Category: Microsoft
Category Archives: Microsoft
Sharepoint Online Site Template
Hi Everyone,
So, I have been tasked to create and management sharepoint for my organization and I’ve learned quite a bit using the resources Microsoft has given us. However, I’ve also learned that creating sites for each department of my Organization has become cumbersome. I’ve been trying to create a site template for my Org but it’s not really to my liking. For example, I’ve gotten to the point where I can create the template however, I’m unable to include certain content (Web parts, lists, the company’s logo, Doc library etc.) I’ve been following some of the documentations on the Microsoft SPO page but it doesn’t really specify how to achieve the desired outcome I’m looking for. Basically what I’m saying is does anyone know how to create a site template that’ll include all of the content I listed above?
Thanks in advance,
6LACK
Hi Everyone, So, I have been tasked to create and management sharepoint for my organization and I’ve learned quite a bit using the resources Microsoft has given us. However, I’ve also learned that creating sites for each department of my Organization has become cumbersome. I’ve been trying to create a site template for my Org but it’s not really to my liking. For example, I’ve gotten to the point where I can create the template however, I’m unable to include certain content (Web parts, lists, the company’s logo, Doc library etc.) I’ve been following some of the documentations on the Microsoft SPO page but it doesn’t really specify how to achieve the desired outcome I’m looking for. Basically what I’m saying is does anyone know how to create a site template that’ll include all of the content I listed above? Thanks in advance,6LACK Read More
Security Headers missing in Windows Admin Center
Hi,
During a recent PenTest of a new Windows Admin Center installation for a client the report picked up that the application was missing or misconfigured a number of Security Headers in its responses back to web browsers. Is this on the roadmap to be included in an upcoming release or if not can I include it as a feature request please. (Content-Security-Policy,X-Frame-Options,X-XSS-Protection,X-Content-Type-Options)
Hi,During a recent PenTest of a new Windows Admin Center installation for a client the report picked up that the application was missing or misconfigured a number of Security Headers in its responses back to web browsers. Is this on the roadmap to be included in an upcoming release or if not can I include it as a feature request please. (Content-Security-Policy,X-Frame-Options,X-XSS-Protection,X-Content-Type-Options) Read More
Using Azure Automation to perform Azure Site Recovery post failover tasks in virtual machines
Overview
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a service that often comes to mind when adopting a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) approach. In summary, ASR continuously replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary to a secondary site. If disaster strikes and causes an outage, ASR will fail over workloads to the secondary site and ensure applications remain accessible, and later fail back to the primary site once it becomes available again. A secondary ‘site’ may be another Azure region, or a different availability zone in the same Azure region.
What ‘failing over’ actually means is creating copies of the protected machines in the secondary site, which ideally should retain all the configurations applied to the original VMs in the primary site. However, there are some settings that ASR is unable to copy. Encryption at host is an example of this. Even though ASR can replicate VMs with this feature enabled, the VMs created by the service in case of a failover will not have it enabled. Detailed information on what settings are and are not supported by ASR can be found at Support matrix for Azure VM disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery.
Encryption at host is an important security feature. It complements Server-Side Encryption (SSE) by encrypting temporary disks, OS and data disk caches at rest. Moreover, it ensures data in transit from the VM to the storage service flows encrypted, therefore achieving end-to-end encryption.
In this scenario, manually getting your failed over VMs to become compliant again could be cumbersome, especially in large deployments, as it would require shutting down the VM, enabling encryption at host, and starting the VM back up again. This is where Azure Automation can add value.
This article shows how to effectively perform post failover tasks using an Azure Automation Account and a PowerShell runbook. While this article focuses on enabling encryption at host in failed over Azure VMs, a similar approach can be used for other post failover actions.
1. Create an Azure Automation Account and PowerShell runbook
As the name implies, Azure Automation is a cloud-based service that automates different kinds of tasks, from OS updates using Update Management, to processes in Azure VMs or machines running on-premises, or in other cloud environments. For this demo, we’re mostly interested in the Process Automation capability of Azure Automation.
Managed Identities
Create an Azure Automation Account following this guidance: Quickstart – Create an Azure Automation account using the portal | Microsoft Learn. For simplicity, the System-assigned option was selected for managed identities in the Advanced tab. The creation of a managed identity is required for this scenario, otherwise the Automation Account (the runbooks in particular), are unable to make any changes on the target machines. User-assigned managed identities are standalone resources that can be reused, whereas system-assigned managed identities have a lifecycle tied to the service for which they were created, the Automation Account in this case.
Networking
In the Networking tab, you’ll see the option to configure the Automation Account with Public or Private Access. Ideally, you should choose Private Access and lock down the Automation Account to only receive requests coming from clients accessing the service through a private endpoint. However, this would break the integration between ASR and Azure Automation. As we’ll see later on, an input parameter from ASR is required to trigger the PowerShell runbook. Today is it not possible for ASR to use a private endpoint connection to access another Azure service. Traffic between Azure services is always encrypted and traverses Microsoft’s backbone network, despite using public endpoints.
For the reason explained above, and to keep the demo simple, the Automation Account was configured with Public Access. If you have a highly secure environment, and you must disable Public Access on your Automation Account, you may want to explore a different approach that doesn’t rely on an input variable from ASR to trigger the runbook. Note that once you create a private endpoint for Azure Automation, you no longer can run cloud jobs. Instead, you must use a Hybrid Runbook Worker hosted in an Azure virtual network. For more information, see Use Azure Private Link to securely connect networks to Azure Automation | Microsoft Learn.
RBAC Permissions
Once the Automation Account is created, you must make sure its managed identity has the necessary RBAC permissions to perform the steps required to enable Encryption at host in a VM. In my experience, the ‘Virtual Machine Contributor’ role is enough for this, and the scope was restricted to the Resource Group where the resources for this demo were deployed. In the real world, you can choose the Resource Group(s) where you’re planning to deploy failed over VMs.
For guidance on how to assign RBAC roles to a managed identity see, Assign Azure roles to a managed identity (Preview) – Azure RBAC | Microsoft Learn.
Create PowerShell Runbook and add PowerShell script
Follow this guidance to create a PowerShell runbook: Tutorial – Create a PowerShell Workflow runbook in Azure Automation | Microsoft Learn.
Once the runbook is created, the portal will automatically redirect to the ‘Edit PowerShell Runbook’ view. Here, you can add the following PowerShell script:
param (
[parameter(Mandatory=$false)]
[Object]$RecoveryPlanContext
)
Disable-AzContextAutosave -Scope Process
$AzureContext = (Connect-AzAccount -Identity).context
Set-AzContext -SubscriptionName $AzureContext.Subscription -DefaultProfile $AzureContext
$VMinfo = $RecoveryPlanContext.VmMap | Get-Member | Where-Object MemberType -EQ NoteProperty | select -ExpandProperty Name
$vmMap = $RecoveryPlanContext.VmMap
foreach($VMID in $VMinfo)
{
$VM = $vmMap.$VMID
if( !(($VM -eq $Null) -Or ($VM.ResourceGroupName -eq $Null) -Or ($VM.RoleName -eq $Null))) {
#this check is to ensure that we skip when some data is not available else it will fail
$VMObject = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $VM.ResourceGroupName -Name $VM.RoleName
“Stopping {0} VM in {1} RG. ” -f $VM.RoleName,$VM.ResourceGroupName
stop-azvm -ResourceGroupName $VM.ResourceGroupName -Name $VM.RoleName -Force
# Configure encryption
“Configuring encryption for {0} VM in {1} RG. ” -f $VM.RoleName,$VM.ResourceGroupName
Update-AzVM -VM $VMObject -ResourceGroupName $VMObject.ResourceGroupName -EncryptionAtHost $true
# Start VM
“Starting {0} VM in {1} RG. ” -f $VM.RoleName,$VM.ResourceGroupName
start-azvm -ResourceGroupName $VM.ResourceGroupName -Name $VM.RoleName
}
}
The script above was written based on the information present in the following sources:
Azure PowerShell – Enable end-to-end encryption on your VM host – Azure Virtual Machines
Add Azure Automation runbooks to Site Recovery recovery plans – Azure Site Recovery
I also counted on the help and expertise of my colleague Jose Fehse, also from the FastTrack team. Thanks, Jose!
As you’ll see in the second link pasted above, the parameter $RecoveryPlanContext used in the beginning of the script is generated by ASR and contains a variable (‘$VmMap) with a list of all failed over VMs. What the script does is loop through the list of failed over VMs and, for each one, stop the VM, enable Encryption at host, and start it back up.
Save and Publish the runbook. Using the Test Pane is not very useful at this point because we don’t have the $RecoveryPlanContext yet. If you need to make sure the PowerShell commands work as expected, testing them locally or using CloudShell in the Azure portal is a better option.
2. Create ASR Recovery Plan and add PowerShell runbook as post failover step
Assuming your Recovery Services Vault (RSV) already has protected VMs, the next step is to create a Recovery Plan in ASR. In summary, a Recovery Plan lets you create groups of machines you want to fail over together, specify the order of the groups for initiating failover, and add tasks or instructions during this process. For more information about Recovery Plans, see About recovery plans in Azure Site Recovery – Azure Site Recovery.
Create a Recovery Plan following this guidance: Create/customize recovery plans in Azure Site Recovery – Azure Site Recovery . For the purpose of this demo, a Recovery Plan with a single test VM was created, and ASR was configured to fail over from availability zone 1 to zone 2 in Sweden Central. Following a similar approach is recommended before applying this workflow on production VMs.
Once the plan is created, click on Customize. Next to Group1: Start, click on the 3 dots on the right to add a post action, meaning after failover is complete:
In the next blade, select the Automation Account previously created and the runbook. Click Ok to save.
If you click Ok and nothing seems to happen, try going back to the previous blade (Recovery Plan view) and click Save. After that, the action added should appear as a post-step:
3. Perform test failover
The last step is to initiate a Test Failover to verify that the runbook is working properly.
VM disk settings before failover
For instructions on how to check and change a VM’s disk encryption settings, see Enable end-to-end encryption using encryption at host – Azure portal.
Once the failover is complete, we can check the status of the cloud job, and the disk settings of the failed over VM:
Job output
VM disk settings after failover
Note that when doing a Test failover, ASR adds a ‘-test’ suffix to the original name of the VM.
If the runbook didn’t work as expected, you can copy the $RecoveryPlanContext input generated by ASR and use it as a parameter in the Test pane of the runbook to perform additional tests without having to initiate a new test failover every time.
If everything went smoothly, it is safe to delete the test failover VM by clicking on Cleanup test failover in the Recovery Plans view.
Next steps
Now that we’ve explored how to automate post failover actions in Azure VMs, you may want to explore automating tasks during failover next:
Run a failover during disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery – Azure Site Recovery
A few tasks you might want to run during an Azure Site Recovery DR
Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More
How to share contact groups now in Office365 as ‘Public Folders’ don’t show in New Outlook
I have used contact lists in ‘Public Folders’ for a team of users for many users, now users on NEW OUTLOOK cannot use or see these.
What do I use now to import these contact lists (csv or whatever) into what medium on Office365, a shared mailbox, a public folder mailbox, a distribution list, contact group, M365 group to hold all these lists for different clients?
Note: All users should have the ability to edit the contact lists AND send email (like its an Outlook Address Book). It must be mail-enabled as the users just need it to send emails to.
I have used contact lists in ‘Public Folders’ for a team of users for many users, now users on NEW OUTLOOK cannot use or see these. What do I use now to import these contact lists (csv or whatever) into what medium on Office365, a shared mailbox, a public folder mailbox, a distribution list, contact group, M365 group to hold all these lists for different clients? Note: All users should have the ability to edit the contact lists AND send email (like its an Outlook Address Book). It must be mail-enabled as the users just need it to send emails to. Read More
SQL Server Licensing
Hi all,
we purchased two SQL Server Standard 2022 2 Core Perpetual licenses. We want install the SQL Server in a virutal environment. Afterwards we noticed that you need an active Softwareassurance or CSP Subscrption Licenses to have the right to use the SQL in a virtual Environment.
As far as i know, those regulations were introduced with the Version 2022. The SQL Server Version 2019 doesn´t have any of this regulations.
If i downgrade my purchased SQL Server 2022 license to a SQL Server 2019 license is it possible to circumvent the regulations? And also install a SQL Server 2019.
Thanks in Advance.
Hi all, we purchased two SQL Server Standard 2022 2 Core Perpetual licenses. We want install the SQL Server in a virutal environment. Afterwards we noticed that you need an active Softwareassurance or CSP Subscrption Licenses to have the right to use the SQL in a virtual Environment. As far as i know, those regulations were introduced with the Version 2022. The SQL Server Version 2019 doesn´t have any of this regulations. If i downgrade my purchased SQL Server 2022 license to a SQL Server 2019 license is it possible to circumvent the regulations? And also install a SQL Server 2019. Thanks in Advance. Read More
Max number of participants in the same room in Mesh?
Hello,
The documentation about Mesh states 200 participants as max number, sometimes 300, and sometimes it is specified that the participants get allocated to max-16-users rooms, sometimes not.
So is it possible to have a big event with more than 16 people in the same room (ideally 300) or not? It is unclear to me.
Thank you.
Hello,The documentation about Mesh states 200 participants as max number, sometimes 300, and sometimes it is specified that the participants get allocated to max-16-users rooms, sometimes not. So is it possible to have a big event with more than 16 people in the same room (ideally 300) or not? It is unclear to me.Thank you. Read More
Thank to MTC team
Just found I’m almost 8 years here with 20K posts behind. Practically that means nothing, only another reason to say thank MTC team for the developing of so great resource.
Compare to some other Microsoft resources. LinkedIn is more tips & tricks plus news. Answers mainly support, why this or that doesn’t work as we expect. At least that’s my impression. MTC is mainly practical questions from real life. I learned a lot for these years with MTC communicating with other people.
A lot was done by the team, not all perfect now. Even more shall be done in future – more growing the resource more demand on improvement. Good luck on this way and thank you!
Just found I’m almost 8 years here with 20K posts behind. Practically that means nothing, only another reason to say thank MTC team for the developing of so great resource.
Compare to some other Microsoft resources. LinkedIn is more tips & tricks plus news. Answers mainly support, why this or that doesn’t work as we expect. At least that’s my impression. MTC is mainly practical questions from real life. I learned a lot for these years with MTC communicating with other people.
A lot was done by the team, not all perfect now. Even more shall be done in future – more growing the resource more demand on improvement. Good luck on this way and thank you! Read More
Search for user activity to servers/data
Hello,
Is there a way in Defender for Endpoint to see users activity to server/data?
I’m trying gather information from a group of users to see what data/servers they access the most.
Let me know.
Thank you,
Jason
Hello,Is there a way in Defender for Endpoint to see users activity to server/data?I’m trying gather information from a group of users to see what data/servers they access the most. Let me know.Thank you,Jason Read More
Learn about iFAKT GmbH’s ISV Success for Business Applications solution in Microsoft AppSource
Microsoft ISV Success for Business Applications offers platforms, resources, and support designed to help partners develop, publish, and market business apps. Learn more about this offer from iFAKT GmbH:
Polaris VSM: This digital lean management tool from iFAKT GmbH enables manufacturers to track and map their supply chain and value streams. Key performance indicators can be calculated, validated, and visualized with Polaris VSM’s formula system and with Kanban and Kaizen boards. Team members can collaborate from anywhere at any time while improving process efficiency and productivity.
Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More
Leading in the era of AI: How Microsoft’s platform differentiation and Copilot empowerment are driving AI Transformation
A Copilot on every desk, every device and across every role is core to Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. By bolstering the services customers know and love with our Copilot capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud, we are enabling zero-shot innovation — the ability to effectively gain value out of the box — for their businesses to increase productivity, creativity and inclusive collaboration. ISVs, digital natives, startups and the rest of our partner ecosystem are leveraging our Copilot stack to build AI solutions that are reshaping business processes across industries. We continue co-innovating directly with customers on our open cloud platform to bend the curve on innovation by identifying AI design patterns; then integrating and applying data to solve their most pressing challenges faster and more efficiently than ever before. Underpinning it all is the need for a strong cybersecurity foundation, and the work we are doing to ensure this critical imperative is met. No one is immune from bad actors, and we remain committed to transparency and trust in our approach to protecting customer and partner data. By empowering organizations with industry-leading cloud and responsible AI solutions, paired with our focus on security, we are helping them unlock opportunities that deliver pragmatic business outcomes. I am proud of the work we have done this past quarter that exemplifies our approach to enabling AI Transformation, and the success of our customers and partners across industries who have embraced it.
Just this week we announced our strategic partnership with The Coca-Cola Company to accelerate AI Transformation enterprise-wide as well as across its global network of independent bottlers, and shared news of our partnership with Cognizant to drive enterprise AI adoption for millions of users. We are expanding our work with G42 to accelerate responsible AI innovation in the United Arab Emirates and beyond while accelerating digital transformation securely across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa with expanded access to services and technologies. We are also building on our relationship with Cloud Software Group to bring joint cloud solutions and generative AI capabilities to more than 100 million people.
We continue to shape the future of industry alongside our customers to help them differentiate their businesses. At CES, we showcased how our customers and partners are innovating across the automotive and mobility industry with generative AI to solve deep business problems and create new opportunities, and revealed the Copilot key for Windows 11 PCs. At NRF, we shared new copilot templates to help retailers incorporate generative AI across the shopper journey while enhancing the experience for store associates and making AI implementation more accessible. Just recently at HIMSS, we announced Microsoft’s role as the technology enabling partner for the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network, a consortium of healthcare leaders aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles to improve the quality, safety and trustworthiness of AI in healthcare.
Air India harnesses AI for operational excellence with Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Enabling pragmatic AI innovation with Copilot capabilities to deliver immediate value
Companies like Amadeus, AAMI, TotalEnergies and Cushman & Wakefield are leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enrich customer interactions and advance high-priority projects. Visa employees are transforming how they work to better serve the needs of their clients and Banca Transilvania is boosting efficiency and innovation while delivering the highest quality of customer service. Emirates NBD engineers are solving their most complex problems while remaining within their development environments, and 96% of early adopters at CommBank have shared that Copilot is making them more productive. Colombia-based Cenit is experiencing rapid adoption of Copilot to empower employees to be more creative, productive and collaborative. U.K.-based law firm Clifford Chance is helping employees automate daily tasks like meeting notes, email drafts and inbox management with AI and natural language processing, while Air India built a plugin to gain real-time access to flight and operations data to empower better decision-making.
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Northrop & Johnson achieved a 250% increase in charter bookings while helping team members save time, boost productivity and enrich the quality of engagement with their customers. Using Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio, Cineplex is saving employees over 30,000 hours annually in manual processing times and reducing ticket refund handling time from 15 minutes to under a minute. Northern Trust is using Microsoft Copilot for Service to modernize its client relations organization, streamline employee processes and elevate the client experience. Teams at EPAM Systems are leveraging Microsoft Copilot for Sales to improve sales processes and better support its business strategies, while freeing up time to spend with customers.
Blue Yonder optimizes supply chain orchestration with Azure OpenAI Service.
Building AI design patterns that bend the curve on innovation and intelligently reason over data to solve business challenges
Icertis is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and its proprietary AI models in conjunction with its extensive data lake to uncover cost savings, enhance compliance and reduce risk across millions of legal contracts. Insurance company FWD Group is using the service to enhance customer experiences and operations across its lines of business, and Singapore-based CapitaLand Investment has saved 1 million Singapore dollars and 10,000 work hours per year with data-driven AI models. With Azure OpenAI Service as the secure foundation for its supply chain platform, Blue Yonder is harnessing AI and machine learning to provide real-time decision making for businesses across 78 countries. Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy and Publicis Sapient are making it easier for travelers to find the right vacation homes through natural language search powered by large language models within Azure OpenAI Service, and Miral is curating some of the most sought-after leisure, entertainment and tourism activities with a 24/7 AI-powered concierge. Using several AI models, Australian retailer Coles developed an edge computing platform that makes 1.6 billion informed predictions each day so customers can find exactly what they are looking for across its 850 stores.
With Microsoft Fabric, Melbourne Airport is synchronizing flight bookings and ground transportation data to project demand while maintaining efficiency, reliability and safety of its operations. Rail freight operator Aurizon is deriving better data insights from 400 sensor-equipped locomotives to enhance cost efficiency, scalability and predictive maintenance. Seair Exim Solutions is increasing export-import trade data ingestion speeds by 90% to empower its global shipping industry customers with improved insights more quickly with help from Mandelbulb Technologies, while Dener Motorsport is using Fabric and real-time analytics to help automotive engineers detect and resolve car issues within minutes — down from nearly half an hour. By hosting its data within Azure Kubernetes, Windstream is improving its custom GPT platform to help employees find the information they need faster across 100,000 indexed documents. To promote financial inclusion, Trusting Social focused on a strong data foundation paired with AI services to enable the development and deployment of solutions that assist more than 130 financial institutions across Asia. Sasfin Bank worked with Legal Interact to implement a unified document management system to analyze contract clauses and streamline legal operations and workflows using Azure Cognitive Services and Azure SQL. TomTom has deployed GitHub Copilot to its developers, resulting in 85% of the company’s engineers feeling more productive and 70% saying it enables them to focus on more satisfying work. Meesho — a leading online marketplace in India — is using a generative AI chat agent to increase inquiry resolution by 40% and customer satisfaction by 25%, while leveraging GitHub Copilot to streamline code delivery and testing for its 200+ developers.
Grupo Bimbo bakes in end-to-end data security and compliance with Microsoft Purview.
Strengthening cybersecurity foundations with industry-leading cloud and responsible AI solutions
Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) reflects our commitment to continually advancing the built-in security of our products and services. We recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security — the industry’s first generative AI solution designed to help security and IT professionals do their work with greater speed and accuracy. In our latest Copilot for Security economic study, security analysts using the Copilot were 22% faster and 7% more accurate across all tasks, with 97% saying they want to use it again. Our ability to offer this solution to customers is bolstered by more than 100 partners such as Capgemini, Cisco and Darktrace who are committed to working with us to deliver trusted, responsible AI solutions. In collaboration with TC1 Labs, Pacifico Seguros has become the first company in Latin America to implement Copilot for Security with a Zero Trust approach, strengthening its security defenses and confidently preparing the company for future security challenges. Security professionals at Enverus are saving hours per day on low-value tasks with Copilot, allowing them to focus on strategic work and help elevate the impact of their security team. Wipro is using the solution to help employees save time and act quickly to improve outcomes across its business.
Using the Microsoft Defender security stack, Del Monte Foods increased security visibility and coverage across its IT environment, reducing security risks by 50% and improving its security response and remediation capabilities. To streamline its security operations, Jones Lang LaSalle implemented Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with help from Tanium, reducing cybersecurity spending by 20% and enhancing protection for nearly 90,000 endpoints. Türkiye-based Demirören has adopted a Zero Trust security model by unifying its security solutions to protect essential business data and enhance threat detection and response capabilities. Paytronix, a provider of customized digital experiences for restaurant and convenience store guests, improved its security profile by seamlessly migrating data for 250 million user accounts to Azure without interruption. The Audi Group’s IT department is simplifying endpoint management and safeguarding its hybrid workforce across 12 countries with enhanced security using Microsoft Intune. To ensure robust data protection and seamless access for authorized personnel, SLT-MOBITEL is using Microsoft’s AI-powered security products to fortify end-user devices and services while simplifying information security and compliance. Oregon State University and Grupo Bimbo are utilizing Microsoft data security solutions to safeguard their environments and confidently prepare for their continued adoption and deployment of AI.
Embracing AI Transformation has become a priority for organizations around the world seeking to unlock AI opportunities. Whether helping our customers adopt and scale AI with our Copilot capabilities or building unique AI strategies leveraging our open platform and partner ecosystem, we are humbled to work with you to drive pragmatic business outcomes and differentiated industry leadership. Our commitment to your success is unwavering. We will continue building upon our trusted relationships and our focus on responsibility and security so you can move forward with confidence in your AI journey. I remain inspired by what we have done — and what we will do — to help our customers and partners achieve more.
The post Leading in the era of AI: How Microsoft’s platform differentiation and Copilot empowerment are driving AI Transformation appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
A Copilot on every desk, every device and across every role is core to Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. By bolstering the services customers know and love with our Copilot capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud, we are enabling zero-shot innovation — the ability to effectively…
The post Leading in the era of AI: How Microsoft’s platform differentiation and Copilot empowerment are driving AI Transformation appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Prioritizing security above all else
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees. In light of the significant attention and discussion this announcement has garnered, it has been made publicly available as an official record.
Today, I want to talk about something critical to our company’s future: prioritizing security above all else.
Microsoft runs on trust, and our success depends on earning and maintaining it. We have a unique opportunity and responsibility to build the most secure and trusted platform that the world innovates upon.
The recent findings by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) regarding the Storm-0558 cyberattack, from summer 2023, underscore the severity of the threats facing our company and our customers, as well as our responsibility to defend against these increasingly sophisticated threat actors.
Last November, we launched our Secure Future Initiative (SFI) with this responsibility in mind, bringing together every part of the company to advance cybersecurity protection across both new products and legacy infrastructure. I’m proud of this initiative, and grateful for the work that has gone into implementing it. But we must and will do more.
Going forward, we will commit the entirety of our organization to SFI, as we double down on this initiative with an approach grounded in three core principles:
Secure by Design: Security comes first when designing any product or service.
Secure by Default: Security protections are enabled and enforced by default, require no extra effort, and are not optional.
Secure Operations: Security controls and monitoring will continuously be improved to meet current and future threats.
These principles will govern every facet of our SFI pillars as we: Protect Identities and Secrets, Protect Tenants and Isolate Production Systems, Protect Networks, Protect Engineering Systems, Monitor and Detect Threats, and Accelerate Response and Remediation. We’ve shared specific, company-wide actions each of these pillars will entail — including those recommended in the CSRB’s report — which you can learn about here. Across Microsoft, we will mobilize to implement and operationalize these standards, guidelines, and requirements and this will be an added dimension of our hiring and rewards decisions. In addition, we will instill accountability by basing part of the compensation of the senior leadership team on our progress towards meeting our security plans and milestones.
We must approach this challenge with both technical and operational rigor, and with a focus on continuous improvement. Every task we take on – from a line of code, to a customer or partner process – is an opportunity to help bolster our own security and that of our entire ecosystem. This includes learning from our adversaries and the increasing sophistication of their capabilities, as we did with Midnight Blizzard. And learning from the trillions of unique signals we’re constantly monitoring to strengthen our overall posture. It also includes stronger, more structured collaboration across the public and private sector.
Security is a team sport, and accelerating SFI isn’t just job number one for our security teams – it’s everyone’s top priority and our customers’ greatest need.
If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security. In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems. This is key to advancing both our platform quality and capability such that we can protect the digital estates of our customers and build a safer world for all.
Satya
The post Prioritizing security above all else appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
Microsoft runs on trust, and our success depends on earning and maintaining it. We have a unique opportunity and responsibility to build the most secure and trusted platform that the world innovates upon.
The post Prioritizing security above all else appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Microsoft and LinkedIn release the 2024 Work Trend Index on the state of AI at work
One year ago, generative AI burst onto the scene and for the first time since the smartphone, people began to change the way they interact with technology. People are bringing AI to work at an unexpected scale — and now the big question is, how’s it going?
As AI becomes ubiquitous in the workplace, employees and businesses alike are under extreme pressure. The pace and intensity of work, which accelerated during the pandemic, has not eased, so employees are bringing their own AI to work. Leaders agree AI is a business imperative — and feel the pressure to show immediate ROI — but many lack a plan and vision to go from individual impact to applying AI to drive the bottom line.
At the same time, the labor market is set to shift and there’s a new AI economy. While some professionals worry AI will replace their job, the data tells a more nuanced story — of a hidden talent shortage, more employees eyeing a career change, and a massive opportunity for those willing to skill up.
“AI is democratizing expertise across the workforce,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft. “Our latest research highlights the opportunity for every organization to apply this technology to drive better decision-making, collaboration — and ultimately business outcomes.”
For our fourth annual Work Trend Index, out today, we partnered with LinkedIn for the first time on a joint report so we could provide a comprehensive view of how AI is not only reshaping work, but the labor market more broadly. We surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries, identified labor and hiring trends from LinkedIn, analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals and conducted research with Fortune 500 customers. The data points to insights every leader and professional needs to know — and actions they can take — when it comes to AI’s implications for work.
1. Employees want AI at work — and won’t wait for companies to catch up.
Three in four knowledge workers (75%) now use AI at work. Employees, overwhelmed and under duress, say AI saves time, boosts creativity and allows them to focus on their most important work. While 79% of leaders agree AI adoption is critical to remain competitive, 59% worry about quantifying the productivity gains of AI and 60% worry their company lacks a vision and plan to implement it. While leaders feel the pressure to turn individual productivity gains into organizational impact, employees aren’t waiting to reap the benefits: 78% of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work. The opportunity for every leader is to channel this momentum into ROI.
2. For employees, AI raises the bar and breaks the career ceiling.
We also see AI beginning to impact the job market. While AI and job loss are top of mind for some, our data shows more people are eyeing a career change, there are jobs available, and employees with AI skills will get first pick. The majority of leaders (55%) say they’re worried about having enough talent to fill open roles this year, with leaders in cybersecurity, engineering, and creative design feeling the pinch most.
And professionals are looking. Forty-six percent across the globe are considering quitting in the year ahead — an all-time high since the Great Reshuffle of 2021 — a separate LinkedIn study found U.S. numbers to be even higher with 85% eyeing career moves. While two-thirds of leaders wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills, only 39% of users have received AI training from their company. So, professionals are skilling up on their own. As of late last year, we’ve seen a 142x increase in LinkedIn members adding AI skills like Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles and a 160% increase in non-technical professionals using LinkedIn Learning courses to build their AI aptitude.
In a world where AI mentions in LinkedIn job posts drive a 17% bump in application growth, it’s a two-way street: Organizations that empower employees with AI tools and training will attract the best talent, and professionals who skill up will have the edge.
3. The rise of the AI power user — and what they reveal about the future.
In the research, four types of AI users emerged on a spectrum — from skeptics who rarely use AI to power users who use it extensively. Compared to skeptics, AI power users have reoriented their workdays in fundamental ways, reimagining business processes and saving over 30 minutes per day. Over 90% of power users say AI makes their overwhelming workload more manageable and their work more enjoyable, but they aren’t doing it on their own.
Power users work for a different kind of company. They are 61% more likely to have heard from their CEO on the importance of using generative AI at work, 53% more likely to receive encouragement from leadership to consider how AI can transform their function and 35% more likely to receive tailored AI training for their specific role or function.
“AI is redefining work and it’s clear we need new playbooks,” said Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn. “It’s the leaders who build for agility instead of stability and invest in skill building internally that will give their organizations a competitive advantage and create more efficient, engaged and equitable teams.”
The prompt box is the new blank page
We hear one consistent piece of feedback from our customers: talking to AI is harder than it seems. We’ve all learned how to use a search engine, identifying the right few words to get the best results. AI requires more context — just like when you delegate work to a direct report or colleague. But for many, staring down that empty prompt box feels like facing a blank page: Where should I even start?
Today, we’re announcing Copilot for Microsoft 365 innovations to help our customers answer that question.
If you’ve got the start of a prompt, Copilot will offer to auto-complete it to get to a better result, suggesting something more detailed to help ensure you get what you’re looking for. That not only speeds things up, it offers you new ideas for how to leverage Copilot’s power.
Other times, you know exactly what you want — you’re just not sure how to ask. With its new rewrite feature, Copilot turns a basic prompt into a rich one with the click of a button, turning everyone into a prompt engineer.
Catch Up, a new chat interface that surfaces personal insights based on your recent activity, provides responsive recommendations, like “You have a meeting with the sales VP on Thursday. Let’s get you prepared — click here to get detailed notes.”
We also know that every role, team and function has unique needs and ways of working. To help create prompts for exactly the work you do, you’ll soon be able to create, publish and manage prompts in Copilot Lab that are expressly tailored to your closest teams.
These features will be available in the coming months, and in the future, we’ll take it a step further, with Copilot asking you questions to get to your best work yet.
LinkedIn has also made free over 50 learning courses to empower professionals at all levels to advance their AI aptitude.
Head to WorkLab for the full Work Trend Index Report, and head to LinkedIn to hear more from LinkedIn’s Chief Economist, Karin Kimbrough, on how AI is reshaping the labor market.
And for all the blogs, videos and assets related to today’s announcements, please visit our microsite.
The post Microsoft and LinkedIn release the 2024 Work Trend Index on the state of AI at work appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
One year ago, generative AI burst onto the scene and for the first time since the smartphone, people began to change the way they interact with technology. People are bringing AI to work at an unexpected scale — and now the big question is, how’s it going? As AI becomes ubiquitous in the workplace, employees…
The post Microsoft and LinkedIn release the 2024 Work Trend Index on the state of AI at work appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Introducing Copilot+ PCs
An on-demand recording of our May 20 event is available.
Today, at a special event on our new Microsoft campus, we introduced the world to a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI, Copilot+ PCs.
Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC. Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English.
These experiences come to life on a set of thin, light and beautiful devices from Microsoft Surface and our OEM partners Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, with pre-orders beginning today and availability starting on June 18. Starting at $999, Copilot+ PCs offer incredible value.
This first wave of Copilot+ PCs is just the beginning. Over the past year, we have seen an incredible pace of innovation of AI in the cloud with Copilot allowing us to do things that we never dreamed possible. Now, we begin a new chapter with AI innovation on the device. We have completely reimagined the entirety of the PC – from silicon to the operating system, the application layer to the cloud – with AI at the center, marking the most significant change to the Windows platform in decades.
The fastest, most secure Windows PCs ever built
We introduced an all-new system architecture to bring the power of the CPU, GPU, and now a new high performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) together. Connected to and enhanced by the large language models (LLMs) running in our Azure Cloud in concert with small language models (SLMs), Copilot+ PCs can now achieve a level of performance never seen before. They are up to 20x more powerful[1] and up to 100x as efficient[2] for running AI workloads and deliver industry-leading AI acceleration. They outperform Apple’s MacBook Air 15” by up to 58% in sustained multithreaded performance[3], all while delivering all-day battery life. With incredible efficiency, Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge.[4] That is up to 20% more battery in local video playback than the MacBook Air 15”.[5]
Windows now has the best implementation of apps on the fastest chip, starting with Qualcomm. We now offer more native Arm64 experiences than ever before, including our fastest implementation of Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word, Excel, OneDrive and OneNote. Chrome, Spotify, Zoom, WhatsApp, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Blender, Affinity Suite, DaVinci Resolve and many more now run natively on Arm to give you great performance with additional apps, like Slack, releasing later this year. In fact, 87% of the total app minutes people spend in apps today have native Arm versions.[6] With a powerful new emulator, Prism, your apps run great, whether native or emulated.
Every Copilot+ PC comes secured out of the box. The Microsoft Pluton Security processor will be enabled by default on all Copilot+ PCs and we have introduced a number of new features, updates and defaults to Windows 11 that make it easy for users to stay secure. And, we’ve built in personalized privacy controls to help you protect what’s important to you. You can read more about how we are making Windows more secure here.
Entirely new, powerful AI experiences
Copilot+ PCs leverage powerful processors and multiple state-of-the-art AI models, including several of Microsoft’s world-class SLMs, to unlock a new set of experiences you can run locally, directly on the device. This removes previous limitations on things like latency, cost and even privacy to help you be more productive, creative and communicate more effectively.
Recall instantly
We set out to solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily – finding something we know we have seen before on our PC. Today, we must remember what file folder it was stored in, what website it was on, or scroll through hundreds of emails trying to find it.
Now with Recall, in preview starting June 18, you can access virtually what you have seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like having photographic memory. Copilot+ PCs organize information like we do – based on relationships and associations unique to each of our individual experiences. This helps you remember things you may have forgotten so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and intuitively by simply using the cues you remember. [7]
You can scroll across time to find the content you need in your timeline across any application, website, document, or more. Interact intuitively using snapshots with screenray to help you take the next step using suggested actions based on object recognition. And get back to where you were, whether to a specific email in Outlook or the right chat in Teams.
Recall leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device. Your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete ranges of time in Settings, or pause at any point right from the icon in the System Tray on your Taskbar. You can also filter apps and websites from ever being saved. You are always in control with privacy you can trust.
Cocreate with AI-powered image creation and editing, built into Windows
Since the launch of Image Creator, almost 10 billion images have been generated, helping more people bring their ideas to life easily by using natural language to describe what they want to create. Yet, today’s cloud offerings may limit the number of images you can create, keep you waiting while the artwork processes or even present privacy concerns. By using the Neural Processing Units (NPUs) and powerful local small language models, we are bringing innovative new experiences to your favorite creative applications like Paint and Photos.
Combine your ink strokes with text prompts to generate new images in nearly real time with Cocreator. As you iterate, so does the artwork, helping you more easily refine, edit and evolve your ideas. Powerful diffusion-based algorithms optimize for the highest quality output over minimum steps to make it feel like you are creating alongside AI. Use the creativity slider to choose from a range of artwork from more literal to more expressive. Once you select your artwork, you can continue iterating on top of it, helping you express your ideas, regardless of your creative skills.
Take photo editing and image creation to the next level. With Restyle Image, you can reimagine your personal photos with a new style combining image generation and photo editing in Photos. Use a pre-set style like Cyberpunk or Claymation to change the background, foreground or full picture to create an entirely new image. Or jumpstart your next creative project and get visual inspiration with Image Creator in Photos. On Copilot+ PCs you can generate endless images for free, fast, with the ability to fine tune images to your liking and to save your favorites to collections.
Innovative AI experiences from the creative apps you love
We are also partnering with some of the biggest and most-loved applications on the planet to leverage the power of the NPU to deliver new innovative AI experiences.
Adobe
Together with Adobe, we are thrilled to announce Adobe’s flagship apps are coming to Copilot+ PCs, including Photoshop, Lightroom and Express – available today. Illustrator, Premiere Pro and more are coming this summer. And we’re continuing to partner to optimize AI in these apps for the NPU. For Adobe Creative Cloud customers, they will benefit from the full performance advantages of Copilot+ PCs to express their creativity faster than ever before.
DaVinci Resolve Studio
Effortlessly apply visual effects to objects and people using NPU-accelerated Magic Mask in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
CapCut
Remove the background from any video clip in a snap using Auto Cutout running on the NPU in CapCut.
Cephable
Stay in your flow with faster, more responsive adaptive input controls, like head movement or facial expressions via the new NPU-powered camera pipeline in Cephable.
LiquidText
Make quicker and smarter annotations to documents, using AI features that run entirely on-device via NPU, so data stays private in LiquidText.
djay Pro
Have fun breaking down and remixing any music track, with a new, higher-quality version of NeuralMix that’s exclusive to NPU in Algoriddim’s djay Pro.
Connect and communicate effortlessly with live captions
In an increasingly connected and global world, Windows wants to bring people closer together. Whether catching up on your favorite podcast from a different country, or watching your favorite international sports team, or even collaborating with friends and colleagues across the world, we want to make more content accessible to more people.
Live Captions now has live translations and will turn any audio that passes through your PC into a single, English-language caption experience, in real time on your screen across all your apps consistently. You can translate any live or pre-recorded audio in any app or video platform from over 40 languages into English subtitles instantly, automatically and even while you’re offline. Powered by the NPU and available across all Copilot+ PCs, now you can have confidence your words are understood as intended.
New and enhanced Windows Studio Effects
Look and sound your best automatically with easily accessible controls at your fingertips in Quick Settings. Portrait light automatically adjusts the image to improve your perceived illumination in a dark environment or brighten the foreground pixels when in a low-light environment. Three new creative filters (illustrated, animated or watercolor) add an artistic flare. Eye contact teleprompter helps you maintain eye contact while reading your screen. New improvements to voice focus and portrait blur help ensure you’re always in focus.
Copilot, your everyday AI companion
Every Copilot+ PC comes with your personal powerful AI agent that is just a single tap away on keyboards with the new Copilot key.[8] Copilot will now have the full application experience customers have been asking for in a streamlined, simple yet powerful and personal design. Copilot puts the most advanced AI models at your fingertips. In the coming weeks, get access to the latest models including GPT-4o from our partners at OpenAI, so you can have voice conversations that feel more natural.
Advancing AI responsibly
At Microsoft, we have a company-wide commitment to develop ethical, safe and secure AI. Our responsible AI principles guided the development of these new experiences, and all AI features are aligned with our standards. Learn more here.
New Copilot+ PCs from Microsoft Surface and our partners
We have worked with each of the top OEMs — Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung — and of course Surface, to bring exciting new Copilot+ PCs that will begin to launch on June 18. Starting at $999, these devices are up to $200 less than similar spec’d devices[9].
Surface plays a key role in the Windows ecosystem, as we design software and hardware together to deliver innovative designs and meaningful experiences to our customers and fans. We are introducing the first-ever Copilot+ PCs from Surface: The all-new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop.
Surface Pro and Surface Laptop
The new Surface Laptop is a powerhouse in an updated, modern laptop design with razor-thin bezels, a brilliant touchscreen display, AI-enhanced camera, premium audio, and now with a haptic touchpad.
Choose between a 13.8” and 15” display and four stunning colors. Enjoy up to 22 hours of local video playback on Surface Laptop 15” or up to 20 hours on Surface Laptop13.8” on top of incredible performance and all-new AI experiences.
The new Surface Pro is the most flexible 2-in-1 laptop, now reimagined with more speed and battery life to power all-new AI experiences. It introduces a new, optional OLED with HDR display, and ultrawide field of view camera perfect for Windows Studio Effects. The new Surface Pro Flex Keyboard is the first 2-in-1 keyboard designed to be used both attached or detached. It delivers enhanced stability, with Surface Slim Pen storage and charging integrated seamlessly, as well as a quiet, haptic touchpad. Learn more here.
New Copilot+ PCs from the biggest brands available starting June 18:
Acer: Acer’s Swift 14 AI 2.5K touchscreen enables you to draw and edit your vision with greater accuracy and with color-accurate imagery. Launch and discover AI-enhanced features, like Acer PurifiedVoice 2.0 and Purified View, with a touch of the dedicated AcerSense button.
ASUS: The ASUS Vivobook S 15 is a powerful device that brings AI experiences to life with its Snapdragon X Elite Platform and built-in Qualcomm® AI. It boasts 40+ NPU TOPS, a dual-fan cooling system, and up to 1 TB of storage. Next-gen AI enhancements include Windows Studio effects v2 and ASUS AiSense camera, with presence-detection capabilities for Adaptive Dimming and Lock. Built for portability, it has an ultra-slim and light all-metal design, a high-capacity battery, and premium styling with a single-zone RGB backlit keyboard.
Dell: Dell is launching five new Copilot+ PCs, including the XPS 13, Inspiron 14 Plus, Inspiron 14, Latitude 7455, and Latitude 5455, offering a range of consumer and commercial options that deliver groundbreaking battery life and unique AI experiences. The XPS 13 is powered by Snapdragon X Elite processors and features a premium, futuristic design, while the Latitude 7455 boasts a stunning QHD+ display and quad speakers with AI noise reduction. The Inspiron14 and Inspiron 14 Plus feature a Snapdragon X Plus 1and are crafted with lightweight, low carbon aluminum and are energy efficient with EPEAT Gold rating.
HP: HP’s OmniBook X AI PC and HP EliteBook Ultra G1q AI PC with Snapdragon X Elite are slim and sleek designs, delivering advanced performance and mobility for a more personalized computing experience. Features include long-lasting battery life and AI-powered productivity tools, such as real-time transcription and meeting summaries. A 5MP camera with automatic framing and eye focus is supported by Poly Studio’s crystal-clear audio for enhanced virtual interactions.
Lenovo: Lenovo is launching two AI PCs: one built for consumers, Yoga Slim 7x, and one for commercial, ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. The Yoga Slim 7x brings efficiency for creatives, featuring a 14.5” touchscreen with 3K Dolby Vision and optimized power for 3D rendering and video editing. The T14s Gen 6 brings enterprise-level experiences and AI performance to your work tasks, with features including a webcam privacy shutter, Wi-Fi 7 connectivity and up to 64GB RAM.
Samsung: Samsung’s new Galaxy Book4 Edge is ultra-thin and light, with a 3K resolution, Dynamic AMOLED 2X display and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. It has a long-lasting battery that provides up to 22 hours of video playback, making it perfect for work or entertainment on the go.
Learn more about new Copilot+ PCs and pre-order today at Microsoft.com and from major PC manufacturers, as well as other leading global retailers.
Start testing for commercial deployment today
Copilot+ PCs offer businesses the most performant Windows 11 devices with unique AI capabilities to unlock productivity, improve collaboration and drive efficiency. As a Windows PC, businesses can deploy and manage a Copilot+ PC with the same tools and processes used today including IT controls for new features and AppAssure support. We recommend IT admins begin testing and readying for deployment to start empowering your workforce with access to powerful AI features on these high-performance devices. You can read more about our commercial experiences here.
AI innovation across the Windows ecosystem
Like we’ve always done with Windows, we have built a platform for our ecosystem partners to build on.
The first Copilot+ PCs will launch with both the Snapdragon® X Elite and Snapdragon® X Plus processors and feature leading performance per watt thanks to the custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which delivers unrivaled performance and battery efficiency. Snapdragon X Series delivers 45 NPU TOPS all-in-one system on a chip (SoC). The premium integrated Qualcomm® Adreno GPU delivers stunning graphics for immersive entertainment. We look forward to expanding through deep partnerships with Intel and AMD, starting with Lunar Lake and Strix Point. We will bring new Copilot+ PC experiences at a later date. In the future we expect to see devices with this silicon paired with powerful graphics cards like NVIDIA GeForce RTX and AMD Radeon, bringing Copilot+ PC experiences to reach even broader audiences like advanced gamers and creators.
We are at an inflection point where the PC will accelerate AI innovation. We believe the richest AI experiences will only be possible when the cloud and device work together in concert. Together with our partners, we’re setting the frame for the next decade of Windows innovation.
Editor’s note: This blog has been updated to note that Recall is launching in preview on June 18.
Editor’s note – June 17, 2024: Information about the Recall feature was updated.
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[1] Based on snapshot of aggregated, non-gaming app usage data as of April 2024 for iGPU-based laptops and 2-in-1 devices running Windows 10 and Windows 11 in US, UK, CA, FR, AU, DE, JP.
[2] Tested April 2024 using Phi SLM workload running 512-token prompt processing in a loop with default settings comparing pre-release Copilot+ PC builds with Snapdragon Elite X 12 Core and Snapdragon X Plus 10 core configurations (QNN build) to Windows 11 PC with NVIDIA 4080 GPU configuration (CUDA build).
[3] Tested May 2024 using Cinebench 2024 Multi-Core benchmark comparing Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Elite 12 core and Snapdragon X Plus 10 core configurations to MacBook Air 15” with M3 8 core CPU / 10 Core GPU configuration. Performance will vary significantly between device configuration and usage.
[4] *Battery life varies significantly by device and with settings, usage and other factors. See aka.ms/cpclaims*
[5] *Battery life varies significantly based on device configuration, usage, network and feature configuration, signal strength, settings and other factors. Testing conducted May 2024 using the prelease Windows ADK full screen local video playback assessment under standard testing conditions, with the device connected to Wi-Fi and screen brightness set to 150 nits, comparing Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Elite 12 core and Snapdragon X Plus 10 core configurations running Windows Version 26097.5003 (24H2) to MacBook Air 15” M3 8-Core CPU/ 10 Core GPU running macOS 14.4 with similar device configurations and testing scenario.
[6] Based on snapshot of aggregated, non-gaming app usage data as of April 2024 for iGPU-based laptops and 2-in-1 devices running Windows 10 and Windows 11 in US, UK, CA, FR, AU, DE, JP.
[7] Recall is optimized for select languages (English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.) Content-based and storage limitations apply. Learn more here.
[8] Copilot key functionality may vary. See aka.ms/keysupport
[9] Based on MSRPs; actual savings may vary
The post Introducing Copilot+ PCs appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
An on-demand recording of our May 20 event is available. Today, at a special event on our new Microsoft campus, we introduced the world to a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI, Copilot+ PCs. Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible…
The post Introducing Copilot+ PCs appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
What’s next: Microsoft Build continues the evolution and expansion of AI tools for developers
Groundbreaking advances in AI are having a profound impact on Microsoft and on the developers using our technology to improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences and make new breakthroughs.
Over the past year, we’ve built Microsoft Copilot and released more than 150 updates to it, and we’ve developed the Copilot stack, which takes everything we’ve learned so far and lets developers build their own copilots.
In addition, over the past two years, GitHub Copilot has become the most widely adopted AI developer tool, with 1.8 million paid subscribers.
And just a day ago, we introduced a new category of Copilot+ PCs, the fastest, most AI-ready PCs ever built.
We are the industry leader in AI, and that’s why, as we begin our flagship event for developers, Microsoft Build, there’s one question on everyone’s mind: What’s next?
On Monday, we introduced the world to a new class of Windows PCs, Copilot+ PCs. These devices are designed to allow developers to deliver differentiated AI experiences on the edge, and, together with the great features that we are announcing at Build, make Windows the most open platform for AI and the best place for developers.
At Build, we also are announcing further branches of this technology revolution, including:
How Microsoft Fabric is helping developers and customers leverage data in motion, or digital information being transported within or between computer systems, to build intelligent apps.
New frontier models that allow developers to explore multimodal capabilities supporting text, images, video and other types of data in their AI applications, evolving beyond text prompts and completions.
Partnerships that show how AI can impact the future of myriad industries, including education.
And how an open and flexible cloud-based platform, built on a foundation of safe and responsible AI, can help developers innovate.
Microsoft Build is always an exciting time for us. About 200,000 people have registered to join us for three days of technical learning and community connection, with 4,000 attending in person in Seattle. Attendees can choose from more than 300 sessions, demos and expert and instructor-led labs from Microsoft and our partners. For those not able to attend the live event, most content will be available on demand. In total, we are announcing about 60 new products and solutions at the event.
With that introduction to Build in mind, let’s explore some of the news and announcements.
In-the-moment decision making with Real-Time Intelligence
For the most efficient AI apps, businesses need to be able to qualify, analyze and organize data at ingestion. This has proven to be a difficult step. The new Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric provides an end-to-end Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that empowers customers to act on high-volume, time-sensitive and highly granular data to make faster and more informed business decisions.
Real-Time Intelligence, now in preview, can be helpful for analysts with simple low/no-code experiences, and it also can benefit pro developers with code-rich user interfaces. For example, racing team Dener Motorsport has been using Microsoft Fabric to support real-time analytics, storage and reporting, enabling them to sustain optimal performance and maintain the cars in good repair, which can keep drivers safer. Dener plans to use Real-Time Intelligence as part of their winning strategy to gain insights at ingestion during races.
Building apps requires a level of flexibility, customization and efficiency to make it feasible for developers. The new Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit makes this possible by enabling independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers to extend applications within Fabric, creating a unified user experience.
GitHub Copilot experience leans into extensibility
GitHub is introducing the first set of GitHub Copilot extensions, developed by Microsoft and third-party partners, in private preview. These additions allow developers and organizations to customize their GitHub Copilot experience with their preferred services like Azure, Docker, Sentry and more directly within GitHub Copilot Chat.
GitHub Copilot for Azure, one of the extensions from Microsoft, showcases how building in natural language with a broader range of capabilities can propel development velocity. Using the extension through Copilot Chat, developers can explore and manage Azure resources, while also troubleshooting issues and locating relevant logs and code.
New frontier models and multimodal capabilities in Azure AI
GPT-4o, OpenAI’s newest flagship model, is now available in Azure AI Studio and as an API. This groundbreaking multimodal model integrates text, image and audio processing to set a new standard for generative and conversational AI experiences.
We also announced that Phi-3-vision, a new multimodal model in the Phi-3 family of AI small language models (SLMs) developed by Microsoft, is now available in Azure. Phi-3 models are powerful, cost-effective and optimized for personal devices. Phi-3-vision offers the ability to input images and text and receive text responses. For example, users can ask questions about a chart or ask an open-ended question about specific images.
Developers can experiment with these state-of-the-art frontier models in the Azure AI Playground, and they can start building with and customizing with the models in Azure AI Studio.
Microsoft, Khan Academy using AI to empower educators
Microsoft and Khan Academy are announcing a multi-faceted partnership to turn the transformative potential of AI into reality.
To start, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to offer all K-12 U.S. educators free access to Khanmigo for Teachers, an AI-powered teaching assistant that frees up teachers’ time so they can focus on what matters most – engaging with and supporting their students. Microsoft is donating access to Azure AI-optimized infrastructure to increase the availability of Khanmigo for Teachers, which will now be powered by Azure OpenAI Service.
Khan Academy is collaborating with Microsoft to explore opportunities to improve math tutoring in an affordable, scalable and adaptable manner with a new version of Phi-3, a family of SLMs developed by Microsoft. They also plan to bring more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education, expanding resources for learners.
New partnership with Cognition AI
Microsoft and Cognition will bring Cognition’s autonomous AI software agent, Devin, to customers to help them with complex tasks such as code migration and modernization projects. As part of the agreement, Devin will be powered by Azure. Cognition AI is an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents to help developers achieve more.
Powerful new virtual machines help fuel AI adoption
Microsoft has a unique systems approach to AI infrastructure, which includes hardware and software from Microsoft and our partners, all optimized to run AI workloads at scale and fine-tuned for customer needs. We are the first cloud provider to bring AMD’s leading MI300X AI accelerator chip to power customers’ AI training and inferencing needs, with the general availability of the Azure ND MI300X v5 virtual machine series optimized for demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads like Azure OpenAI Service.
Following the launch of Azure Cobalt 100, Microsoft’s first custom-designed compute processor, the company is announcing a preview of new Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machines (VMs), based on the company’s custom silicon series announced in November 2023. Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs are the first generation of VMs to feature Microsoft’s new Cobalt processor, custom-built on an Arm architecture, and optimized for efficiency and performance when running general-purpose and cloud-native workloads. Customers can expect up to 40% improved performance compared to comparable Azure VMs.
The evolution of Copilot
Copilot has been a game-changer for many people since it was first released. Using modern AI and large language models (LLMs) like Open AI’s GPT-4, copilots across Microsoft products have assisted people with complex tasks, serving as a personal, behind-the-scenes AI assistant.
Now, we are introducing Team Copilot, the expansion of Copilot for Microsoft 365 from a behind-the-scenes, personal AI assistant to a new, valuable member of your team. You will be able to invoke Copilot where you collaborate – in Teams, Loop, Planner and more. Team Copilot can be a meeting facilitator in meetings, managing the agenda, tracking time and taking notes. It can act as a collaborator in chats by surfacing important information, tracking action items and addressing unresolved issues. It can serve as a project manager to help ensure every project runs smoothly and notify the team when their input is needed. These initial experiences, coming in preview later this year, will enable us to learn, iterate and refine as we enter a new phase of innovation where Copilot begins to take more action on behalf of individuals and teams.
Microsoft Copilot Studio is introducing new agent capabilities, empowering developers to build copilots that can proactively respond to data and events, tailored to specific tasks and functions. Copilots built with this new category of capabilities can now independently manage complex, long-running business processes by leveraging memory and knowledge for context, reason over actions and inputs, learn based on user feedback and ask for help when they encounter situations that they don’t know how to handle. Users can now put Copilot to work for them – from IT device procurement to customer concierge for sales and service.
Copilot extensions, including plugins and connectors, allow customers to enhance Microsoft Copilot by connecting it to new data sources and applications, expanding its functionality.
We’re excited about these announcements and all the other updates and features being unveiled at Build. For more information, today you can watch keynotes from Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices Rajesh Jha and Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.
On Wednesday, you can watch keynotes from Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI Scott Guthrie and friends. Additionally, you can explore all the news and announcements in the Book of News.
RELATED LINKS:
Watch Microsoft Build keynotes and view photos and videos
Khan Academy and Microsoft announce partnership, Copilot integration
Copilot Studio empowering next wave of copilot experiences
Azure ND MI300X V5 series now generally available
Extend and customize Microsoft Copilot with Copilot extensions
The post What’s next: Microsoft Build continues the evolution and expansion of AI tools for developers appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
Groundbreaking advances in AI are having a profound impact on Microsoft and on the developers using our technology to improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences and make new breakthroughs. Over the past year, we’ve built Microsoft Copilot and released more than 150 updates to it, and we’ve developed the Copilot stack, which takes everything we’ve learned…
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Microsoft’s Datacenter Community Pledge: To build and operate digital infrastructure that addresses societal challenges and creates benefits for communities
In the span of just one year, we’ve witnessed a remarkable acceleration in AI adoption, opening a new frontier of innovation, discovery and solutions. This surge in AI is not just about technological advancement; it’s about harnessing the potential to promote innovation, tackle some of societies’ largest challenges and change lives for the better. Microsoft’s role and responsibility as a leader in AI is reflected in the company’s commitment to ensure broad access to our technology that empowers organizations and individuals to serve the public good.
We build and operate a global network of advanced datacenters that enable this technology, and we recognize the crucial role that communities play in this ecosystem. We rely on a vast network of local suppliers, officials, stakeholders and residents to plan, design, construct and operate each of our facilities. To those communities, we owe a commitment to be responsible neighbors and contribute positively to local economies and ecosystems while advancing digital transformation. We recognize the importance of supporting communities, and our datacenters should be a resource that addresses local needs and priorities.
With that, I’m delighted to announce our Datacenter Community Pledge that builds upon the deep partnerships we have formed with communities around the world. This is our pledge that Microsoft’s datacenters will be not only the backbone of modern technology but also a force for good in the communities they serve.
The Datacenter Community Pledge focuses on three core areas:
Contributing to a sustainable future
We will design and operate our datacenters to support society’s climate goals and become carbon negative, water positive and zero waste before 2030.
Our sustainability work starts with taking accountability for our operational footprint. We remain unwavering in our commitment to achieve carbon negativity by 2030, and our datacenters play a pivotal role in this comprehensive decarbonization strategy.
By 2025, we will procure 100% renewable energy on a global scale, both significantly expanding and decarbonizing local electricity grids.
Our datacenter designs are more water efficient than traditional enterprise datacenters, and our plan by 2030 is to replenish more water than we consume locally.
Another critical aspect of our work is achieving zero waste. In 2020, we introduced the first of its kind Microsoft Circular Center in Amsterdam designed to reuse and repurpose servers and hardware in our datacenters. Since then, we’ve built more than 10 Circular Centers in key locations that help us divert waste from landfills, and our plan by 2030 is to achieve zero waste through a combination of waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting.
This pledge minimizes our dependency on local resources and ensures that our operations contribute positively to the community.
Read more about this work:
Building world-class sustainable datacenters and investing in solar power in Arizona
Opening doors to a sustainable future with Microsoft’s Circular Center in Singapore
Progress on our commitment to sustainable backup power in datacenters by 2030
Advancing community prosperity and well-being
We will deliver significant local, economic, social and environmental benefits to the communities where we operate.
Local people know their community better than anyone else, and that is why we partner with local stakeholders to ensure our datacenters provide support in the form of educational programs, grants and other initiatives aligned to local needs and priorities.
We partner with local governments, businesses, schools and nonprofits to create well-paid jobs and apprenticeship opportunities, and we provide essential digital skills training and STEM education for adults and children. Our goal is to empower community members with future-ready skills necessary for the digital age, ensuring they are prepared for the opportunities of tomorrow.
We invest in initiatives to enhance local sustainability. We restore sensitive watershed corridors and invest in projects to conserve trees, enhance native flora and protect ecological habitats, providing benefits to the surrounding ecosystems and honoring the natural beauty of the area.
Our datacenters generate public infrastructure improvements and tax revenue that serve as a catalyst for enhancing the quality of life in these areas. That translates into new and improved social services, such as parks where families can come together, better-equipped schools that empower children’s education and well-maintained roads and digital infrastructure that connect us all.
Read more about this work:
How a small city in Iowa became an epicenter for advancing AI
Microsoft opens Asia’s first Datacenter Academy in Singapore with ITE
Microsoft to establish its first datacenter region in Taiwan as a part of its “Reimagine Taiwan” initiative
Operating responsibly as a good neighbor
We will partner closely with communities and operate in a way that respects the local environment.
In all we do, we strive to be a responsible neighbor. We listen, learn, build relationships and follow through on our commitments — guided by what is important locally. We will design our datacenters with the environment and communities in mind. From sustainable development practices and building materials to noise and light reduction measures, we will work with, and support, the environment and the communities where we are based.
We will collaborate with neighbors and communities throughout our development and operations, while partnering with nonprofits and suppliers who share our commitment to expand opportunities for all.
Read more about this work:
Microsoft and Fortum join forces – Microsoft is building a data center area in Finland that will produce emission-free district heat for Fortum’s customers in the Helsinki metropolitan area
Blending datacenters into Wieringermeer nature with biomimicry
Partnering with the City of Quincy to open Washington’s first industrial water reuse center
We approach this work to create positive change, uplift the communities where we operate and to make a significant contribution to the digital transformation. Through partnerships, we are crafting a future both at the forefront of technology and also deeply rooted in social responsibility and environmental sustainability.
Our investments serve not only the countries in which we operate but embody our pledge to be a good neighbor. When we build a datacenter in your community, we are here for all of us.
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In the span of just one year, we’ve witnessed a remarkable acceleration in AI adoption, opening a new frontier of innovation, discovery and solutions. This surge in AI is not just about technological advancement; it’s about harnessing the potential to promote innovation, tackle some of societies’ largest challenges and change lives for the better. Microsoft’s…
The post Microsoft’s Datacenter Community Pledge: To build and operate digital infrastructure that addresses societal challenges and creates benefits for communities appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Celebrating Pride and ‘Radical Joy’
In the face of adversity, the ability to continue to move forward, inspire and spark change is something to celebrate. Even small change is hugely meaningful because progress often comes from small steps of affirmation, resistance and perhaps, even most importantly, celebration. That’s why the LGBTQIA+ communities at Microsoft centered our 2024 Pride campaign on the idea of “Radical joy.” The joy that radiates and inspires. The joy that is not dependent on outside forces but is within us and within our control, and when expressed, can help make change for all and inspire others to do the same. “Radical joy” is an anthem to those who thrive against all odds.
Discover everything Pride at unlocked.microsoft.com/pride.
Stories of joy
This year’s campaign is an ode to the strength and power of the LGBTQIA+ communities. The LGBTQIA+ community is the heart of this movement, and employees are the heart of Microsoft. Eight Microsoft employees shared their radical joy stories, reminding us of the why behind Pride and uniting us in furthering its mission.
Microsoft employees share what Pride and “Radical joy” means to them.
Open source and spreading joy
“Radical joy” is grounded in inclusion and acceptance, values that are important for us at Microsoft. One of the many ways we are celebrating them at Pride is by highlighting the interconnected and intersectional nature of LGBTQIA+ communities. Our designs unite 74 flags representing different LGBTQIA+ identities through vibrant abstract shapes that nod to the joy and power that radiates from and through the community year-round. This year’s graphic expands representation to 25 new communities and is localized for use in 33 languages.
For the third year in a row, Microsoft invites everyone to spread LGBTQIA+ acceptance and inclusion by sharing stories, open sourcing the entire Pride campaign design to remix and share, as we have found time and time again, participation is key to the community and its allies. For the first time, this year, we invite you to leverage AI to create even more Pride by sharing your own stories with fast and easy AI-powered tools like Microsoft Designer and Clipchamp to make your own Pride stickers, social posts and more. In addition, we are making all Pride assets available on Figma and GitHub, where anyone can download and customize the campaign assets to spread joy this Pride. Microsoft and its employees invite everyone to visit Microsoft.com/pride to learn more and share on social by using #MicrosoftPride and #Pride. We look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Everyone can use our Pride graphics to create their own celebrations and designs.
Our pride collection
Pride lights up across many Microsoft products – including Teams, Edge, Clipchamp, Microsoft 365, Designer and Windows.
We are spreading joy across our products and platforms and have been since 2018. Discover how you can celebrate Pride and the power of LGBTQIA+ communities:
Microsoft Unlocked – Unlock all things Pride at Microsoft.
Open source – Microsoft Pride designs from this year and past years are available on GitHub and Figma for you to download, remix and customize.
Microsoft Designer – Create and customize this year’s radical joy design for your own Pride graphics.
Microsoft Designer templates – Discover and customize even more Pride-themed templates.
Microsoft Designer sticker creator – Prompt AI to create custom stickers that reflect your joy and use them on your devices!
GIPHY – Radical joy should be shared, and that is why we brought this year’s graphics to GIPHY, so you can share joyful GIFs across devices!
Microsoft Teams – Download custom Teams backgrounds to spread joy during your video calls.
Microsoft Edge themes – Light up your Edge experience with the new Pride theme.
Windows wallpapers – Update your desktop with radical joy by downloading one of our custom wallpapers.
Microsoft 365 apps theming – Turn on your Pride in select Microsoft 365 apps* and celebrate with a special theme inspired by the flags of the LGBTQIA+ communities.
Clipchamp – Unleash your creativity on Clipchamp with Pride assets built straight into the product.
Xbox – Learn about Xbox’s partnership with The Trevor Project, discover custom Pride art, purchase merch and more on Xbox Wire.
Microsoft Store – Explore collections of curated games from LGBTQIA+ and transgender and non-binary
Inclusion is Innovation – Explore LGBTQIA+ employee stories year-round.
Our commitment
We are continuing our longstanding efforts to financially contribute to nonprofits doing on-the-ground work to support LGBTQIA+ communities. This year, we are donating $200,000 to charities across the globe: The Trevor Project, Transconvida, ACCEPT ASOCIATIA and Transgender Law Center. Together with our employees, Microsoft has donated over $16 million to organizations that support LGBTQIA+ communities in the last 30 years, and in the last year alone, we donated over $1.3 million.
Our efforts to support and advocate for LGBTQIA+ people do not start or end at Pride. By supporting our employees through global advocacy, charitable giving and better workplace practices, we hope to make a difference for LGBTQIA+ communities and beyond, as our drive for positive global impact continues and celebrates our employees and what brings them, and their communities’ joy.
At Microsoft, we continue to leverage our platform year-round to support and learn from LGBTQIA+ communities and address issues that impact the lived experience, safety, and fundamental rights of employees and their communities around the world.
We know that there is still work to be done, as a brand and as a global society. While we celebrate our successes, we remain committed to making continued progress.
Standing up for LGBTQIA+ equity since 1989
Microsoft introduced sexual orientation into our non-discrimination policies in 1989 – and we have been driving toward LGBTQIA+ inclusion ever since. In 1993, we began offering employee benefits for same-sex domestic partnerships, making us one of the first companies in the world to do so. We stood as a public supporter for marriage equality even before it became legal in the United States – and we continue to advocate for every type of family. Microsoft has attained a 100 score on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index for 18 years. Since its founding in 1993, GLEAM (Global LGBTQIA+ Employees & Allies at Microsoft) has honored Pride by lifting up LGBTQIA+ voices and used the reach of our products to share the messages of inclusion and support.
We invite everyone to join us in the call for making more Pride. Share your thoughts with us on social by using #MicrosoftPride and #Pride.
* “Show your Pride” theme is available in the following apps – iOS: Outlook, OneNote, Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint; in Android: Outlook; in Mac OS: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote. In Outlook, you can find the Pride themes in Settings > Appearance In all other apps, you can find Pride theme in Settings.
The post Celebrating Pride and ‘Radical Joy’ appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
In the face of adversity, the ability to continue to move forward, inspire and spark change is something to celebrate. Even small change is hugely meaningful because progress often comes from small steps of affirmation, resistance and perhaps, even most importantly, celebration. That’s why the LGBTQIA+ communities at Microsoft centered our 2024 Pride campaign on…
The post Celebrating Pride and ‘Radical Joy’ appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Announcing Dynamics 365 Contact Center – a Copilot-first cloud contact center to transform service experiences
Today we are thrilled to announce the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer service: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. With general availability on July 1, this standalone Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution enables customers to maximize their current investments by connecting to preferred customer relationship management systems (CRMs) or custom apps.
Modernizing service experiences with generative AI
Customer service expectations are higher than ever. It’s not only frustrating for customers to deal with long wait times, being transferred to the wrong agent or having to repeat themselves multiple times — it’s detrimental to business. When people have poor customer service experiences, over half of them end up spending less or decide to take their business elsewhere (Qualtrics).
Generative AI is transforming customer service and revolutionizing the way contact centers operate — from delivering rich experiences across digital and voice channels that enable customers to resolve their own needs, to equipping agents with relevant context within the flow of work, and ultimately unifying operations to drive efficiency and reduce costs.
We have experienced the transformational impact of generative AI firsthand with Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support (CSS) team, one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Before the support team migrated to Microsoft’s own tools, CSS was previously using 16 different systems and over 500 individual tools — slowing down service, hindering collaboration and producing inefficient workflows. With Copilot as part of the solution, the CSS team achieved a 12 percent decrease in average handle time for chat engagements and 13 percent decrease in agents requiring peer assistance to resolve an incident. And more broadly, CSS has seen a 31 percent increase in first call resolution and a 20 percent reduction in missed routes.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center
Applying learnings and insights from our own Copilot usage, coupled with multi-year investments in voice and digital channels, Dynamics 365 Contact Center infuses generative AI throughout the contact center workflow — spanning the channels of communication, self-service, intelligent routing, agent-assisted service and operations to help contact centers solve problems faster, empower agents and reduce costs.
Additionally, Dynamics 365 Contact Center is built natively on the Microsoft cloud to deliver extensive scalability and reliability across voice, digital channels and routing while at the same time allowing organizations to retain their existing investments in CRM or custom apps.
Key Dynamics 365 Contact Center capabilities include:
Next-generation self-service: With sophisticated pre-integrated Copilots for digital and voice channels that drive context-aware, personalized conversations, contact centers can deploy rich self-service experiences. Combining the best of interactive voice response (IVR) technology from Nuance and Microsoft Copilot Studio’s no-code/low-code designer, contact centers can provide customers with engaging, individualized experiences powered by generative AI.
Accelerated human-assisted service: Across every channel, intelligent unified routing steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent best suited to help, enhancing service quality and efficiency. When a customer reaches an agent, Dynamics 365 Contact Center gives the agent a 360-degree view of the customer with generative AI — for example, real-time conversation tools like sentiment analysis, translation, conversation summary, transcription and more are included to help improve service, along with others that automate repetitive tasks for agents such as case summary, draft an email, suggested response and the ability for Copilot to answer agent questions grounded on your trusted knowledge sources.
Operational efficiency: Contact center efficiency depends just as much on what happens behind the scenes as it does on customer and agent experiences. We’ve built a solution that helps service teams detect issues early, improve critical KPIs and adapt quickly. With generative AI-based, real-time reporting, Dynamics 365 Contact Center allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels, including their workforce.
Here’s what customers are saying:
“At 1-800-Flowers.com, we pride ourselves on exceptional service and continually raising the bar. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re creating a best-in-class solution that furthers our mission and helps inspire people to give more, connect more, and build more and better relationships.” — Arnie Leap, CIO, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.
“MSC has always been known for the personal service that we give to our customers; Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps us elevate that customer-centric approach.”— Fabio Catassi, CIO, Mediterranean Shipping Company
“For our support teams, efficient problem-solving and smooth customer interactions are key to delivering exceptional service. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and by leveraging its AI capabilities, we see a future where our support teams will deliver that level of service every day.”— Stephen Currie, Vice President Support Operations, Synoptek
If you’re attending Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, join me for my main stage panel on Thursday, June 6. Be sure to also stop by the Microsoft booth (#151) during the event to see Dynamics 365 Contact Center in action.
Stay tuned for the general availability of Dynamics 365 Contact Center on July 1.
The post Announcing Dynamics 365 Contact Center – a Copilot-first cloud contact center to transform service experiences appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
Today we are thrilled to announce the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer service: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. With general availability on July 1, this standalone Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution enables customers to maximize their…
The post Announcing Dynamics 365 Contact Center – a Copilot-first cloud contact center to transform service experiences appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Satya Nadella remarks at the 2024 G7 Summit
At the 2024 G7 Summit in Fasano, Italy, President Biden and other G7 leaders met with private sector executives, including Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, to reaffirm their commitment to accelerate sustainable infrastructure investment through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. Below are Satya’s remarks at the event.
Thank you very much, Prime Minister Meloni and President Biden for the opportunity this afternoon to really participate in this very important discussion about scaling the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment to support very high-quality infrastructure, financing in low-and-middle-income countries. It’s encouraging to see the partnership expand and gain momentum.
As this partnership has recognized, we are entering a very new age, driven by AI, which has made clear the critical importance of both digital infrastructure and connectivity in every sector of the economy and every corner of the world, as well as energy.
There is no doubt that AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time, and we believe it will fundamentally bend the productivity curve for every individual, organization, and industry sector to help us address some of our most pressing global challenges, including in the world’s low-income countries.
At Microsoft we have this saying where we say that we will only succeed if the world around is fundamentally succeeding. We are therefore very, very focused on ensuring that every country can benefit from this broad technological shift, while mitigating its risks.
This presents a pretty unique opportunity to help address the economic development and societal priorities, everywhere in the world, whether it’s small businesses becoming more productive, whether it’s the multinationals in every part of the world becoming more competitive, globally, governments becoming more efficient, improving health outcomes and education outcomes.
Over the past three months, for example, we have invested $5 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure in Indonesia and Malaysia and Thailand, as well as in Kenya, together with our partners G42 of the UAE. This is work designed to drive that broad spectrum of economic growth, innovation, and connectivity to drive productivity.
But we recognize that this requires more than just infrastructure, which is why we have also launched initiatives to provide broad-based AI skilling opportunities, strengthen cybersecurity, and support startups and innovative companies around the world.
We have already seen many examples of this impact in action. I was in Indonesia recently and I saw how Indonesian farmers are improving their yields. To Kenyan street vendors who now have access to credit for the first time.
We also have noted that the infrastructure of the future has to be sustainable, and so this is why we are investing in carbon-free energy, as well as efforts to develop greener steel and concrete in order to build our data centers, and also make our silicon more carbon-free and efficient.
At the same time, this ambition is not something that any one company, or for that matter, any one country can accomplish on its own. This requires broad partnerships across the private and public sectors.
For example, we need regulatory innovation to enable multiple countries to share digital infrastructure when located in neighboring regions. That’s what we did in Kenya, where we created a trusted data zone for the East Africa community, in partnership with the government and G42. This ensures governments and companies across the region can store their data in our data center with the assurance that their own privacy and cybersecurity and other legal rules and protections will continue to be applied.
This is just one example of the type of partnership and innovation and regulatory involvement that is required in order to be able to really drive this next generation of infrastructure.
To close, I’m incredibly optimistic about our collective opportunity, and I’m looking forward to working together in helping people and organizations around the world as they apply this new generation of technology to grow and thrive.
Thank you all, very much.
The post Satya Nadella remarks at the 2024 G7 Summit appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
At the 2024 G7 Summit in Fasano, Italy, President Biden and other G7 leaders met with private sector executives, including Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, to reaffirm their commitment to accelerate sustainable infrastructure investment through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. Below are Satya’s remarks at the event. Thank you very much, Prime…
The post Satya Nadella remarks at the 2024 G7 Summit appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Empowering every scientist with AI-augmented scientific discovery
At Microsoft, our vision is to empower scientists with the latest breakthroughs in AI to unlock their full creative potential and tackle some of our most pressing challenges. This vision will require bringing the full power of generative AI together with quantum-classical hybrid computing to augment every stage of the scientific method. Whether expanding knowledge research, creating better hypotheses, or accelerating experimentation and analyses, doing so demands a purpose-built cloud platform for science. This is why we built Azure Quantum Elements for chemistry and materials science.
Today, we’re announcing Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT, which will expand the ways researchers can harness the full power of this platform. These breakthrough capabilities will empower scientists to compress the next 250 years of chemistry into the next 25.
With Generative Chemistry, we want to broaden the horizons of scientific exploration. Researchers can generate and explore novel molecules suited for specific industry applications using the latest AI models trained on hundreds of millions of compounds, and then evaluate the steps suggested by the workflow for synthesizing the most promising candidates in a lab more efficiently — all in a matter of days rather than years.
With Accelerated DFT, researchers can expedite and scale their chemical discovery pipelines by simulating the quantum-mechanical properties of molecules at an unprecedented speed — an order of magnitude faster compared to other Density Functional Theory (DFT) codes.
This brings us closer to a new paradigm for scientific discovery, where advanced AI and digital tools are more accessible than ever to scientists, students, and labs across industries. Below is our vision for how researchers will be able to leverage these breakthrough capabilities to design new molecules and enable the transformation of entire sectors from consumer goods and medicine, to manufacturing and energy, in turn addressing some of our most pressing societal challenges.
We’re working towards this vision today. As part of the private preview of Azure Quantum Elements, scientists and developers have the opportunity to explore Accelerated DFT today, with the potential to access Generative Chemistry in the coming weeks.
We’re already putting our vision into practice by collaborating with Unilever, a global leader in consumer goods, which serves over 3.4 billion people every single day. Unilever is harnessing the power of Microsoft supercomputing and AI services to support their digital R&D transformation and product innovation.
Integrating AI into every stage of the scientific method
From global ambitions like reversing climate change and pioneering renewable energy sources to personal ones like living more sustainably and using healthier and safer products, we all want to do our part to create a better world. Time is of the essence for many of these goals, with more than 8 million scientists1 around the globe working to pioneer innovative solutions and unlock progress. At Microsoft, we aim to empower them with state-of-the-art digital tools to harness the full collective ingenuity of every researcher and lab around the world.
Just as generative AI has unleashed new waves of creativity and improved productivity with collaborative tools like Copilot, we are now bringing AI and natural language processing capabilities to science. Our goal is to integrate AI reasoning into every stage of the scientific method: this requires the power of next-generation AI models to speed up the scientific process from hypothesis to results. It starts with knowledge research and hypothesis generation, connecting the dots by generating millions of potential molecular candidate solutions, then narrowing down candidates with digital experiments and analyzing the outcomes — all in a matter of days. We demonstrated how this approach can land real-world results in our collaboration with PNNL, where we screened over 32 million candidates to discover and synthesize a new material that holds the potential for better batteries — a tangible example of the possibilities in this new era of scientific discovery.
When powered by natural language tools, this new paradigm will help create an autonomous reasoning loop with AI at every stage as a scientific assistant. It will redefine how we approach innovation by democratizing these capabilities for breakthrough discoveries.
Our goal is to integrate AI into every stage of the scientific method, from initial research and hypothesis generation to experimentation and analysis.
Announcing new capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements
Generative Chemistry will unleash a new wave of creativity for scientists tasked with discovering and designing new molecules. This will enable breakthrough growth across many industries, whether helping an oil and gas company discover a stronger fuel additive for enhancing the longevity of engine life, or an adhesive firm creating a new chemical for strengthening adhesion while removing unwanted residue.
We could compare this discovery process to searching for a small box in a large, crowded and dark warehouse with one small flashlight. We can only focus the light on a small area at a time while the rest of the warehouse remains completely dark and unknown. Generative AI gives us a much smarter light that can point in new directions, providing visibility where we may not have considered – or have been able – to look before.
Researchers can ask Generative Chemistry for molecules with desired characteristics, such as the ability to degrade rapidly or be recycled more easily. They can also provide information about their targeted application and let the system help determine relevant molecular properties. After a few more steps, they receive a set of candidates — matching those parameters — for further study.
However, simply generating candidates is not sufficient for transforming the discovery process with AI. The essential criteria for computational tools in chemistry are that they help scientists discover molecules that are novel, synthesizable and useful in the real world. This is why I’m excited to see our approach to Generative Chemistry come to life, suggesting molecules that have not been seen before, with useful properties tuned for a specific application, and whose synthesis is feasible in a reasonable number of steps.
For this reason, Generative Chemistry will offer researchers potential steps to consider as they develop their “recipe” for synthesizing these molecular candidates in a laboratory. Support for this critical component has been developed from the capabilities of our AutoRXN software, exploring chemical reactions in reverse order, which can help to evaluate synthesis pathways for creating a target molecule.
After scientists specify the desired characteristics of a molecule, they receive thousands of molecular candidates that can be further refined through AI inferences and subsequent HPC simulations, arriving at a select few that show the most promise for laboratory synthesis and further experimental exploration.
This capability is truly groundbreaking for scientific discovery. Businesses and research groups can look for efficient, cost-effective and innovative methods to develop new molecules in a matter of days, compressing the iterative process of extensive database searches and trial-and-error laboratory experiments. This end-to-end workflow will provide scientists with entirely new compounds that could lead to the next breakthrough in manufacturing, medicine and more.
We’re also announcing Accelerated DFT to offer a simplified and more powerful quantum chemistry solution for scientists. For the past few decades, DFT has been an extremely popular method used across a variety of molecular simulations, helping researchers to simulate and study the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and nanoparticles, as well as surfaces and interfaces.
We can liken molecular systems to traffic systems, where cars moving in various directions at different speeds represent electrons. From a traffic helicopter, we can observe the overall flow of traffic even if we don’t know each car’s speed and destination. DFT provides this “helicopter view’” of molecular systems, simplifying the complex task of tracking individual electrons by instead mapping out the “density” of them at a higher altitude.
Such DFT simulations can be complex to optimize and run, and often require supercomputer-scale resources. This is why our managed DFT service, based on innovation developed by Microsoft Research, enables researchers to perform substantially faster calculations than other DFT codes and offers a 20-fold average increase in speed compared to PySCF, a widely used open-source DFT code.
Accelerated DFT is already used by many organizations such as AspenTech, DTU Energy University of Denmark and Unilever. It seamlessly integrates into broader chemistry and materials science workflows, and paves the way for expediting innovations in therapeutics, environmental sustainability and beyond.
You can learn more about this announcement in the technical blog, Introducing two powerful new capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements: Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT.
Pioneering a new scientific discovery paradigm with Unilever
Unilever stands at the forefront of the consumer goods industry, with a strong portfolio of household brands that are used by 3.4 billion people every day, including Dove, TRESemmé, Omo, Degree, Hellmann’s and Ben & Jerry’s. Whether cleaning, beauty or care products, each requires the latest scientific breakthroughs to ensure the best possible consumer experience and enhance daily life.
Over the past two and a half years, Unilever has worked with Microsoft to identify new digital capabilities to drive product innovation forward. Unilever is bringing its digital vision to life through the transformational DataLab — its digital counterpart to the company’s physical laboratories — with the help of Microsoft Azure. From unlocking the secrets of our skin’s microbiome to reducing the carbon footprint of a multi-billion-dollar business, Unilever is redefining what it means to be a consumer goods company in the modern world with leading science.
With Copilot and the advanced simulation capabilities of Azure Quantum Elements, Unilever can query scientific information using natural language, performing thousands of computational simulations in the time it would take to run tens of laboratory experiments. Unilever scientists can use the data gathered from these simulations to fine-tune models that screen tens of thousands of materials at substantial speed or enable the exploration of intricate chemical reactions.
For example, R&D teams can expand their search space for novel molecules that restore natural bonds in hair fibers across more hair types, in turn redefining the standards of personalized hair care for brands like Dove and TRESemmé. Furthermore, by placing scaled simulations at the forefront of the discovery funnel, Unilever will be further empowered to expedite the delivery of solutions within their key sustainability focus areas.
“Digital tools are unlocking an unprecedented age of scientific discovery. Using advanced computing power and AI, we are able to compress decades of lab work into days, accessing a level of insight we could not previously have imagined. This technological leap, coupled with our vast repository of proprietary data and a century of expertise in personal and household care, means our scientists are able to lead the industry in developing the next generation of consumer goods.”
— Alberto Prado, Global Head of R&D Digital and Partnerships at Unilever
Expanding quantum capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements
We stand on the cusp of unprecedented innovation, and at Microsoft, we continue to pioneer state-of-the-art solutions to usher in a new era of scientific discovery. We remain focused on achieving scaled quantum computing and more breakthroughs on our path to engineering our topological qubits with inherent hardware-level stability.
Earlier this year, we demonstrated with Quantinuum the most reliable logical qubits on record, further advancing the state-of-the-art for quantum computing. And recently, we simulated a chemical catalyst combining classical supercomputers, AI and logical qubits created with Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system and Quantinuum’s H1 hardware. This combination holds the key to unlocking scientific breakthroughs enabled by a new generation of hybrid-computing applications.
In the coming months, we will bring advanced logical qubit capabilities using our software and Quantinuum’s hardware in private preview in Azure Quantum Elements. As logical qubit capabilities scale to deliver increasingly reliable results, we will unlock simulation accuracy, moving us from scientific advantage to commercial advantage, and ultimately to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Accelerating scientific discovery, together
We’re committed to advancing these technologies responsibly, always focusing on innovation, empowerment and trust. That’s why we are committed to responsible computing practices and the Microsoft AI principles, to help ensure that safety measures adequately account for the increasing power of AI and quantum.
For more information about today’s announcements:
Sign up to learn more about Accelerated DFT and Generative Chemistry, as part of the private preview of Azure Quantum Elements.
Read the technical blog, Introducing two powerful new capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements: Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT.
Register for our upcoming ACS Webinar
Check out the upcoming Future of Cloud webinar series about our vision to accelerate scientific discovery for business innovation.
Top image: Leaders from Unilever and Microsoft discuss the Azure Quantum Elements program.
Sources
1. “Statistics and resources | 2021 Science Report.” This translates into 8.854 million full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers by 2018”.
The post Empowering every scientist with AI-augmented scientific discovery appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
At Microsoft, our vision is to empower scientists with the latest breakthroughs in AI to unlock their full creative potential and tackle some of our most pressing challenges. This vision will require bringing the full power of generative AI together with quantum-classical hybrid computing to augment every stage of the scientific method. Whether expanding knowledge…
The post Empowering every scientist with AI-augmented scientific discovery appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More
Why my Read Aloud voice is changing between two lines in Office 365?
I have a Word document with only two lines as below.
Word Number 2 is. Acquaintance. spelt as
Word Number 2 is. Acquaintance. spelt as a c q u a i n t a n c e
When I click speak Aloud, it speaks line 1 in a British tone and line 2 in some European tone.
Please can someone guide how to stick to a British tone only?
I have noticed that the voice tone is also changed when it encounters the below words in the line, not sure what is so special in these words that causes it to change its tone.
a c q u a i n t a n c e
i n c o n v e n i e n c e
e m b a r r a s s m e n t
m i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g
d i s a g r e e m e n t
r e c o m m e n d a t i o n
c o m p r e h e n s i o n
t r a n s m i s s i o n
m a t h e m a t i c i a n
s t a t i s t i c i a n
I have a Word document with only two lines as below. Word Number 2 is. Acquaintance. spelt asWord Number 2 is. Acquaintance. spelt as a c q u a i n t a n c e When I click speak Aloud, it speaks line 1 in a British tone and line 2 in some European tone. Please can someone guide how to stick to a British tone only? I have noticed that the voice tone is also changed when it encounters the below words in the line, not sure what is so special in these words that causes it to change its tone. a c q u a i n t a n c ei n c o n v e n i e n c ee m b a r r a s s m e n tm i s u n d e r s t a n d i n gd i s a g r e e m e n tr e c o m m e n d a t i o nc o m p r e h e n s i o nt r a n s m i s s i o nm a t h e m a t i c i a ns t a t i s t i c i a n Read More