At Microsoft Ignite, Copilot Is King
Let Slalom help you navigate the event’s announcements
In a keynote filled with optimism and excitement about the technologies that promise to boost our imaginations to help us solve some of the world’s biggest problems, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened this year’s Microsoft Ignite by proclaiming this the age of copilots. These productivity- and creativity-enhancing artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) tools and their enabling technologies featured prominently throughout the event, but not always in the ways one might expect.
Instead of diving right into demos or customer testimonials highlighting how copilots work and the benefits they can deliver, Nadella first illustrated the effort Microsoft has invested and will continue to invest in making sure all the layers below its highly user-friendly experiences are optimized for AI’s specific requirements. Running AI workloads has more intensive demands than other kinds of compute when it comes to speed, capacity, performance, and security, which means both Microsoft and its customers are undergoing some major changes to support their AI needs.
Fueling your AI journey
When traveling by plane, you want the airline to provide both a flight crew that’s had lots of hands-on experience as well as equipment that’s modern and well maintained. At Ignite, Microsoft did something very similar for its customers by outlining all the ways its technology would support a smooth and successful AI journey.
Infrastructure
Microsoft is optimizing its datacenters and their network of connections with new hollow-core fiber technology and the first Microsoft-manufactured central processing units (CPUs). The company has also pledged to use 100% zero-carbon energy sources in its datacenters by 2025, which is all the more impressive considering that, by 2027, the world’s AI may need as much energy per year as an entire country consumes.
Foundation models and AI toolchain
A new models-as-a-service offering will provide access to AI foundation models through hosted APIs so developers can focus on what they do best, rather than spending time managing back-end operations. This is in addition to an ever-growing model catalog for creating images, text, code, and apps using generative AI. And when it comes to building, deploying, and managing your own AI foundation models, Azure AI Studio has built-in functionality the promotes responsible AI by detecting and filtering harmful user-generated and AI-generated content in your applications.
Data
Microsoft Fabric — a tool that brings an organization’s data and analytic workloads together into a single unified experience — is now generally available. At Slalom, we’ve seen a lot of interest in Fabric, but up until this announcement most Microsoft customers have only heard about what the technology is capable of. With general availability, customers can now go straight from conducting proofs of concept (POCs) directly into production and thereby experience all Fabric offers firsthand.
“It’s perhaps one of the most important considerations, because in some sense there is no AI without data.” — Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
Some leaders, however, are reluctant to bring GenAI and their vital business data together. Over 70% of senior IT leaders taking part in a recent survey expressed concerns that GenAI would introduce additional security risks to their organizations’ data. But by bringing Microsoft Purview and Security Copilot together, SecOps teams can diagnose security and compliance alerts faster than ever before, thereby making your data environments secure for use with AI and preventing data loss.
Slalom has spent the past several years helping clients prepare their data for use with AI, as we believe this will be a significant source of differentiation for organizations that can quickly and successfully adopt technologies like Fabric. For example, by enabling Fabric in your organization, you’ll also have access to Copilot in Power BI. This can open the world of data analytics to a broader range of users, giving even those with minimal technical knowledge the ability to obtain insights from your organization’s data to drive better decision-making. And those insights will be delivered through Fabric even faster and more seamlessly with Microsoft’s new data Mirroring offering, which enables users to access information across a wide range of databases in near real time, without the need to extract, transform, and normalize the data.
Copilot Studio
This new offering will allow for the creation and management of custom AI language models (GPTs) that can incorporate your organization’s own business data as well as data from other, non-Microsoft business applications, such as Workday and SAP.
AI today and for the future
As hinted in the keynote’s opening montage, Microsoft envisions copilots being used for both professional and personal purposes as varied as learning languages, interacting with healthcare providers, shopping, creating, analyzing, and so forth. To support this vision, Microsoft 365 Copilot can answer questions and complete tasks using information from across the Microsoft experience — from email and calendars in Outlook, chats and collaboration in Teams, and documents in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.
But this isn’t the end of what copilots can do. They’re also being used to:
- Turn natural language into programming language to help developers code 55% faster (GitHub Copilot)
- Help SecOps teams respond to threats at machine speed (Microsoft Security Copilot)
- Enrich customer interactions by grounding the copilot with CRM data (Microsoft Sales Copilot)
- Help customer service agents resolve cases faster by providing them access to data in multiple tools in one easy application interface (Microsoft Copilot for Service)
And it doesn’t stop there. Looking to the future, Nadella spoke to the arc of innovation for AI.
- AI in mixed reality will go beyond natural language as its main input to using “the real world as your prompt and interface.” This type of AI will react to voice but also gestures, movement, and the direction of a person’s gaze so it can process requests with highly conversational and context-driven responses. It will provide information based on the immediate environment, such as for maintenance workers servicing machinery, and do so via a mobile device or headset, so the humans involved don’t have to be tethered to a desk or laptop to get the job done.
- AI in quantum computing will accelerate scientific discovery far beyond what’s currently possible using existing computational techniques. For example, new chemicals and pharmaceuticals can be developed as scientists design molecules with unique properties and use a copilot to narrow down results to only the most promising candidates.
Microsoft is positioning itself to be the copilot company by providing one unified experience across all its offerings with tools that understand your context and bring the right information to you where and when you need it. Regardless of where you are in terms of researching, choosing, or implementing copilots in your organization, Slalom can help by introducing you to Microsoft’s tools and their capabilities, working with you to identify opportunities and use cases where copilots could deliver the most benefit, and enabling your teams to get the most out of the technology with support for change management, prompt engineering training, creating a copilot center of excellence, and much more.
To learn how copilots can help steer your business to success, check out Slalom’s offerings in the Microsoft Marketplace.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
