10 Things You Need to Know About Microsoft Inspire 2023
Microsoft Inspire is the annual event where Microsoft partners gather to learn, network, and celebrate their achievements. This year, Microsoft Inspire was held online from July 19 to July 21, and it was packed with exciting announcements, innovations, and opportunities for partners to grow their businesses with AI and the Microsoft Cloud. Here are ten things you need to know about Microsoft Inspire 2023.
1. Microsoft announced Bing Chat Enterprise, a new AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection.
Bing Chat Enterprise is a new offering that gives organizations access to the robust AI capabilities of Bing Chat, such as natural language understanding, knowledge retrieval, and content generation, while ensuring that their data remains protected and compliant. Bing Chat Enterprise will start rolling out today in preview to organizations licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium, and Business Standard at no additional cost. It will also be available as a stand-alone monthly subscription for $5 per user.
2. Microsoft revealed pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI assistant that helps you get more done in less time.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new AI assistant that puts thousands of skills at your command, from writing emails and documents to analyzing data and designing presentations. Copilot uses your business data and working context to deliver richer, more relevant, and more actionable responses to your questions. And it is integrated into the apps you use daily, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers when generally available.
3. Microsoft introduced new AI features for Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Virtual Agents to empower sellers and customer service agents.
Microsoft Sales Copilot is a new AI solution that helps sellers improve productivity and close more deals with CRM task automation (including Salesforce), actionable real-time insights, and AI-assisted content and recommendations to personalize customer interactions at scale. These add to AI capabilities already available in Microsoft Sales Copilot, such as Teams calls summaries and email thread summaries.
Power Virtual Agents is a low-code chatbot platform that enables businesses to create intelligent chatbots without coding or AI expertise. With Copilot integration, companies can train chatbots using natural language to reference internal and external knowledge sources, customer service applications, and web data via Bing Search.
4. Microsoft announced the general availability of next-generation AI features within Power Automate Process Mining.
Power Automate Process Mining is a solution that helps organizations understand what is happening across their business processes, identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and optimize them with low-code automation. With the new AI features, users can get AI-powered insights to discover improvement opportunities, app and automation suggestions based on best practices, and easy access to Power Platform tools to build the solutions they need quickly.
5. Microsoft expanded the availability of Azure OpenAI Service, a cloud-based platform for building and deploying large-scale AI models.
Azure OpenAI Service is a cloud-based platform that enables developers and researchers to build and deploy large-scale AI models using OpenAI’s state-of-the-art technology. Azure OpenAI Service supports models up to hundreds of billions of parameters, such as GPT-4, which can generate natural language text for various tasks and domains. Last week, Microsoft expanded the availability of Azure OpenAI Service in North America and Western Europe while making it available for Asia for the first time.
6. Microsoft announced new Azure capabilities and investments to help customers migrate, modernize, and innovate with AI.
Microsoft announced a substantial investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate & Modernize, a set of tools and services that help customers migrate their existing applications and infrastructure to Azure and modernize them with cloud-native technologies. Microsoft also announced Azure Innovate, an all-new dedicated investment in response to the heightened demands for analytics and AI. Azure Innovate offers customers access to advanced analytics and AI solutions on Azure, such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Purview, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, and more.
7. Microsoft supported Meta’s Llama family of large language models on Azure and Windows.
Meta is a leading AI company that develops large language models that can understand natural language across multiple domains and languages. Meta’s Llama family of models includes Llama 2, which has up to 70 billion parameters and can generate high-quality text for various applications. As part of a strategic partnership with Meta, Microsoft announced support for the Llama family of models on Azure and Windows. Azure customers can easily fine-tune and deploy the Llama models on Azure. Windows developers can use Llama 2 by targeting the Direct ML execution provider through the ONNX runtime.
8. Microsoft highlighted expanding its collaboration with Epic, a leading healthcare software company, to use AI to improve clinical outcomes and reduce administrative workloads.
Microsoft and Epic have been working together to use AI to help clinicians spend less time on administrative functions and more time providing quality care. Epic has integrated Azure OpenAI Service into its electronic health record (EHR) software to offer multiple solutions. These include helping clinicians explore clinical data conversationally and intuitively, helping them more efficiently reply to patient messages and more. Epic customers are also utilizing Azure Large Instances to achieve the scale needed to run large Epic EHR databases.
9. Microsoft launched the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of its partner program that empowers every partner to deliver customer value while leveraging Microsoft AI and Microsoft Cloud.
The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program is the next generation of Microsoft’s partner program that provides partners with a comprehensive portfolio of investments for all partner business models at every stage of maturity. The program utilizes the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling. Partners get the value and benefits of the previous program plus access to new offerings and benefits specific to AI. And there is no action for a partner to take to move to the new program – Microsoft has moved all existing partners into the new program effective immediately, and partners maintain their existing benefits and designations.
10. Microsoft announced several new opportunities for partners to market and scale their businesses, such as ISV Success, multiparty private offers, and new Solutions Partner designations.
Microsoft announced several updates with new opportunities for partners to go to market and scale their businesses, such as:
- ISV Success: Announced in preview at last Microsoft Inspire, ISV Success is the pathway 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 consults to build and publish applications, and, once published, sales and marketing benefits to help accelerate deals through Microsoft commercial marketplace. In addition, partners participating in ISV Success will also get access to GitHub Copilot as part of ISV Success benefits at the end of 2023.
- Multiparty private offers: As part of its continued investments in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, Microsoft also announced multiparty personal offers, which empower partners to work together to sell customized deals through the Microsoft commercial marketplace.
- New Solutions Partner designations for more partners: Microsoft introduced new designations as part of the AI Cloud Partner Program to allow additional partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success. This includes a new training services designation for learning partners, ISV designations for partners building solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and its industry clouds, and a support services designation.
Source: blogs.microsoft.com
written with the aid of bing chat and Grammarly