with its experience

Sonata Software: Sonata Software goes from early adopter to market leader with Fabric

Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS): SWISS targets 30% cost savings, increased passenger satisfaction with Azure

SymphonyAI: SymphonyAI is solving real problems across industries with Azure AI

Syndigo: Syndigo accelerates digital commerce for its customers by more than 40% with Azure

TAL: TAL and Microsoft join forces on strategic technology deal

Tecnológico de Monterrey: Tecnológico de Monterrey university pioneers ambitious AI-powered learning ecosystem

Telstra: Telstra and Microsoft expand strategic partnership to power Australia’s AI future

The University of Sydney: The University of Sydney utilizes the power of Azure OpenAI to allow professors to create their own AI assistants

Torfaen County Borough: Torfaen County Borough Council streamlines organizational support for Social Care using Copilot for Microsoft 365

Trace3: Trace3 expands the realm of clients’ possibilities with Windows 11 Pro and Microsoft Copilot

Unilever: Unilever is reinventing the fundamentals of research and development with Azure Quantum Elements

University of Wisconsin: Microsoft collaborates with Mass General Brigham and University of Wisconsin–Madison to further advance AI foundation models for medical imaging

Via: Marketplace, online support, and remote work: Via embraces the digital world supported by Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure

Virgin Atlantic: How Virgin Atlantic is flying higher with Copilot

Virgin Money: Redi, set, go: Virgin Money delivers exceptional customer experiences with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Visier: Visier achieves performance improvements of up to five times using Azure OpenAI Service

World2Meet (W2M): World2Meet, the travel company providing a better customer experience and operations with a new virtual assistant powered by Microsoft Azure

Xavier College: Xavier College begins a process of modernizing its student information systems on Dynamics 365 and AI, unlocking powerful insights

ZEISS: More time for research: ZEISS supports businesses and researchers with ZEISS arivis Cloud based on Microsoft Azure

ZF Friedrichshafen AG (ZF Group): ZF Group builds manufacturing efficiency with over 25,000 apps on Power Platform

The post How Copilots are helping customers and partners drive pragmatic innovation to achieve business results that matter appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Today, I am sharing Microsoft’s 2024 Diversity & Inclusion Report, our most global and transparent report to date. This marks our sixth consecutive annual report and the eleventh year sharing our global workforce data, highlighting our progress and areas of opportunity.

Our ongoing focus on diversity and inclusion is directly tied to our inherently inclusive mission — to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, enabling us to innovate in the era of AI. As we approach our company’s 50th anniversary, we remain deeply committed to D&I because it is what creates transformational solutions to the most complex challenges for customers, partners and the world.

Key data

We gather a range of data, which is presented in specific ways throughout the report. In the following section, it is important to understand the distinction between our *Broader Microsoft business and our **Core Microsoft business.

New and expanded data

• Datacenters: As we lead the AI platform shift, our workforce continues to expand to include employees with varied backgrounds and roles, and we are sharing new data this year on a growing employee population in datacenter roles. The population of datacenter employees grew 23.9% globally and 28.9% in the US in 2024, more than tripling since 2020.
• In our most global report to date, we expanded new global Self-ID data to include Indigenous and military employees, as well as those with disabilities. For example, 5.7% of global employees in our core Microsoft business self-identified as having a disability, an increase of 0.2 percentage points year over year.
• We continue to have pay equity. For median unadjusted pay analysis, the data shows we have made progress in narrowing the gaps. This year we expanded pay equity analysis and median unadjusted pay analysis to not only include women inside and outside the US, but also include a combined view of women globally. Increasing representation for women and racial and ethnic minority groups at more senior levels, combined with maintaining pay equity for all, will continue to reduce the median unadjusted pay gap. 

Representation

• Representation of women in our core Microsoft workforce is 31.6%, an increase of 0.4 percentage points year over year. Additionally, the representation of women in technical roles is 27.2%, an increase of 0.5 percentage points year over year.
• Representation of women in our core Microsoft workforce rose year over year at all leadership levels except Executive.
• Leadership representation in our core Microsoft workforce of Black and African American employees at the Partner + Executive level grew to 4.3%, an increase of 0.5 percentage points year over year. Leadership representation in our core Microsoft workforce of Hispanic and Latinx employees at the Executive level rose to 4.6%, an increase of 0.8 percentage points year over year.
• In our broader Microsoft workforce, representation of racial and ethnic minority groups is 53.9%, an increase of 0.6 percentage points year over year.

Culture and inclusion in focus

Employee sentiment and engagement

• Our semi-annual Employee Signals survey focuses on employee experience and helps us deepen our understanding so we can adjust our efforts where needed. These insights show that employees continue to feel like they are thriving, with a global and US score of 76. Within Employee Signals, we focus on thriving, which we define as “being energized and empowered to do meaningful work.” This is designed to measure employees’ sense of purpose, which is important to personal and professional fulfillment. We survey employees on three dimensions of thriving: Feeling energized, feeling empowered and doing meaningful work.
• Our Daily Signals survey results indicate employee perceptions around Microsoft’s commitment to creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace increased two points year over year to an average score of 79.
• Since introducing the concept of allyship to employees in 2018, we have inspired and led a positive impact on our culture. As of June 2024, 95.6% of employees reported some level of awareness of the concept of allyship, up from 65.0% in 2019 when we first started asking employees about their awareness.

A commitment that spans decades

Our annual D&I report not only reviews our data, but also illuminates the intentional strategy and actions that have helped us make progress across our company’s journey.

Examples include:

• Being one of the first Fortune 500 companies to expand antidiscrimination policy and benefits to LGBTQIA+ employees in 1989.
• Announcing our Racial Equity Initiative in June 2020, outlining actions and progress we expect to make by 2025 to help address racial injustice and inequity in the US for Black and African American communities.
• Launching immersive D&I learning simulations in 2021, allowing employees to practice crucial D&I skills, such as recognizing and addressing bias, responding to microaggressions and demonstrating effective allyship.
• Building on more than a decade of helping to reskill military service members through our Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA), and this year expanding this skilling opportunity to train military spouses for portable, in-demand IT roles.
• Introducing pronouns and self-expression features in Microsoft 365, an innovation brought directly to fruition because we listened to, and collaborated with, customers, partners and employees who asked for these features.

A mission as bold as ours

At Microsoft, we’re guided by our mission, worldview and culture. Our mission is the why; it drives our actions. Our worldview is the what, shaping our strategy and products. Culture is the how, influencing everything with a focus on growth and innovation. Culture is also the who: Who makes up the workforce, who services our customers, who innovates the future of tech. The diversity of the workforce, combined with inclusion, unlocks individual and collective potential. This is what is necessary to stay relevant, compete at scale and win.

Every person. Every organization. Every day. Everywhere.

Here’s to making progress for the next 50 years.

Lindsay-Rae

Notes

* Broader Microsoft business: Includes the core Microsoft business, plus minimally integrated companies. Employees of joint ventures and newly acquired companies are not included in the data, including Activision, Blizzard, and King. LinkedIn was acquired in December 2016, GitHub was acquired in June 2018, and Activision, Blizzard, and King were acquired in October 2023. We provide standalone data for these three acquisitions. Nuance Communications was acquired in March 2022 and fully integrated in August 2023. 

**Core Microsoft business: Represents 88.4% of the worldwide broader Microsoft workforce. 

The post Microsoft’s 2024 Global Diversity & Inclusion Report: Our most global, transparent report yet appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Already, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft 365 Copilot to accelerate business results and empower their teams. With Copilot supporting sales associates, Lumen Technologies projects $50 million dollars in savings annually. Honeywell(1) equates productivity gains to adding 187 full-time employees and Finastra is reducing creative production time from seven months to seven weeks.  

Today, we’re announcing new agentic capabilities that will accelerate these gains and bring AI-first business process to every organization. 

• First, the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month.  

• Second, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for every sales, service, finance and supply chain team. 

Copilot is your AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain.  

Empowering more customers to build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio 

Earlier this year, we announced a host of powerful new capabilities in Copilot Studio, including the ability to create autonomous agents. Next month, these capabilities are shifting from private to public preview, allowing more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI. Agents draw on the context of your work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric, and can support everything from your IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as a personal concierge for sales and service.  

Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact. Pets at Home, the U.K.’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings. McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%. Thomson Reuters built a professional-grade agent to speed up the legal due diligence workflow, with initial testing showing some tasks could be done in half the time. This agent can help Thomson Reuters increase the efficiency of work for clients and boost its new business pipeline.  

Scaling your teams with 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365  

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value — and are just the start. We will create many more agents in the coming year that will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization. Today, we’re introducing ten of these autonomous agents. Here are a few examples: 

• Sales Qualification Agent: In a profession where time literally equals money, this agent enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities while the agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses. 

• Supplier Communications Agent: This agent enables customers to optimize their supply chain and minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays and responding accordingly — freeing procurement teams from time consuming manual monitoring and firefighting. 

• Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents: A business gets one chance to make a first impression, and these two agents are game changers for customer care teams facing high call volumes, talent shortages and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team. 

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be confident that they have robust data governance and security. The agents coming to Dynamics 365 follow our core security, privacy and responsible AI commitments. Agents built in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge and actions. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls — all managed in Copilot Studio. These include data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols and more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. 

Microsoft’s own transformation  

At Microsoft, we’re using Copilot and agents to reimagine business process across every function while empowering employees to scale their impact. Using Copilot, one sales team has achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals(2). And thanks to Copilot, one team is resolving customer cases nearly 12% faster(3). Our Marketing team is seeing a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers(4). And in Human Resources, our employee self-service agent is helping answer questions with 42% greater accuracy(5).  

With Copilot and agents, the possibilities are endless — we can’t wait to see what you create. Start building agents in Copilot Studio today. Read more about autonomous agent capabilities on the Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 blogs. Head to WorkLab for more insights on Microsoft’s own AI transformation.

NOTES

1. Statistics are from an internal Honeywell survey of 5,000 employees where 611 employees responded.
2. Internal Microsoft Sales Team data based on 687 sellers of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Jan. – June 2024, as compared with sellers with low usage of Copilot. Regular usage of Copilot means sellers who use Copilot daily at least 50% of the time during the testing period.
3. Internal CSS experiment conducted by Microsoft, 600 participants using Copilot Q&A function, Azure Core team, Nov. – Dec. 2023. These results are statistically significant at the 95th% confidence interval.
4. Internal Microsoft Marketing team data, June – Sept. 2024. Conversion means initiating the free account sign-up process on Azure.com.
5. Internal HR experiment conducted by Microsoft, 33 participants, Oct. 2024. These results are statistically significant at the 95th% confidence interval.

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We’re living through a technological paradigm shift. In a few short years, our computers have learned to speak our languages, see what we see and hear what we hear.

Yet technology for its own sake counts for nothing. What matters is how it feels to people and what impact it has on societies. It’s about how it changes lives, opens doors, expands minds and relieves pressure. It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

And yet technology is, and must always remain, in service to humanity: an enabler and a path to deepening our common bonds and shared understanding, our energy and imagination, our creativity and our capacity for everything from invention to forming relationships.

In the field of AI, we often get caught up in the technical details. We spend our time talking about parameters and compute. The focus is on training runs, datacenters and the latest techniques. This is natural and inevitable when operating on the frontiers of something new, where the details do really matter. But I think it’s important that in doing all of this, getting stuck right in the technical weeds, we don’t lose sight of not only what we are building, but why we are building it.

At Microsoft AI, we are creating an AI companion for everyone.

I truly believe we can create a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before. Great technology experiences are about how you feel, not what’s under the hood. It should be about what you experience, not what we are building.

Copilot will be there for you, in your corner, by your side and always strongly aligned with your interests. It understands the context of your life, while safeguarding your privacy, data and security, remembering the details that are most helpful in any situation. It gives you access to a universe of knowledge, simplifying and decluttering the daily barrage of information, and offering support and encouragement when you want it.

Over time it’ll adapt to your mannerisms and develop capabilities built around your preferences and needs. We are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent and evolving interaction. It will provide you with unwavering support to help you show up the way you really want in your everyday life, a new means of facilitating human connections and accomplishments alike.

With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. It’ll be an advocate for you in many of life’s most important moments. It’ll accompany you to that doctor’s appointment, take notes and follow up at the right time. It’ll share the load of planning and preparing for your child’s birthday party. And it’ll be there at the end of the day to help you think through a tricky life decision.

Some people worry that AI will diminish what makes us unique as humans. My life’s work has been to ensure it does precisely the opposite. We choose what we create. This is something we must do together. Our task is to ensure AI always enriches people’s lives and strengthens our bonds with others, while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just “solve problems,” it’s there to support you, teach you and help you. In this sense, Copilot really is different from that last wave of the web and mobile. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in what’s possible for all of us. It’s a long journey that will take years. With our latest updates to Copilot, you are seeing only the first careful steps in this direction.

Patience and care with our deployments are at the very foundation of our approach. My commitment is to be accountable at every stage, work with you and listen to you. Respect and deep compassion for our users and for society is the core purpose behind everything we do. It comes first. This is a journey we promise to take together. I couldn’t be more excited to embark on it with you.

Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI

__________

From the Copilot Team

Our refreshed Copilot is focused on delivering a more intuitive design with more digestible, speedy and fluent answers. It now adapts to you with a warm tone and a distinct style, providing not only information but encouragement, feedback and advice as you navigate life’s everyday challenges — no matter how big or small. For example, in addition to helping you plan that big trip, it can also offer tips on how to keep your composure when, say, the back of your seat is getting kicked by a small child.

And we’re adding advanced capabilities like Voice and Vision that make it both more useful and feel more natural. These modalities change how we connect with technology, enabling people to seamlessly reflect with, learn from and work with their Copilot companions.

Copilot’s next phase

Today, we’re beginning to roll out the updated Copilot, including new and enhanced features:

Copilot Voice: We’re making it easier than ever to connect with your companion using Copilot Voice. This is the most intuitive and natural way to brainstorm on the go, ask a quick question or even just vent at the end of a tough day. Your companion will be personal to you, with four voice options to choose from.

Copilot Daily: Copilot Daily helps you kick off your morning with a summary of news and weather, all read in your favorite Copilot Voice, with more options like reminders of what’s coming soon. It’s an antidote for that familiar feeling of information overload. Clean, simple and easy to digest. Copilot Daily will only pull from authorized content sources. We are working with partners such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA TODAY Network and Financial Times, and plan to add more sources over time. We’ll also add additional personalization and controls in Copilot Daily over time.

Personalized Discover: Not sure where to start? Copilot Discover helps you get going, offering both a handy guide to its useful features and conversation starters, making jumping in simpler than ever. With your permission, these jumping off points are customized based on your interactions with other Microsoft services and will be further personalized over time according to your conversation history.

Copilot in Microsoft Edge: Copilot has been built right into your Microsoft Edge browser, quickly helping answer questions, summarize page content, translate text or rewrite a sentence. Now it’s even easier to access Copilot directly from the Microsoft Edge browser by simply typing @copilot into the address bar.

Copilot Labs: Copilot Labs gives people the opportunity to test out our experimental features that are still in development. It’s a chance to give feedback and help shape the experiences we create. We have two features we’re bringing to Labs initially, Copilot Vision and Think Deeper.

Copilot Vision: This is a profoundly new way of interacting with a computer. Copilot Vision sees what you see and can talk to you about it in real time. It understands the web page you’re viewing, both text and images, and can answer questions about its content, suggest next steps and help you without disrupting your workflow. Imagine you’re trying to furnish a new apartment, Copilot Vision can help you search for furniture, find the right color palette, think through your options on everything from rugs to throws and even suggest ways of arranging what you’re looking at.

Safety and security are our top priority here:

• Copilot Vision sessions are entirely opt-in and ephemeral. None of the content Copilot Vision engages with is stored or used for training — the moment you end your session, data is permanently discarded.
• The experience won’t work on all websites because we’ve taken important steps to put boundaries on the types of websites Copilot Vision can engage. We’re starting with a limited list of popular websites to help ensure it’s a safe experience for everyone.
• Copilot Vision won’t work on paywalled and sensitive content for this preview. We’ve created it with both users’ and creators’ interests top of mind.
• There is no specific processing of the content of a website you are browsing, nor any AI training. Copilot Vision simply reads and interprets the images and text it sees on the page for the first time along with you.
• Before we launch broadly, we’ll continue to take feedback on all the above from early users in Copilot Labs, refine our safety measures and keep privacy and responsibility at the center of everything we do. Let us know what you think!

Think Deeper: Copilot can now reason through more complex questions. Think Deeper takes more time before responding, allowing Copilot to deliver detailed and step-by-step answers to challenging questions. We’ve designed it to be helpful for all kinds of practical and everyday challenges, like comparing two complex options side by side. Should I move to this city or that? What type of car best suits my needs? And so on. It’s an early Copilot Skill that’s still undergoing development, so we’ve placed it in our experimental Copilot Labs to test and get feedback.

We’re also making sure Copilot is easily available on all our platforms. On Copilot+ PCs and Windows we’re putting Copilot just a click away, unlocking new ways to interact with your PC. Check out today’s announcement on the latest with Copilot+ PCs and Windows.

Our work toward creating these kinds of experiences goes much further than just Copilot. Bing, Edge and MSN will also be more personalized, visual, cohesive and useful experiences than ever. For example, Bing generative search goes beyond simply finding an answer. Instead, it understands the search query, reviews millions of sources of information, dynamically matches content and generates search results on the fly.

While still under development, you’ll notice generative search rolling out across Bing starting today. To explore generative search in the U.S., simply search “Bing generative search” to choose from a selection of demo queries. We are also launching a new experience where users can more easily trigger Bing generative search for informational queries.

The refreshed Copilot is rolling out today on iOS and Android, through the Copilot web experience at copilot.microsoft.com and in Windows. We’re also excited to start rolling out Copilot to WhatsApp to help users there experience natural and engaging interactions with Copilot. Learn more here.

Notes:

• Copilot Voice is initially available in English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Copilot Voice will expand to more regions and languages soon.
• Copilot Daily is rolling out from today starting in the United States and the United Kingdom with more countries coming soon.
• Personalization in Copilot follows our Microsoft Privacy Statement, and people can opt out at any time in Settings. We’re still finalizing options for offering personalization to users in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom.
• Copilot Vision is rolling out to Copilot Labs soon and will be available to a limited number of Copilot Pro subscribers in the United States.
• Think Deeper starts to roll out this week through Copilot Labs to a limited number of Copilot Pro users in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The post An AI companion for everyone appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

In 2012, a child’s drawing of her appointment with a physician was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In the brightly colored sketch, the girl is sitting on the exam table accompanied by her mother and siblings. To those of us working in healthcare, her doctor is the most notable part of the image. He is sitting at his desk, typing on the computer — with his back to the patient.

This drawing, published alongside an article titled “The Cost of Technology,” is emblematic of the unintended consequences of healthcare innovation. With more tools for physicians to use and greater demands on their time, technology can easily become a barrier between the clinician and the patient. For example, in 2023 approximately 53% of physicians surveyed by Medscape reported feeling burned out, and 23% reported feeling depressed. Long working hours, bureaucratic demands and loss of work-life balance due to administrative requirements are leading causes. Our mission has always been to help clinicians turn their chairs around by providing the support they need to fully focus their attention on delivering care.

Fast-forward to today, and we’ve translated that goal into reality. After establishing the ambient technology category, we introduced DAX Copilot, the first generative AI voice-enabled solution, which has been generally available for one year, and we’re seeing remarkable momentum. Part of a proven and extensible platform, DAX Copilot leverages health systems’ existing investments in the trusted family of Dragon Medical solutions, which is used by more than 600,000 clinicians worldwide.

DAX Copilot combines proven conversational and ambient AI with generative AI to automatically convert multiparty conversations into specialty-specific standardized draft clinical summaries that integrate with existing workflows. DAX Copilot was the first ambient solution to be integrated into the Epic electronic health record (EHR) workflow and allows clinicians to seamlessly document patient visits directly within the EHR. Across the country, more than 400 organizations have already embraced its revolutionary capabilities, streamlining administrative tasks and lightening clinicians’ documentation workloads.

This transformative year has highlighted many of the ways we’re helping empower healthcare teams today and bringing joy back to practicing medicine for thousands of clinicians.

Improving Access to Care — and Enhancing Documentation Quality

DAX Copilot is helping Northwestern Medicine in Chicago improve patient access to care, with physicians using the solution in at least 50% of patient encounters and able to see an average of 11.3 additional patients per month. DAX Copilot users at Northwestern Medicine also report spending an average of 24% less time on notes and a 17% decrease in “pajama time,” working on administrative tasks late into the night.

“Northwestern Medicine is committed to providing a superior work environment that promotes well-being, and implementing DAX Copilot will allow our physicians to spend more quality time with our patients, focusing on their needs rather than on paperwork and data entry,” says Dr. Gaurava Agarwal, chief wellness executive, Northwestern Medicine.

Overlake Medical Center & Clinics in Bellevue, Washington, deployed DAX Copilot to help reduce after-hours documentation time and equip its clinicians with tools to manage escalating demands. A pilot with 30 Overlake clinicians saw a significant reduction in time spent on notes outside of scheduled hours. Users also reported other important benefits: 81% said DAX Copilot had reduced their cognitive burden and 77% said the solution had improved the quality of their documentation.

At Atrium Health, “DAX Copilot is enabling a better clinician experience,” says Dr. Matthew Anderson, senior medical director of primary care at Atrium Health. “Most of our surveyed users are reporting a positive impact on their day-to-day schedule, being able to increase the number of patients they are able to see and even spending more time with them.”

Enhancing Clinician Well-being

Atrium Health isn’t alone in finding that the time saved on documentation with DAX Copilot is having a positive impact on clinicians’ quality of life. “I finally have weekends back,” says Dr. Christy Chan, a family medicine physician at Overlake. “I used to always have to worry that there was something I had to do — get back onto the EMR, log back in — but I actually have some weekends back.”

Clinicians at Novant Health are experiencing similar benefits. “DAX Copilot has done an amazing thing for the physicians and clinicians who are currently using it,” says Dr. Aram Alexanian, a family physician at Novant Health. “When you hear a comment like ‘I am now able to do things with my daughter in the evenings and weekends that I couldn’t do before,’ nothing satisfies us more than knowing the impact DAX is having on our clinicians.”

Community Health Network places a major focus on clinician well-being and implementing DAX Copilot has had a major impact on its clinicians’ ability to close notes before they leave for the day. “Since we have implemented DAX Copilot, I have not left clinic with an open note,” says Dr. Patrick McGill, chief transformation officer for Community Health Network. “We have seen improved access, improved numbers of patients, but overall, it’s really the clinician satisfaction that we’ve seen. In one word, DAX Copilot is transformative. It transforms how we’re able to deliver care and how we’re able to document it. It also transforms the patient experience.”

“DAX Copilot has made my professional life easier. My patients have also benefited from my using Nuance DAX during our appointments. I can be right there with the patient and not furiously writing notes. I cannot thank you enough,” said Anita M. Kelsey, M.D., Duke Health.

Transforming the Patient Experience 

Dr. Dominick Lanzo, an orthopedic surgeon at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, agrees. “Once I introduced the DAX Copilot program, it completely transformed the patient experience, and it’s turned out to be incredibly accurate with regards to the history of present illness and the physical exam,” he says. “It’s made my practice much more efficient. I can see more patients, my notes are more accurate, and they’re done in a timely fashion by the end of the afternoon.”

For Dr. Alison Pomykala, an internal medicine specialist at Baptist Medical Group, the integration of DAX Copilot with the Epic EHR is particularly valuable. “The thing I like most about DAX Copilot embedded in the Epic workflow is I’m able to focus more on the patient and I’m spending less time in the exam room typing on the computer,” she says.

“I think the interface is wonderful with Epic. It has been great to see the notes coming up basically in real time on the Epic system. That’s also helped with other things: where we needed to generate a note quickly for referrals, for insurance pre-certifications, for imaging studies, or to have a complete note ready for a patient that we’re sending to the hospital.”

“At our academic health system, integrating DAX Copilot has revolutionized patient care,” says Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, co-president and CEO at Cooper University Health Care. “By automating clinical documentation through ambient voice technology, it has significantly reduced administrative workloads. This allows our physicians to focus on real-time patient interactions, leading to better care outcomes and increased job satisfaction. DAX Copilot has not only improved efficiency but has also empowered our team to spend more time where it matters most — caring for patients.”

It’s a privilege to see this industry-leading solution make a meaningful difference for the clinicians who are already on board — but the work never stops. The Microsoft healthcare team is determined to continue solving some of the industry’s most complex challenges, and harnessing the power and potential of AI is how we’ll achieve that. We will continue to be leaders in innovation, collaborating across our ecosystem of incredible customers, partners and Microsoft researchers to bring real impact to clinical settings.

DAX Copilot is an innovative solution that goes beyond documentation, offering unique features such as orders, problem-based charting and pre-charting capabilities. For example, recent updates to DAX Copilot include a robust set of features, such as the ability to customize documentation style and formatting, as well as automatically create referral letters, diagnostic evidence, after-visit summaries and encounter summaries. The solution also now offers AI coaching to help users improve the quality and completeness of their notes. Also, the new Summarized Evidence capability offers a comprehensive and sophisticated approach that helps clinicians validate and trust the note output by combining insights that go beyond evidence linking, helping clinicians validate the note.

Importantly, when creating technologies that can change the world, Microsoft believes organizations need to ensure that the technology is used responsibly. Microsoft is committed to creating responsible AI by design that is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability.

DAX Copilot is helping restore the human connection at the heart of medicine. We’re excited to drive this solution forward and expand its reach to more clinicians over the coming year and beyond.

Today, the solution can be used across ambulatory specialties, in-office primary care and urgent care, telehealth and emergency medicine. And we are scaling the solution’s availability and capabilities to even more care settings, such as nursing and geographies.

If you’d like to learn how DAX Copilot can help transform healthcare at your organization, please visit: the DAX Copilot website.

The post A year of DAX Copilot: Healthcare innovation that refocuses on the clinician-patient connection appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

As AI advances, we all have a role to play to unlock AI’s positive impact for organizations and communities around the world. That’s why we’re focused on helping customers use and build AI that is trustworthy, meaning AI that is secure, safe and private.

At Microsoft, we have commitments to ensure Trustworthy AI and are building industry-leading supporting technology. Our commitments and capabilities go hand in hand to make sure our customers and developers are protected at every layer.

Building on our commitments, today we are announcing new product capabilities to strengthen the security, safety and privacy of AI systems.

Security. Security is our top priority at Microsoft, and our expanded Secure Future Initiative (SFI) underscores the company-wide commitments and the responsibility we feel to make our customers more secure. This week we announced our first SFI Progress Report, highlighting updates spanning culture, governance, technology and operations. This delivers on our pledge to prioritize security above all else and is guided by three principles: secure by design, secure by default and secure operations. In addition to our first party offerings, Microsoft Defender and Purview, our AI services come with foundational security controls, such as built-in functions to help prevent prompt injections and copyright violations. Building on those, today we’re announcing two new capabilities:

• Evaluations in Azure AI Studio to support proactive risk assessments.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot will provide transparency into web queries to help admins and users better understand how web search enhances the Copilot response. Coming soon.

Our security capabilities are already being used by customers. Cummins, a 105-year-old company known for its engine manufacturing and development of clean energy technologies, turned to Microsoft Purview to strengthen their data security and governance by automating the classification, tagging and labeling of data. EPAM Systems, a software engineering and business consulting company, deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot for 300 users because of the data protection they get from Microsoft. J.T. Sodano, Senior Director of IT, shared that “we were a lot more confident with Copilot for Microsoft 365, compared to other large language models (LLMs), because we know that the same information and data protection policies that we’ve configured in Microsoft Purview apply to Copilot.”

Safety. Inclusive of both security and privacy, Microsoft’s broader Responsible AI principles, established in 2018, continue to guide how we build and deploy AI safely across the company. In practice this means properly building, testing and monitoring systems to avoid undesirable behaviors, such as harmful content, bias, misuse and other unintended risks. Over the years, we have made significant investments in building out the necessary governance structure, policies, tools and processes to uphold these principles and build and deploy AI safely. At Microsoft, we are committed to sharing our learnings on this journey of upholding our Responsible AI principles with our customers. We use our own best practices and learnings to provide people and organizations with capabilities and tools to build AI applications that share the same high standards we strive for.

Today, we are sharing new capabilities to help customers pursue the benefits of AI while mitigating the risks:

• A Correction capability in Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety’s Groundedness detection feature that helps fix hallucination issues in real time before users see them.
• Embedded Content Safety, which allows customers to embed Azure AI Content Safety on devices. This is important for on-device scenarios where cloud connectivity might be intermittent or unavailable.
• New evaluations in Azure AI Studio to help customers assess the quality and relevancy of outputs and how often their AI application outputs protected material.
• Protected Material Detection for Code is now in preview in Azure AI Content Safety to help detect pre-existing content and code. This feature helps developers explore public source code in GitHub repositories, fostering collaboration and transparency, while enabling more informed coding decisions.

It’s amazing to see how customers across industries are already using Microsoft solutions to build more secure and trustworthy AI applications. For example, Unity, a platform for 3D games, used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to build Muse Chat, an AI assistant that makes game development easier. Muse Chat uses content-filtering models in Azure AI Content Safety to ensure responsible use of the software. Additionally, ASOS, a UK-based fashion retailer with nearly 900 brand partners, used the same built-in content filters in Azure AI Content Safety to support top-quality interactions through an AI app that helps customers find new looks.

We’re seeing the impact in the education space too. New York City Public Schools partnered with Microsoft to develop a chat system that is safe and appropriate for the education context, which they are now piloting in schools. The South Australia Department for Education similarly brought generative AI into the classroom with EdChat, relying on the same infrastructure to ensure safe use for students and teachers.

Privacy. Data is at the foundation of AI, and Microsoft’s priority is to help ensure customer data is protected and compliant through our long-standing privacy principles, which include user control, transparency and legal and regulatory protections. To build on this, today we’re announcing:

• Confidential inferencing in preview in our Azure OpenAI Service Whisper model, so customers can develop generative AI applications that support verifiable end-to-end privacy. Confidential inferencing ensures that sensitive customer data remains secure and private during the inferencing process, which is when a trained AI model makes predictions or decisions based on new data. This is especially important for highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing and energy.
• The general availability of Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which allow customers to secure data directly on the GPU. This builds on our confidential computing solutions, which ensure customer data stays encrypted and protected in a secure environment so that no one gains access to the information or system without permission.
• Azure OpenAI Data Zones for the EU and U.S. are coming soon and build on the existing data residency provided by Azure OpenAI Service by making it easier to manage the data processing and storage of generative AI applications. This new functionality offers customers the flexibility of scaling generative AI applications across all Azure regions within a geography, while giving them the control of data processing and storage within the EU or U.S.

We’ve seen increasing customer interest in confidential computing and excitement for confidential GPUs, including from application security provider F5, which is using Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs to build advanced AI-powered security solutions, while ensuring confidentiality of the data its models are analyzing. And multinational banking corporation Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has integrated Azure confidential computing into their own platform to analyze encrypted data while preserving customer privacy. With the general availability of Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, RBC can now use these advanced AI tools to work more efficiently and develop more powerful AI models.

Achieve more with Trustworthy AI 

We all need and expect AI we can trust. We’ve seen what’s possible when people are empowered to use AI in a trusted way, from enriching employee experiences and reshaping business processes to reinventing customer engagement and reimagining our everyday lives. With new capabilities that improve security, safety and privacy, we continue to enable customers to use and build trustworthy AI solutions that help every person and organization on the planet achieve more. Ultimately, Trustworthy AI encompasses all that we do at Microsoft and it’s essential to our mission as we work to expand opportunity, earn trust, protect fundamental rights and advance sustainability across everything we do.

Related:

Commitments

• Security: Secure Future Initiative  
• Privacy: Trust Center 
• Safety: Responsible AI Principles

Capabilities

• Security: Security for AI
• Privacy: Azure Confidential Computing
• Safety: Azure AI Content Safety

The post Microsoft Trustworthy AI: Unlocking human potential starts with trust appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning. 

As we mark our 50th year, I’ve been reflecting on how we have remained a consequential company decade after decade in an industry where there is no franchise value. And it is because — time and time again when tech paradigms have shifted — we have seized the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. And that’s what we are doing again today in this AI platform shift. 

To continue thriving as a company, we need to raise the bar on our operational excellence, continually improving security, quality, and delivery to our customers, as well as the rigor with which we operate the business. Building this capability is essential, and I want each of us to take as much pride in exceeding customer expectations in our fundamentals as we do in our product innovation. After all, both are mission critical to our customers and our future.  

In this context, I’m thrilled to share that Carolina Dybeck Happe is joining Microsoft as EVP and Chief Operations Officer. In this newly created role, she will join the senior leadership team (SLT), reporting to me.  

I’ve come to admire Carolina through her work as a global business leader, including most recently her role in leading GE’s historic turnaround. She is recognized for her ability to drive transformational change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value. Carolina will partner with the SLT to help us drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners.  

As part of this transition, the Commerce + Ecosystems organization in Cloud + AI, the Microsoft Digital organization in Experiences + Devices, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in Finance will move to report to Carolina. These teams are doing mission-critical work for us with high ambition plans on how to empower our partners, customers, and employees with world class technology and experiences. 

I look forward to seeing the progress we will achieve together as we embrace continuous improvement in all we do. 

Please join me in welcoming Carolina to Microsoft.  

Satya

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At Microsoft, we’re ushering in a new era of computing on the path to unlocking scientific advantage and tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges. This is why we’re building Azure Quantum — to create the first platform for reliable quantum computing and achieve the vision of quantum at scale.

In April, we announced we’re entering the next phase for solving meaningful problems with reliable quantum computers by demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits with an error rate 800x better than physical qubits. The main issue with today’s noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines is that their physical qubits are too noisy and error-prone, making the machines impractical for real-world applications. That’s why we must transition to using reliable logical qubits that combine multiple physical qubits together to protect against noise and to maintain coherence for long-running computations.

But quantum computing doesn’t exist in isolation. It requires deep integration with the power of the cloud. We must leverage the best of computing to unlock a new generation of hybrid quantum applications that could solve some of our most pressing challenges — from pioneering more sustainable energy solutions to transforming how we treat disease with the next generation of life-saving therapeutics.

We designed the Azure Quantum compute platform to provide quantum computing across a variety of hardware architectures, enabling the most advanced hybrid quantum applications in the industry — all in a secure, unified and scalable cloud environment — to tackle classically intractable problems. This is our vision for Azure Quantum. Today, we continue to make advances that bring us closer to achieving it with our industry-leading partners, Quantinuum and Atom Computing. With both companies, we want to bring best-in-class solutions to the Azure Quantum platform, and collectively advance and scale resilient quantum capabilities.

In collaboration with Quantinuum, we applied our improved qubit-virtualization system to create and entangle 12 highly reliable logical qubits. This represents the largest number of entangled logical qubits, with the highest fidelity, on record. These results scale logical qubit computation — on ion-trap hardware — within our Azure Quantum compute platform. In addition, advancing toward scalable quantum computing necessitates not only reaching significant hardware milestones, but also proving these improvements can address practical and real-world challenges.

This is why we demonstrated the first end-to-end chemistry simulation that combines reliable logical quantum computation with cloud high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. Today’s announcements would not have been possible without Quantinuum’s leading quantum machines. This paves the way toward practical solutions at the intersection of these technologies, especially in the domains of chemistry, physics and life sciences.

Lastly, as we expand our Azure Quantum compute platform, we are excited to announce that Microsoft and Atom Computing are coming together to ultimately build the world’s most powerful quantum machine. Through this collaboration, we’re bringing a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers by integrating and advancing Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware into our Azure Quantum compute platform. With it, we are bringing the best-in-class from Microsoft and our partner ecosystem to provide the commercial offering of a reliable quantum machine.

Combining the capabilities of this reliable quantum hardware with our platform for Science, Azure Elements, we are providing a comprehensive discovery suite to achieve scientific quantum advantage.

Creating a new generation of hybrid quantum applications

At Microsoft, we’re pioneering a new computing paradigm by bringing the power of the cloud and AI together with quantum. Our Azure Quantum compute platform enables the seamless execution of quantum applications that leverage hardware across a variety of qubit architectures and chips, while offering integration with cloud HPC and AI. Over this past year, we’ve continued to announce new breakthroughs and collaborations in pursuit of this platform mission, including offering Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT and advancing the industry to reliable quantum computing by demonstrating highly reliable logical qubits.

We are bringing these technologies together in a purpose-built cloud platform that leverages the complementary strengths of both AI for large-scale data processing and quantum for complex calculations and unprecedented accuracy. This strong compute foundation offers a secure, unified and scalable hybrid computing environment that enables innovators to develop best-in-class solutions for tackling problems that are difficult or even intractable on classical computers. We are integrating quantum hardware architectures from our ecosystem partners with our quantum control, processing and error correction software — in addition to capabilities for copilot-assisted workflows, developer tools, classical supercomputing and multi-modal AI models. This differentiated computing stack will pave the way for this new generation of hybrid applications. AI co-reasoning will help articulate problems and translate them into workflows, using both classical and scaled quantum tools at the right stages to drive impactful insights in an iterative loop to compress R&D and time-to-solution into days, not years.

Continuing to implement reliable quantum computing with Quantinuum 

Today, in collaboration with Quantinuum, we’re proud to announce the demonstration of the best performing logical qubits on record, achieving the largest number of entangled logical qubits. We created 12 logical qubits by improving and optimizing our qubit-virtualization system for Quantinuum’s 56-physical-qubits H2 machine.

This progress speaks to the world-class error correction expertise at Microsoft. In less than six months, our improved qubit-virtualization system tripled reliable logical qubit counts. Furthermore, when we entangled all 12 logical qubits in a complex state required for ‘deeper’ quantum computation, they exhibited a 22X circuit error rate improvement over the corresponding physical qubits. 

The ability of our systems to triple the number of logical qubits while less than doubling our physical qubits from 30 to 56 physical qubits is a testament to the high fidelities and all-to-all connectivity of our H-Series trapped-ion hardware. Our current H2-1 hardware combined with Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system is bringing us and our customers fully into Level 2 resilient quantum computing. This powerful collaboration will unlock even greater advancements when combined with the cutting-edge AI and HPC tools delivered through Azure Quantum.

— Rajeeb Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum

As we continue to strive toward scientific and industrial breakthroughs with quantum computers, noise remains our biggest barrier. In a previous post, I highlighted how increasing the number of physical qubits alone is not enough to make robust quantum error correction possible. As part of the quantum ecosystem, we must remain focused on improving both logical qubit counts and fidelity to have a solid foundation for producing meaningful results. This will be possible through hardware and software advancements that together enable running longer and more reliable quantum applications. Today’s announcement demonstrates that it is possible to realize these fundamental capabilities on the path to large-scale quantum computing.

A true computing paradigm shift also requires a focus on practical and commercially relevant applications. Earlier, we successfully completed a chemistry simulation in the first end-to-end workflow that combined HPC, AI and logical qubit computation to predict the ground state energy for a specific catalyst problem. This demonstration marked a critical step toward ushering in a new generation of hybrid applications that will become increasingly impactful as quantum technologies scale. Quantum and AI will have the earliest significant impact on scientific discovery, and researchers at Microsoft have demonstrated the breakthrough potential of this integration. This work was only possible thanks to our long-standing and close collaboration with Quantinuum, a company that remains at the forefront of quantum computing.

You can learn more about today’s improved logical qubits and the technical details about this chemistry simulation in our blog Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid, end-to-end chemistry simulation.

Announcing a new commercial offering with Atom Computing

Lastly, in collaboration with Atom Computing, we are excited to bring a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers. Bringing together Microsoft’s enhanced qubit-virtualization system with Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware, we’ve jointly generated logical qubits and are optimizing the system to enable reliable quantum computation. Together, we believe this new commercial offering will be the world’s most powerful quantum machine on record and will scale to scientific advantage and beyond.

Atom Computing’s hardware uniquely combines capabilities essential for expanding quantum error correction, including large numbers of high-fidelity qubits, all-to-all qubit connectivity, long coherence times and mid-circuit measurements with qubit reset and reuse. The company is building 2^nd generation systems with over 1,200 physical qubits and plans to increase the physical qubit count tenfold with each new hardware generation. By applying Microsoft’s state-of-the-art fault-tolerance protocols on a different qubit architecture, our Azure Quantum compute platform can offer a spectrum of best-in-class logical qubits across multiple hardware platforms, providing flexibility and future proofing our customers’ investments.

Our collaboration with Atom Computing aims to integrate these capabilities with Azure Elements, our purpose-built cloud platform offering differentiated computing scale, state-of-the-art AI models for chemistry and materials science simulations and Copilot. Our goal is to empower governments and organizations to tackle scientifically and commercially relevant problems with today’s most advanced computational solutions, including designing and predicting properties of chemicals and materials, exploring molecular interactions and simulating complex chemical reactions. Additionally, we want to help galvanize a quantum-ready ecosystem, providing the critical tools necessary for commercial adoption of these technologies that can help build quantum expertise and create new demand for jobs.

We are excited to accelerate Atom Computing’s quantum capabilities with Microsoft as our partner. We believe that this collaboration uniquely positions us to scale and be first to reach scientific quantum advantage. Our neutral-atom technology is an ideal foundation for Microsoft’s leading qubit-virtualization capabilities, and we look forward to enabling fault tolerant, cutting-edge quantum applications for global innovators to use the best platform in the world.

— Ben Bloom, PhD, Founder and CEO of Atom Computing 

Empowering customers with the best of quantum and AI

At Microsoft, we want to enable practitioners to unlock a new generation of applications that harness the complementary strengths of quantum, classical supercomputing and AI, all connected in the Azure cloud.

We remain committed to achieving quantum at scale so we can solve commercially significant problems that are far too complex for classical computers. As a platform company, it’s critical that we continue investing in the quantum ecosystem and collaborating with industry leaders such as Quantinuum, Atom Computing, Photonic and others to advance and scale quantum capabilities. Alongside our industry collaborations, we’re also focused on our own innovation with a topological qubit-based approach.

This approach continues to offer a unique path to scaling up, with fast clock speeds, digital control and more. Furthermore, a topological quantum computer could control over one million physical qubits on a single chip, with the ability to process information faster than other types of qubits. Our Azure Quantum team previously demonstrated the feasibility of this approach, and we look forward to scaling this to the level of quantum supercomputing. 

Azure is the place where all this innovation comes together. For more information about today’s announcements:

1. Read the technical blog Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid end-to-end chemistry simulation.
2. Register for the upcoming Microsoft Quantum Innovator Series on how quantum and AI can unlock a new generation of hybrid applications for science.
3. Get the latest news and announcements from Azure Quantum.

The post Microsoft announces the best performing logical qubits on record and will provide priority access to reliable quantum hardware in Azure Quantum appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Innovation isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the heartbeat of thought leadership and a catalyst for growth. And in the past year, no innovation has changed the business landscape quite like AI. At Microsoft, we’re always looking for ways to harness emerging technology for the greater good, and it’s that desire that led to the creation of the Microsoft AI Tour.

Last year’s AI Tour gave senior business leaders and technical practitioners a platform to come together and explore the transformative potential of AI, and we couldn’t be happier with the response it received. That’s why we’re hitting the road again, and this time we’ve tripled the cities on the itinerary to ensure we can reach more of our customers and partners around the world. We hope you’ll join us.

A global movement

The Microsoft AI Tour is more than an event; it’s a global movement that will begin September 24, 2024, and span over 60 cities around the world, from Mexico City to Johannesburg, Mumbai to Sydney, Seoul to Berlin, and many more. This free, one-day and in-person experience offers AI thought leadership, sessions to help build AI skills, hands-on workshops and connection opportunities designed to inspire attendees, while providing practical approaches for using the power of AI to improve productivity and deliver solutions that drive real impact for businesses. We’ll also showcase local customer and partner stories at each stop, which makes the AI Tour a great chance for attendees to deepen their connections with local peers.

Something for everyone

Whether you’re a senior business leader or a technical practitioner, you’ll find valuable insights and actionable solutions at these events. We’ve built the Microsoft AI Tour from the ground up to be a comprehensive AI experience at no cost to you.

For technical practitioners, the Microsoft AI Tour is a platform for learning, collaborating and staying ahead of AI trends. It offers immersive workshops on the latest AI technologies, hands-on experience with Microsoft and partner experts and a vibrant community ready to exchange ideas. We’ll also provide insight into the future of AI, helping attendees stay updated on the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

For senior business leaders, the AI Tour is a unique opportunity to understand how AI can drive growth and innovation for their organizations. Through expert-led presentations, attendees will gain insights into how to best leverage AI to solve complex problems and create lasting value. Plus, dive deep into how AI fits into the Microsoft roadmap, which will help those present align their AI strategies with the latest technologies and best practices.

Learn from Microsoft leadership

During the event, attendees will have the opportunity to engage with industry-leading experts, partners and members of Microsoft’s senior leadership team. Leaders such as Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, and Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, will join us at select stops on the tour, where they’ll share how this new generation of AI is reshaping how people live and work.

We can’t wait for you to join us

AI innovation continues to grow, and how we conduct business and develop solutions will never be the same because of it. By joining us at the Microsoft AI Tour, you can position yourself at the forefront of that innovation and ensure you are prepared for whatever’s next on the horizon.

Ready to join this innovation revolution? Visit the Microsoft AI Tour website and request to attend the Tour when it comes to your city.

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