Ascendant Bot
Two things can be true at the same time.
In the case of AI, it is absolutely true that the industry is moving incredibly fast and evolving quickly. It’s also true that hundreds of thousands of customers are using Microsoft AI technology today and, by making early bets on the platform, are seeing big benefits now and future-proofing their ability to benefit from the next big wave of AI improvements.
Microsoft Ignite is our annual event that spotlights the updates and creations that enable customers, partners and developers to unleash the full potential of Microsoft’s technology and change the way we approach work.
This year, we are announcing about 80 new products and features, including new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot, additions to the Copilot + AI stack and new Copilot+ devices offerings. Underpinning each of these innovations is our commitment to security. Since launching our Secure Future Initiative (SFI) one year ago, we have made security the No. 1 job of every employee at Microsoft, dedicated 34,000 engineers to this focus and, at Ignite, we will announce innovations that are rooted in our SFI principles: secure by design, secure by default and secure operations.
More than 200,000 people have registered to join us for this year’s Ignite, with more than 14,000 attendees at our in-person events in Chicago. Attendees can choose from more than 800 sessions, demos and expert-led labs from Microsoft and our partners. Most of the Ignite content will be available on demand for those who can’t attend the live event.
Copilot momentum
Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work, and we have seen the momentum grow as more organizations are moving to Copilot and deploying it to great success. All up, nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot.
That echoes an industry trend: A recent IDC study showed that generative AI is on the rise, with 75% adoption among companies surveyed in 2024. In addition, for every $1 invested, companies are realizing a return of $3.70, and leaders are saying they are realizing as much as a $10 return, according to the study.
The investments that Microsoft has made in Copilot are paying dividends for our customers.
We recently highlighted some of the more than 200 customer stories of accelerated AI Transformation, with Copilot helping many of them spark innovation and transform their organization for the better. Several examples include:
- Power management company Eaton used Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline and automate operations, improve data access, centralize knowledge and empower teams to focus on higher-value tasks. Copilot helped Eaton’s Finance operations document over 9,000 standard operating procedures (SOPs), an 83% time savings for each SOP documented.
- Consulting firm McKinsey & Company is creating an agent to speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%. The agent automates complex processes, such as identifying the right expert capabilities and staffing teams and acts as a single place where colleagues can ask questions and request follow-ups. By streamlining tasks and reducing manual inputs, this agent could potentially save consultants many hours, allowing them to spend more time with clients.
Boosting productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft is continuing to supercharge productivity with new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot designed to help simplify the workday.
Copilot Actions, now in private preview, enable anyone to automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts, whether it’s getting a daily summary of meeting actions in Microsoft Teams, compiling weekly reports or getting an email upon return from vacation that summarizes missed meetings, chats and emails.
Anyone can easily set up Actions right in their Microsoft 365 app, allowing users to focus on more impactful work, save time and boost productivity.
New agents in Microsoft 365 are designed to help scale individual impact and transform business process. At Ignite we will introduce:
- Agents in SharePoint: These natural language AI assistants are grounded on relevant SharePoint sites, files and folders to make it easy to find answers from that content, and to make quicker decisions as a result. Now generally available, every SharePoint site will include an agent tailored to its content. Users can also create customized agents scoped to select SharePoint files, folders or sites with as little as one click.
- Interpreter: This agent in Teams helps users overcome language barriers by enabling real-time, speech-to-speech interpretation in meetings. Available in public preview in early 2025, meeting participants will also have the option to have the agent simulate their personal voice.
- The Employee Self-Service Agent: An agent available in private preview in Business Chat expedites answers for the most common policy-related questions and simplifies action-taking on key HR and IT-related tasks — like helping employees understand their benefits or request a new laptop. It can be customized in Copilot Studio to meet an organization’s unique needs.
- Other agents in public preview take real-time meeting notes in Teams and automate project management from start to finish in Planner.
Copilot + AI Stack
The Copilot stack empowers users to build more ambitious products by leveraging advanced technology at each layer of the stack. To create a unified experience where customers can design, customize and manage AI applications and agents, we are introducing Azure AI Foundry, which gives customers access to all existing Azure AI services and tooling, plus new capabilities like:
- Azure AI Foundry SDK, now available in preview, provides a unified toolchain for designing, customizing and managing AI apps and agents with enterprise-grade control and customization. With tools that help organizations responsibly scale their applications, Foundry also provides 25 prebuilt app templates and a simplified coding experience they can access from familiar tools like GitHub, Visual Studio and Copilot Studio.
- Azure AI Foundry portal (formerly Azure AI Studio), now available in preview, is a comprehensive visual user interface to help developers discover AI models, services and tools. With a new management center experience that brings essential subscription information into a single dashboard, the portal also helps IT admins, operations and compliance teams manage AI applications at scale.
- Azure AI Agent Service, coming soon to preview, will enable professional developers to orchestrate, deploy and scale enterprise enterprise-ready agents to automate business processes.
We also continue to back up our Trustworthy AI commitments with new tools. Today we’re announcing AI reports and risk and safety evaluations for images to help organizations ensure AI applications are safe and compliant. AI reports will help organizations improve observability, collaboration and governance for AI apps and fine-tuned models, while evaluations for image content will help customers assess the frequency and severity of harmful content in their app’s AI-generated outputs.
Copilot+ devices
As organizations move more workloads to the cloud to enhance security and flexibility, Microsoft is expanding its Cloud PC solution by introducing the first in a new class of devices purpose-built to connect securely to Windows 365 in seconds.
Windows 365 Link is the simple, secure, purpose-built device for Windows 365. It is in preview now and will become generally available for purchase starting in April 2025 in select markets with an MSRP of $349, allowing users to work securely in a familiar Windows desktop in the Microsoft Cloud with responsive, high-fidelity experiences.
Windows 365 Link is secure by design. The device has no local data, no local apps and admin-less users so corporate data stays protected within the Microsoft Cloud.
Other new capabilities for Copilot+ PCs for commercial customers include harnessing the power of inbuilt native processing units (NPUs) to deliver local AI. With improved Windows Search, and the new Recall experience (preview), finding what you need on your PC is easier than ever by just describing what you are looking for. These features are releasing first to our Windows Insider community on Copilot+ PCs before rolling out more broadly to our customers.
BlackRock momentum
Four years ago, BlackRock, one of the world’s pre-eminent asset management firms, formed a strategic alliance with Microsoft to move its Aladdin platform to Microsoft Azure. With this foundation on Azure, BlackRock rolled out generative AI tools for global clients with Aladdin Copilot. Through generative AI, Aladdin Copilot serves to strengthen the connective tissue across the platform, leveraging Microsoft technology to help users receive answers instantly to unlock new efficiencies and discover important business insights even faster. Aladdin Copilot makes BlackRock’s Aladdin platform even more intelligent and responsive. That results in enhanced productivity, enables scale and keeps users more informed.
BlackRock’s move to Azure and launch of Aladdin Copilot are just two of the many ongoing milestones in a long-term partnership that also includes an enterprise-wide deal for 24,000 seats of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Today, about 60% of BlackRock’s Copilot user population is leveraging Copilot on a weekly basis. Additionally, BlackRock also recently made the choice to move its on-prem CRM solution to the cloud with Dynamics 365, citing its native integration with Teams and Outlook as one of its primary decision-making factors.
Strength in security
We know that the threat landscape is rapidly evolving, and it’s imperative that we stay ahead of bad actors. At Microsoft we believe that security is a team sport, and we are stronger when we partner as a security community to share information, collaborate and stop bad actors.
In that spirit, and as part of our Secure Future Initiative (SFI), at Ignite we are announcing the largest public security research event in history: the Zero Day Quest. This event, which focuses on AI and cloud security, will offer the largest award pool in the industry at $4 million, in addition to our existing $16 million annual bounty program. This competition aims to attract the world’s best security minds to tackle high-impact scenarios critical to our customers’ security, with award multipliers, starting today.
As the threat landscape has changed, we have seen rapid evolution in the way attackers exploit weaknesses within systems — particularly by navigating graph relationships between identities, files and devices to uncover attack paths. Attackers thinking in graphs cause wider damage from the first point of intrusion. Traditional security products, with limited visibility into these graph relationships, are often better suited to protect specific devices or mediums — like laptops or inboxes — rather than the full scope of potential attack surface.
Today’s Microsoft Security Exposure Management launch is a pivotal step in transforming cybersecurity with savvy data and AI-based strategies. The power of incorporating Microsoft graph data, in context with data from customers’ other third-party security tools, creates a powerful single pane of glass to visualize attack paths before threat actors do. With computing power and cloud-scale performance to distill powerful real-time mapping of assets and evolving risks, Exposure Management assists security teams in preventing intrusions and provides IT, operations and risk leaders with real-time data to support cyber risk decision-making.
This is only a small section of the many exciting features and updates we will be announcing at Ignite. As a reminder, you can view keynote sessions from Microsoft executives including Satya Nadella, Rajesh Jha, Scott Guthrie, Charlie Bell and Vasu Jakkal, live or on-demand.
Plus, you can get more on all these announcements by exploring the Book of News, the official compendium of all today’s news.
Author: Frank X. Shaw
Blog Article: Here
