Microsoft Ignite launched today with a sweeping set of agent and copilot products and features that expand the reach and functionality of AI technology deeper into the enterprise.
In addition to the product and strategy developments delivered by top executives including CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft featured big-name customers including the investment management firm BlackRock and materials science company Dow explaining how AI is helping them revamp operations and enhance customer engagement.
Nadella continued to promote Microsoft’s, and his own personal, message that AI is changing everything in fundamental ways. “What lean did for manufacturing, AI will for knowledge work,” he said.
Agent Developments
Building on a growing portfolio of agents, Microsoft executives detailed new agents that can be used within the context of a team, including:
- Facilitate Agent can be added to a Teams meeting to moderate, manage follow-ups, and assign action items.
- Project Manager Agent automates key steps in project management workflows, makes content assignments, and creates tasks.
- Employee Self Service Agent answers questions on policies while augmenting IT and HR departments by helping employees complete tasks.
- Sharepoint Agent now comes built into every Sharepoint instance, providing instant access to real-time information and insights from knowledge bases within the flow of employees’ work. “Now every Sharepoint site has an agent so all that rich information [stored in Sharepoint] is immediately accessible and useful,” said Callie August, senior marketing manager at Microsoft.
- Interpreter Agent is built to enhance collaboration with real-time speech translation during meetings to overcome language barriers.
They also detailed agent functionality from partners (highlighted by SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday) that is available natively within Copilot. For instance, integration with SAP Joule enables two-way access to Microsoft 365 and SAP business apps for greater productivity, noted Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president, business and industry copilot. “Copilot is going to be a one-stop shop for accessing all these agents,” Lamanna said.
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Dow officials detailed how they’re using agents to better manage the billions of dollars their company spends on freight shipping, improving the handling of invoices and saving millions of dollars in the process. This freight optimization initiative is helping Dow to create a more resilient supply chain, said Melanie Kalmar, CIO of Dow.
Copilots
While agents have risen to the top of many vendor product agendas, including that of Microsoft, today’s event still included a strong focus on Copilots, with these specific products and updates:
- Copilot Control System provides data access and security policies as well as management controls for Copilot and agents.
- Copilot Analytics lets customers correlate copilot usage to a business metric like win rate in sales or conversions in marketing campaigns.
- Copilot Actions work across the entire Microsoft 365 platform to automate functions such as asking for status updates from teammates, compiling weekly reports, and scheduling emails. They’re targeted at the automation of multi-step processes.
- Screen Understanding lets Copilots answer questions about documents shared during meetings.
- Security Copilot enhancements include automating tasks and workflows with AI enrichment, unified threat intelligence, and expanded integration with key enterprise systems such as ServiceNow. Emily Longman, Security Operations Center Manager at Oregon State University, said ServiceNow integration is especially appealing; the university recently deployed ServiceNow and will benefit from reducing the need to create tickets in favor of focusing on human analysis of security incidents.
One other noteworthy development on Copilot Studio: It’s now available on a consumption-based, pay-as-you-go model in Azure so customers can develop their own Copilot experiences without the upfront cost of a software license.
AI App Platform
Launching what the company refers to as an “AI App Platform,” Nadella laid out the functionality of Azure AI Foundry, which unifies models, tooling, safety, and monitoring in a single platform. The company’s AI catalog now includes 1,800 models from across the industry and it’s adding over 20 industry models from co-creation partners and customers including Bayer and Siemens.
With all the models to choose from, Foundry provides the ability to experiment with models to ensure the optimal choice based on use cases, business objectives, security considerations, and more.
The new Azure AI Foundry Agent Service is used to securely build, deploy, and scale AI agents. The service uses a code-first approach to building agents, grounded in data wherever it lives; it can also unify data across clouds.
Customer Insights
Lance Braunstein of BlackRock, a prominent Copilot customer, spoke during the keynote and underscored the value placed on Copilot technology by his firm. “We believe in a Copilot for every job family,” he said, explaining employees should have LLM-powered assistants that help them get to first drafts of emails, pitches, presentations, and code much faster. Braunstein is head of engineering for Aladdin, BlackRock’s investment management platform.
Those same tools can help employees get in front of the right customer at the right moment with the right product, and the tools will only get better as they grow beyond current capabilities. In fact, they can “profoundly bend the curve in client engagement,” Braunstein said. That improved client engagement will include natural language interfaces that customers can use to engage with the Aladdin platform reducing the barrier to usage and supporting more timely, effective investment decisions.
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