The much-awaited Microsoft Ignite event is a treat for solutions partners like us. We had the privilege of being there at Microsoft Ignite 2024 in Chicago. Microsoft announced some groundbreaking updates and enhancements that will redefine the business operations, maximize efficiency resulting in shorter time to outcome rate .
3 days, Satya’s keynote, umpteen sessions and the big pivot towards Agent AI, we surely have a lot to say to our audience. Here is a curated list of updates that businesses should not miss. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
Leaping into the AI future
“What lean did for manufacturing, AI will do for knowledge work – increasing value and reducing waste,” says Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, in his keynote at Ignite 2024 while announcing the latest updates on Microsoft Copilot.
Yes, Copilot is yet again at the center of Ignite, making AI more accessible for businesses.
Copilot is the UI for AI – Satya
Copilot, Copilot Devices and Copilot & AI stack – Three platforms in making.
Copilot Actions
Your employees spend several hours of their time every week on tasks that can be automated. With Copilot Actions, automating repetitive tasks is as simple as filling in blanks in predefined prompts directly on Microsoft 365 Copilot. Whether it is summarizing customer emails or sharing weekly reports with the team, you can set the prompts and forget – Copilot Actions will handle the rest. Copilot Actions can help your employees save time and focus on high-value tasks.
(Source: Introducing Microsoft Copilot actions, new agents, and tools to empower IT| Microsoft 365 Blog)
Microsoft welcomes you to the world of AGENTS
Agents in Microsoft 365
Agents are generative AI powered virtual assistants that can empower individuals and teams to accomplish more. Adoption, Customizability and extensibility are the key drivers of ROI for your Copilot investment. At Ignite 2024, Microsoft announced some out-of-the-box agents that can have a direct impact on your everyday work. These agents serve specific purposes on the Microsoft 365 product suite and transform your operations.
Agents in SharePoint
Your organization creates and uploads tons of documents to SharePoint websites. The major challenge for end users – whether a warehouse frontline worker or the chief finance officer, is to find the right information from the right document at the right time. Let’s say your sales associate is on a call with a prospect and needs information on the updated specs and pricing of products. Previously, finding answers required digging through documents or contacting stakeholders. Now, with Copilot’s conversational interface, responses are instant, and salespeople can effortlessly access information in documents and access call summaries, streamlining sales support.
How easy is it to create an agent in SharePoint?
All it takes is a couple of clicks. You can create agents that are grounded on specific files and share them with your team or entire organization over Teams. Your colleagues can chat with the agent on Teams and ask questions related to data from across the specified documents.
Interpreter in Teams
Translation gets more engaging and personalized with Interpreter in Teams – an agent that can simulate your voice and provide real-time speech-to-speech translation during meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Facilitator agent
Listening to the speakers and taking notes can be a daunting task. Hustle no more. The Facilitator agent in Microsoft Teams can take real-time notes from meetings and enables you to collaborate with colleagues. The agent can also summarize long conversations on chats and help you with the key points.
Employee self-service agent
Microsoft introduced the employee self-service agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat to enable you to get quick answers to policy-related questions. But that’s not all. You can also use the agent to get key HR and IT tasks done with simple prompts. You can edit the ESS agent on Copilot Studio for extended capabilities.
Azure AI Foundry
To help businesses create, customize, and manage AI applications more easily and efficiently, Microsoft launched Azure AI Foundry – an app server that unifies the models, tooling, safety, and monitoring solutions. You can access the platform as an SDK and a portal to build and scale AI apps effectively. Foundry SDK comes with prebuilt templates to help you build apps faster with enterprise-grade security. You can integrate the SDK with Copilot Studio, GitHub, and Visual Studio to customize and manage AI applications. Microsoft has transformed Azure AI Studio into the Foundry portal to help you discover AI models, services, and tools.
Fabric gets more sophisticated
Data is the fuel running innovation. Whether you want to create AI applications, forecast trends or make better decisions – data is what you need. The data market is so fragmented that you need to connect each service required to complete the data to insights journey. At Build 2023, Microsoft launched Fabric – an end-to-end data platform for analytical purposes. Ever since, more than 16000 businesses have been using Fabric, including 70% of the Fortune 500 companies. Continuing this momentum and making data more accessible for building cutting-edge applications, Microsoft had some interesting updates for the platform.
Fabric Databases
This year, Microsoft introduced a new class of cloud databases – Fabric Databases, creating a truly unified data platform. SQL database will be the first in Fabric Databases to bring together transactional and analytical workloads and simplify AI application development. The company announced that more databases will be made available on Fabric to enable faster application development.
GA of Fabric Real-time Intelligence
Early 2024, Microsoft introduced Real-time Intelligence in Fabric to help businesses analyze in-motion data in real time and make better decisions. You can connect the workload with all your streaming data sources, such as IOT and web logs, using out-of-the-box and custom connectors and build solutions that offer high-value insights in real time. Early users of Fabric Real-time Intelligence across industries have been using the solution for monitoring supply chains, detecting defects, identifying fraudulent activities, etc. At Ignite 2024, Microsoft made this game-changing solution generally available to bring the power of real-time intelligence from streaming data to every business.
OneLake catalog
OneLake in Microsoft Fabric allows you to unify all your on-prem and multi-cloud data sources using Shortcuts and Mirroring. You can now explore, manage, and govern your entire Fabric data estate using OneLake catalog in Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft 365 users can see OneLake catalog already as it is the evolution of OneLake data hub. You can extend OneLake catalog to Purview for advanced governance capabilities.
More on Fabric
- Microsoft Fabric now offers more AI-powered tools needed for a data project.
- You can now access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake.
- You can now understand your data on Fabric much better with AI-powered Q&A experiences embedded in Microsoft 35 applications.
Power Platform
Power Platform has been playing a crucial role in empowering businesses with intelligent applications. The low-code/no-code platform helps businesses save 50% of development time and increase revenue by 7%. Last year, we witnessed the roll out of some amazing AI capabilities in Power Platform. The same momentum continued this year too with more AI and Copilot capabilities across Power Apps and Power Automate.
Build complex solutions on Power Apps with
You can now build more complex applications on Power Apps with the help of Copilot. With Copilot, you can build solution architectures that include pages, apps, automations, and AI agents as assets. You can iterate the plans to ensure they reflect the original business problems.
Agent builder in Power Apps
With agent builder in Power Apps Studio, you can turn your low-code applications into intelligent applications. Using Agent builder, you can build agents that use the knowledge, logic, and actions that are already in the applications to autonomously perform tasks.
GPT 4o for Intelligent document processing
You can now process multimodal documents – including images, incoming emails, and documents, with significant efficiency. Power Automate Copilot for automation will unlock fast authoring automations and generative actions that allow seamless cloud flows with natural language input. The automation center gives centralized access to managing all the automation including SLA’s in work. Though few are now in preview, it would be a reality in your enterprise soon.
The future of work is more exciting
The line of updates at Ignite 2024 will surely lead us to build better workplaces where everyone thrives. By the time of writing, most of these features were yet to be generally available. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, we have an opportunity to try and test these features and analyze their potential to maximize business value. But one announcement is loud and clear. Human and AI synergy in the era of Copilot is going to make our lives better, brighter and productive.
Watch this space to know more.
If you want to discover more about the advancements made in the Microsoft technology ecosystem, our experts are here for you!
