Microsoft Build 2023 might have just marked the beginning of the new era of AI! And here’s all you need to know about the key announcements from the sixth Microsoft Build that sharply focus on the use of AI for workplace efficiency and productivity.
In the digitally connected world today, AI is the new gold rush, and the path to making the most out of AI is uncharted for many organisations. AI is complex and constantly evolving, but it also has an immense potential to transform the way organisations strategise, departments collaborate, and employees work. But most importantly, AI will present businesses with new creative and data-driven ways to communicate with customers, expedite their journeys, and drive conversions.
That is precisely why AI was the common thread across all the top announcements in Microsoft Build 2023.
The tech giant sought to leverage OpenAI’s AI breakthroughs and enable its partners and customers to expand on them responsibly to develop enhanced capabilities for their specific business needs.
Want to learn exactly what Microsoft Build has in store for you to drive AI-ready culture within your organisation? Here are the top five highlights of Microsoft Build 2023:
1. Introduction of Microsoft Fabric
Businesses are increasingly looking to transform themselves and gain digital agility by leveraging data analytics. If you are part of those businesses, you will be pleased to know that there is a new data analytics platform called Microsoft Fabric coming your way. It is a new powerful app, in preview, that unifies Power BI, Azure Data Factory, OneLake, and Azure Synapse Analytics to unleash the true potential of business data using Copilot. Additionally, it has data integration and warehousing capabilities along with real-time analytics, business intelligence and data science.
Copilot in Fabric, in preview soon, will provide a conversational workflow with AI for businesses to automatically create dataflows and data pipelines, generate codes and functions, and build machine learning models.
2. Support for Copilot Plug-ins
There was some exciting development with Copilot as well at this year’s Microsoft Build. The AI-powered workplace assistant just got even better with the support for plug-ins. This paves the way for an enhanced Copilot experience with three main kinds of plug-ins: Teams messages extensions, ChatGPT-based plug-ins, and Power Platform connectors.
However, this is an early access program that will begin with more than 50 plug-ins. But Microsoft has promised that thousands of plug-ins will be available by the official launch.
This is another step towards making AI more flexible and functional for more users. These plug-ins harness the power of AI systems, enabling them to interact with various APIs from other systems, databases, or the internet to respond with real-time information that is more relevant and complex.
But it’s not just Copilot that is getting plug-in support. Microsoft is also bringing plug-ins for Bing Chat and ChatGPT. It also announced that it will be following an open standard for all plug-ins to make them interoperable on Copilot, ChatGPT, and Bing Chat. What that means is developers can now build plugins that function the same way across all three AI platforms.
3. Bing Integration Into ChatGPT
Microsoft announced a formidable integration between ChatGPT and Bing for effortless information sharing between these two platforms. That means Bing is now the default search engine for ChatGPT, and users can get timelier and more current responses with the AI chatbot’s real-time access to the web. Researchers and academic professionals will even get high-quality citations to make their work easier and more accurate. Please note that this new Bing search experience within ChatGPT has rolled out to ChatGPT Plus already and will soon be available for free ChatGPT users.
4. Copilot for Power BI
While it may still be in preview, it was announced in Microsoft Build 2023 that Copilot in Power BI will leverage the power of its Large Language Models (LLMs) to help you discover new patterns and opportunities in your business data. This way, you can work smartly and efficiently and ensure faster dissemination of analytics and reports to your team, enabling intelligent decision-making.
You can also create tailored and personalised reports in moments, generate data summaries, or make natural language queries about your data. While the results and suggestions Copilot gives you are editable, you can always ask the AI to further enhance the scope of the results.
5. Responsible Use of AI
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to developing responsible and beneficial AI technology that earns trust and ensures safety, this year’s Build introduced Azure AI Content Safety. It’s a new service in preview that assists organisations in developing safer online environments and will be integrated across Microsoft products.
What’s more, Microsoft also teased a new media provenance feature for Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator. This capability will help users verify if an image or video was AI-generated.
Ready to Harness AI for Growth?
By now, everyone is pretty clear where Microsoft is heading: incorporating its AI breakthroughs in all its product ranges. So, it’s high time you embraced AI on your digital imperative journey so that you can gain a competitive business advantage the smart way. To discover how you can benefit from these latest Microsoft Build 2023 announcements, get in touch with our experts immediately.
