Did you attend Microsoft Inspire this year? Or did you totally miss out on its key sessions?
Whether you watched the highly anticipated Microsoft partner event digitally or skipped it entirely, here’s a quick overview of the five biggest announcements at Microsoft Inspire 2023 to get you up to speed.
1. Presenting Bing Chat Enterprise— A Generative AI Chat for Work with Data Protection
Have you been wanting to use Bing Chat to improve team productivity and process efficiency? But worried about data security? Well, that’s about to change because Microsoft just introduced Bing Chat Enterprise at this year’s Inspire. And with that, Bing Chat will now deliver commercial data protection besides AI-powered chat for your work.
That’s good for corporations eager to supercharge their knowledge workflows with generative AI but worried about data confidentiality. With Bing Chat Enterprise, every piece of information you give or receive remains protected. Nothing is stored and nothing is shared, and even Microsoft itself won’t have eyes-on access to your chats. That also means, your chats won’t be used to train the AI.
Thanks to this ironclad data security, you can now confidently research industry insights, analyse sensitive data, or work with proprietary information. And since Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded in web data, you always have access to real-time, complete answers with links and citations. Additionally, Bing Chat will now support multimodal visual search. That means you can upload images along with entering text queries on Bing Chat and get relevant answers from the web.
Note: Bing Chat Enterprise is now available in preview for businesses with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium from 18 July 2023. Microsoft also has in its pipeline a standalone offering that will go for $5 (£3.86) per user per month. Bing Chat Enterprise is accessible with your work account at Bing.com/chat and the Microsoft Edge sidebar.
2. Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing Announcement
Back in May, Microsoft gave its 600 enterprise customers paid early access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Today, the tech giant announced a $30 (£23.17) per user per month subscription for all Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers after general availability.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a step ahead of generative AI. Besides the ability to take questions and give answers from the web, it can also reason over your business data and contextual information. Plus, you can accomplish multiple tasks within a few clicks with Copilot: from generating meeting updates and summaries to creating emails and presentations, and even performing SWOT analysis or writing sales proposals. The possibilities are limitless!
Since Copilot is grounded in your business data, it pulls relevant information from your emails, chats, calendar, and internal documents as well as web to assist you accurately and in real time. It works seamlessly across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams providing you a whole new way to work, making you more creative, productive and efficient.
But what about data security? Don’t worry, Copilot is enterprise-ready and always under your control. It adheres to your existing Microsoft security, privacy, permission, and compliance policies, and always keeps your data within your tenant.
3. Empowering sellers and customer service agents with Sales Copilot
As a seller, do you find yourself spending more time looking for the information you need? Does personalising every customer interaction, like meetings or emails, take too much effort?
Don’t lose hope yet! Microsoft has just announced Microsoft Sales Copilot—an AI-powered seller companion that will truly transform seller experiences. It’s the next step in the development of Dynamics 365 Copilot.
Sales Copilot works alongside you whether you’re using Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. It even connects to other customer relationship management solutions like Salesforce. That way, you can improve your sales productivity and personalise customer interactions at scale to drive more deals easily.
Designed to save time with sales-related task automation, you can now quickly deliver a more confident and personalised service to your customers. That’s because Sales Copilot keeps you informed with real-time actionable insights with auto-generated meeting summaries or emails. That way, you never have to interact with your customers unprepared. What’s more, you can even use Sales Copilot for customer follow-ups with its AI-generated content and contextual recommendations based on Outlook emails, Teams chat, and system data.
To elaborate further, here’s a quick rundown of what sellers and agents can now do with Sales Copilot:
- Stay informed and take quick actions with auto-generated opportunity summaries, including status, progress, and highlights of key changes, in Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Work efficiently and creatively with AI-generated contextual emails that incorporate real-time information about customer, product, and opportunity, in Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Be prepared for meetings with a summary view that provides account information, recent notes, issues, customer updates, and more in Dynamics 365 Sales, Outlook, or Teams.
- Handle customer queries and close deals faster with real-time tips and suggestions during Teams meetings, whether it’s about how your brand compares to the competitor’s or what personalised service you can offer for the customer.
Eager to get your hand on Sales Copilot? It’s generally available from 18 July 2023. It is now part of your existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licences. If you don’t use Dynamics 365 Sales, you can still use it as a standalone subscription service.
4. New AI-Driven Capabilities for Process Mining in Power Automate
Like many organisations, do you also struggle spotting bottlenecks in processes and fixing them in time? Do you want to understand your business workflows to improve, automate or digitise them? What you need is process mining—a continuous activity that every business needs for a fluid workflow, but it can also be trickier.
That is why Microsoft is introducing new AI features to Power Automate Process Mining for its Power Platform customers. Using this process mining capability, you can gain actionable insights into your operational processes and tasks. Not only that, you can also identify areas for improvement. This functionality analyses process and event data from different sources and paints a clear picture of how each process transpires in reality. That way, you can have visibility into what’s happening across your organisation and use AI-generated insights and suggestions to automate tasks and digitise processes at scale using Power Platform.
Missing a bigger picture? From improved operational efficiency and optimised resources to enhanced customer experience and better supply chain management, you can unlock a range of business benefits with this new capability. Plus, you can also ensure compliance to avoid legal risks.
Is this feature generally available? No, but it will be on 1 August 2023 for existing Power Automate users. Don’t have a Power Automate licence? Talk to our experts!
5. New Azure capabilities and investments
At Microsoft Inspire 2023, the tech giant also announced two new Azure offerings: Azure Migrate & Modernise and Azure Innovate. These will greatly help customers like you at every step of your journey into Microsoft Cloud, which is built on Azure. Increased investments in these two technologies will cover customer demand for AI and analytics and support everything from fluid migrations to innovating new AI-driven apps.
As a result, you will be able to build a strong digital foundation not only to navigate market disruptions but also continue innovating forward. Azure technology advancements are designed to help you develop digital perseverance that enables you to adapt, grow, and stay ahead of market forces by anticipating what’s next.
Moreover, Azure AI is all set to help you apply next-generation AI to solve your unique business challenges and find new opportunities. That will usher in an era of transformational AI apps and experiences underpinned by Azure’s enterprise-grade security and AI-driven capabilities.
Honourable Mentions
Besides these five key announcements at Microsoft Inspire 2023, here are a few more that are worth noting down:
- Microsoft Fabric – Empower people to unlock the potential of data and close the gap between information and intelligence with Microsoft Fabric. It’s a human-centred solution that integrates data from multiple sources to uncover deeper insights and shape business intelligence for all kinds of unique reporting needs. This not only helps you make data-driven decisions but also create intelligence faster.
- Power Virtual Agent – Use generative AI to make intelligent chatbots and experiences to help solve customer queries without a support personal. Link URLs, SharePoint sites, or upload files to power those chatbots. Ask questions and get generative answers that are tailored and actional with a ChatGPT like experience powered by your system data.
What’s Next?
Microsoft Inspire 2023 brings with it 40+ updates and announcements that will trickle down from partners and ISVs like Dogma to businesses and organisations using Microsoft technologies. The major focus this year is on furthering innovations and growth with AI and ensuring data security for enterprises and commercial users. You can also start leveraging all these new technologies and drive desired outcomes at your organisation today!
