This blog was written by Clare Baxter, Process Automation Manager in the Faculty of Engineering and Design.
Yesterday I went to Microsoft Ignite to learn about the latest AI innovations - many of which we already have access to, or will do later this year. It's a really exciting time to be working within any kind of digital space, but even more so when you see the potential that new tech could have on our working lives.
Here are some of my notes from the day so that anyone reading this can get a gist of the direction that Microsoft is heading in when it comes to their range of products. Hint: it involves AI, AI and more AI.
Opening Keynote: The Microsoft Cloud in the era of AI
To kick off the day we heard from Francesca Colenso about Microsoft's position on AI - both in a moral and business sense. There was a heavy focus on responsible AI right off the bat and a guiding set of principles were introduced:
- Fairness
- Reliability and Safety
- Privacy and security
- Inclusiveness
- Transparency
- Accountability
Nick Hedderman, Paul Kelly and Rob Smithson, Microsoft UK's Directors of Modern Work, Security and Business Applications, respectively, all spoke during the keynote about their specialist areas of business and pitched in to tell us more about the different Copilots Microsoft has on offer.
This was really exciting to hear about because it feels like there is a Copilot for almost every common business scenario. Here is a summary of the Copilot products introduced:
- Copilot for M365 - this was pitched as a solution to ‘digital debt’ to help employees to manage time and day to day work. Pilot study users of Copilot for M365 are saving 10 hours a month. The example shown was highly complex and would have taken hours of brainpower to produce. They prompted the AI to refer to two colleagues' schedules and plan visits around their availability, the locations of clients, time slots, mileage, even building in breaks for them. It was fascinating.
- Copilot for Sales & Service - I don't work in the commercial sector but I can see how this might have various use cases in higher education (student recruitment?). One of the example capabilities of this product was recapping conversation topics and agreed actions from previous meetings in order to provide a coherent service.
- Copilot for Security - The emphasis with this product was that it could protect at the speed and scale of AI, which is a lot faster presumably than a team of people figuring out where a data breach occurred or how to stop it. They projected 'Your data is your data' to reassure the audience on how the technology was working and where it is pulling its intelligence from. Private data is not used to train the foundation AI models and data will be protected by 'the most comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls'.
- Copilot for GitHub - this was launched 2021 and is generally available now (Enterprise is now available too, so customised for each organisation). 1.5 million developers have adopted this product and love it, according to Francesca.
- Copilot for Azure - this product is in preview. I went to a break out room later on in the day where they talked more about it and demonstrated it in more depth (it was not low-code friendly, but still very impressive!), but this one allows you to design, operate, optimise, and troubleshoot.
- Copilot for Studio - this product allows you to build virtual agents/chat and build them into workflows. Users can ask questions in natural language and it provides the capability to create conversational plug-ins. The demo I saw of this later in the day was brilliant and is something that looked very doable and very useful.
One of the most powerful things that any of the speakers said was actually about Microsoft's mission statement, which is to empower every person on the planet to achieve more. (I am paraphrasing a little but if you go to the Microsoft About page, it's right there.) After the keynote, I could certainly begin to see how the suite of products could help everyone to achieve more.
As well as the introduction to the new array of Copilots, a customer panel spoke about how they are already leveraging AI to transform their businesses - they ranged from commercial outfits like Vodafone, to start ups like Nikhil Sehgal's Vastmindz, which is a tech-driven healthcare service combining the capabilities of AI, machine learning and predictive analytics to enable remote health monitoring and screening.
You can register to watch the opening keynote by going to this link for digital access to the event on 12 March.
AI Led ERP: Reimagining a new era of business
For this break out room, Sameer Verma, Head of Products at Dynamics 365, explained that the new era of Copilots will empower people to work side by side with AI. It's the new 'face' of business efficiency and agility.
This was particularly of interest as it involved process redesign and business performance, while considering how innovations can shape the future of business. The three things that were highlighted as being the key things to transform business as they converge were:
- Leading with data (a unified data foundation)
- AI Copilot (a new AI-employee alliance to improve productivity and job satisfaction)
- Low code (empowering everyone to innovate to adapt to change while ensuring governance)
With AI, we will be able to transform operational processes (low and high stakes) and optimise strategic decision making, and this will all be done with a natural language interface (i.e. using words you would use in normal conversation) and powerful reasoning engine. This will allow us to guide users, empower users, ensure best decisions are made, and carry out relevant, autonomous action.
Navigating Copilot on Azure: A Deep Dive into Responsible AI Development
This was the aforementioned talk about Azure AI Studio and how you can build generative AI apps. The demonstration was pretty advanced, covering data and search structures, model selection, testing and customisation from within a powerful AI development hub.
We heard from Atif Ishaq, the AI Director at Haleon, a consumer healthcare company who created their own internal AI tool. In doing this, they learned about specific user needs (i.e. wanting to upload documents), system connectivity (small apps and apps using large data sets), prompting (guiding the user to write them effectively), and how best to support users.
They planned to integrate data sources (using document metadata), to build a GenAI platform, to integrate GenAI products and to use the bespoke AI as a service. In order to do this discipline in testing was stressed and an illustration of a 'Copilot Stack' was shown - photo from my iPad below, apologies about the low quality:
Aastha Madaan's demo was mind bogglingly good in showing how 'data fuels AI', with a prompt flow in action (especially under pressure and with time constraints she did so much!), though it will clearly require a bit of practice to get to grips with. We were reminded that models can just use text, but multi-modality and Gen AI is the next exciting step.
The public preview of Azure AI Studio is live now so check it out if you'd like a play: ai.azure.com.
Business wide transformation with AI in Power Platform
This was my favourite talk of the day because it covered the apps that I am most familiar with and use daily.
Before getting to the Copilot features, we were reminded that low code enables more people to innovate and drive business process with agility (which I can 100% vouch for). Then they suggested that those who have creativity and want to innovate can do so with AI. Colour me intrigued...
So, what can AI do, on top of the efficiencies that low code brings?
- Enrich employee experiences
- Reinvent customer engagement
- Reshape business processes
- Unlock innovation opportunities
Power Platform is all about transformation so when you throw Copilot into the mix, you get that but with added benefits.
We were shown a couple of demos in this session using Copilot for M365, showing how conversational experiences can be. The actual solutions can be generated from within the Maker Portal (the home page where there is a field to type in prompts) of Power Apps and Power Automate to create solutions with conversations, not code, which makes it so accessible to create products and efficiencies.
One example demonstrated how to use AI builder - it can look at a set of attached documents (e.g. invoices) and decide what to do with them, then you can use this information to build an app. The other demo showed how to create a Copilot by pointing at a website, then adding connectors (like you would do in Power Automate) - the MSN Weather connector for example - so that specific questions can be asked by a person without trawling pages of content for an answer.
Overall, I found the day exciting rather than overwhelming, and I can't wait to explore some of the Copilots on offer to see how I might leverage them to reshape how I approach workflows and processes.
I hope this post provides some insight for anyone planning on exploring AI tools in the near future. The following links may be of interest:
- Watch highlights from the November Ignite event here: ignite.microsoft.com.
- Power your own transformation by accessing AI training content on Microsoft Learn: learn.microsoft.com
- Register for an upcoming Microsoft Virtual Training Day: Microsoft Virtual Training Days.
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