Microsoft Inspire: Accelerating AI Transformation Through Partnerships

*By Frank X. Shaw

Collaboration is a key component of Microsoft's success. Our partner ecosystem consists of more than 400,000 partners worldwide and they play a key role in making new technologies available to customers, especially in today's AI-centric world. O Microsoft Inspire it's an opportunity to recognize our partners' critical support in customer success and to share new opportunities and ways to engage with Microsoft solutions.

To recognize the impressive achievements of our employees, we started the event by celebrating the finalists and winners of the 2023 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards, which were announced at the end of June. The awards highlight success and innovation across multiple categories, spanning across disciplines, industries, business transformation and social impact.

This year's Microsoft Inspire continues our effort to make AI a transformative tool for our customers and partners. We're excited to share more solutions based on this technology and show how partners can apply these innovations to their organizations in a variety of ways, from expanding AI skill to new products and services that drive customer success. Below are some of the main announcements from the event.

Introducing Bing Chat Enterprise

Since the launch of the new Bing in February, we've heard that many enterprise customers are excited to empower their organizations with powerful new AI tools, but are concerned about protecting their company's data. That's why we're announcing the Bing Chat Enterprise, which provides organizations with AI-powered enterprise-focused chat with advanced layers of data protection. What goes in – and what goes out – stays protected, providing managed access to better answers, greater efficiency and new ways to enable creativity.

The tool is being released in preview for organizations licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium, and Business Standard at no additional cost. We will also make Bing Chat Enterprise available as a standalone subscription in the future for US$ 5 per user/month. Learn more and find out how to get started with Bing Chat Enterprise.

Announcing pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot

We are also pleased to announce pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot. It will be available soon for US$ 30 per user/month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers.

While some generative AI apps focus on a single feature like real-time transcription or copywriting, the tool puts thousands of skills at your command. By basing responses on business data such as your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining it with your work context – the meeting you are in now, the emails you've exchanged on a topic, the chats you've had over the past week – Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and actionable answers to your questions.

The solution is built into the apps that millions of people use every day. Copilot starts your creativity in Word, analyzes data in Excel, designs presentations in PowerPoint, triages your Outlook inbox, summarizes meetings in Teams – whether you attended or not – and much more.

Empowering Sellers and Service Providers with AI

Sellers need to have as many options as possible in the tools they use. So we are adding more functionality to the Microsoft Sales Copilot directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, such as AI-generated opportunity summaries, in-context email drafts, and meeting preparation materials. This allows professionals to improve their productivity and close more deals by automating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tasks (including Salesforce). In addition, it will also provide real-time actionable insights and AI-backed content and recommendations to personalize customer interactions at scale. This is in addition to features already available in Microsoft Sales Copilot, such as Teams meeting summaries and email thread summaries. Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, was the beginning of our work to transform seller experiences, and these capabilities are now part of Sales Copilot. Read more about news.

At Microsoft Inspire, we're also highlighting actions from customers such as Virgin Money, who are empowering their customer service departments with custom chatbots built with Copilot on Power Virtual Agents. In minutes, companies can train a chatbot using natural language to reference internal and external knowledge sources, customer service applications and web data via Bing Search. The chatbot powered by Virgin Money encompasses more than 195,000 customer interactions per month, helping professionals focus on more complex customer demands. Read more about Microsoft Sales Copilot.

Arrival of Process Mining in Power Automate

Organizations often struggle to identify processes that are getting in the way of their workflows and how to resolve them. To support this task, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of next-generation AI capabilities on Power Automate Process Mining, providing customers with AI-powered insights to optimize existing processes and drive efficiency through low-code automation. With Process Mining, users can understand what's happening in their business, use AI to generate insights, application suggestions and automation, and use the Power Platform to quickly build the solutions they need. know more about Process Mining in Power Automate.

Extended Availability of Azure OpenAI Service

We are tracking the commercial adoption of the Azure OpenAI Service, with more than 4,500 customers using the solution. We've seen our customers do amazing things like creating chatbots using organizational data, summarizing text and generating content.

Now, we're bringing the service to more organizations around the world. Last week, we expanded access to the Azure OpenAI Service, increasing its availability in North America and Western Europe, while making it available in Asia for the first time.

New Azure features and investments 

We will also announce a substantial investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate & Modernize and to launch the Azure Innovate, a dedicated investment we are making in response to heightened demands for analytics and AI. These new offerings have expanded scenario coverage and offer more extensive incentives and support for everything from fast, frictionless migrations to building new AI-powered apps.

Expanding Strategic Collaboration with Epic

A great example of Microsoft and its partners working together is an expansion of our strategic collaboration with Epic, a leading healthcare software company, where we are using the power of AI to help clinicians spend less time on administrative functions and more time dedicated to patient care. Epic has integrated the Azure OpenAI Service into its electronic health record (EHR) software to provide a range of solutions, from helping clinicians explore clinical data conversationally and intuitively to helping them more effectively respond to patient messages. And with Nuance DAX Express, we're embedding our AI-powered clinical documentation capabilities directly into Epic's workflows to help providers further decrease the administrative workloads that lead to burnout, expand patient access to care, and in improving health care outcomes.

Additionally, Epic customers are now leveraging Azure Large Instances to achieve the scale needed to run large Epic EHR databases – up to 50 million database accesses per second. This allows Epic customers to push beyond the previous limits of shared public cloud infrastructure solutions.

The new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

Microsoft Inspire marks the launch of Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of our partner program, empowering all partners to deliver customer value while leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud. Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, we are providing partners with a comprehensive investment portfolio for all partner business models, at all stages of maturity.

The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program leverages the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, qualification, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling. Partners get the value and benefits of the previous program, plus access to new AI-specific offerings and benefits. There is no action for a partner to take to move to the new program – we move all existing partners to the new program effective immediately and partners retain their existing benefits and designations. Read more about Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.

 Additional updates from partners

We have several updates with new opportunities for partners to go to market and scale their business, including:

• ISV Success Updates: Announced in preview at Microsoft Inspire, ISV Success is the path for ISV partners within the AI Cloud Partner Program and is now generally available. ISV Success offers product and cloud benefits, demo and sandbox environments, technical consultations to build and publish applications, and once published, sales and marketing benefits to help accelerate business through Microsoft's commercial marketplace. In addition, partners participating in ISV Success will also have access to GitHub Copilot as part of their ISV Success benefits in late 2023.

• Private offers with multiple participants: As part of our continued investments in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, we are also announcing multi-party private offers that enable partners to work together to sell personalized offers through the Microsoft commercial marketplace.

• New solutions partner designations for more partners: We are introducing new designations as part of the Cloud and AI Partner Program to provide opportunities for additional partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success. This includes a new Learning Training Services designation, ISV designations for partners building solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and our industry clouds, and a Support Services designation.

We are excited about today's announcements and our commitment to accelerating AI transformation to drive customer success, growth and profitability for our partners' businesses. This is just a snippet of the updates being announced in Microsoft Inspire – for a more comprehensive look, see the additional resources at the end of this post.

And for more information on today's announcements, be sure to sign up for Microsoft Inspire and follow the 1st day lectures with sessions by Satya Nadella, Judson Althoff and Nicole Dezen, or watch them on demand whenever you prefer.

*Frank X. Shaw – Director of Communications, Microsoft

Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies