Transacting through our marketplace connects you to thousands of pre-vetted Microsoft partner solutions, enabling you to rapidly accelerate your AI transformation and drive business outcomes. Whether that’s helping to enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement or reshape business processes.  

It also represents smart spend. To move at the speed of business today, many companies prefer buying to building cloud apps, handing off the associated costs and management to SaaS partners while provisioning end-to-end solutions quickly and reliably. 

In this series of four blogs, we’ll dive into some exciting new AI-powered software solutions and how they can benefit your business. Here’s a taste of what follows.

Decision intelligence for service operations 

Imagine if every decision that service operations teams make were consistently more accurate, timely and planned for. That’s countless micro-gains every minute of the day – at your fingertips. Delivering “decision intelligence” for service operations in banks, insurance companies and healthcare providers,

ActiveOps’ blend of AI and human intelligence delivers the most complete and useful set of predictive and prescriptive insight to help make better decisions at the right time – resulting in over 20% more capacity, over 30% boost in productivity, and significant business impact, quickly. 

Guarding against cyber disruption, 24/7 

Darktrace offers global leadership in cybersecurity AI. Rather than study attacks, Darktrace DETECT’s “Self-Learning AI” technology continuously learns about your organisation, inside and out, and applies that understanding to optimise your state of cybersecurity. Darktrace is fuelling a continuous end-to-end security capability that can autonomously spot and respond to novel in-progress threats within seconds.

Read Blog 2: Safeguard your business with AI-powered security solutions 

Harness emerging Causal AI to go beyond prediction 

Causal AI is a new class of machine intelligence that overcomes many of the issues seen with traditional machine learning and AI. Using Causal AI models, organisations can now go beyond making predictions to answer “what-if?” questions.  

causaLens is the only company to have productised Causal AI through its decisionOS solution – enabling customers to optimise pricing and promotions strategies, fine-tune the marketing mix, anticipate and pre-empt customer churn, and much more. decisionOS is available via the Microsoft marketplace.

Read Blog 3: Optimise business operations through AI-powered solutions 

Delivering outstanding people processes 

Zellis is the largest provider of payroll and HR software, and managed services, to companies in the UK & Ireland. Built on Microsoft Azure, Zellis HCM Cloud connects into PowerBI for analytics, and Power Automate to create integrated solutions for payroll, HR, benefits, and recognition – driving efficiencies and staff satisfaction across your entire organisation.

Read Blog 4: Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions

Empowering smooth operations from start to finish 

Innovation is thriving across sectors such as banking, finance and insurance, with support from the Microsoft cloud. Enate helps large enterprises to better manage end-to-end workflow smoothly, harnessing the power of automation and AI.

Powered by the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, EnateAI saves Operations teams from having to buy, train and test costly AI MLops solutions from third-party vendors. Instead, just “switch on” EnateAI to extract data from documents, categorise and automate email processing, and understand your customers’ sentiments, driving efficiency and cost savings straightaway.

Making smarter decisions, faster 

Imagine building your own AI-powered data extraction models with no data scientists required. That’s AI with real ROI, a solution offered by Eigen that reduces the amount of time your organisation spends on manual processes by up to 90%.  

Eigen’s no-code AI platform automates the extraction, classification, and understanding of data from any kind of document, so customers can make faster, smarter decisions. Leveraging Microsoft capabilities, Eigen’s software integrates multiple AI technologies, including natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision.  Building a model requires only a small number of training documents, which means business users can start automating their document workflows quickly. 

Using AI to make working capital more accessible 

Trade Ledger’s mission is helping every business get the capital they need to thrive, through enabling banks and alternative lenders to simplify complex business lending. Using Large Language Models, finance professionals can query their business systems using natural language and get rich analysis and insights into their working-capital needs. AI matches their funding needs with appropriate lending products; once a product is selected, it performs the loan application process.  

By integrating AI, Trade Ledger bridges the gap between what businesses need and what lenders have on offer. It also speeds the application and decision-making process, contributing to a more accessible and transparent working-capital market. 

Reimagining trade transactions 

Meanwhile, Traydstream – a trade finance document-checking automation and digitisation platform – has partnered with Microsoft Azure to reimagine the paper-based processes that support trade finance. Available on the Microsoft marketplace, Traydstream uses a machine learning-based engine, slashing the time to complete checks on the dozens of documents and over 400,000 rules-permutations generated by a single transaction. Traydstream is now collaborating with Citi to provide their clients with access to this cutting-edge and automated trade-document processing capability. 

Start your AI transformation journey today  

Whether it’s safeguarding your organisation and data, amplifying human ingenuity or delivering transformational customer experiences, buying cloud-driven AI software solutions through the global marketplace allows your business to be more innovative, agile and resilient, with less complexity, time and cost. 

That’s because the Microsoft marketplace offers the most comprehensive catalogue of certified cloud solutions anywhere. We’ve made procurement simple, enabling you to complete your entire journey in one place, with straightforward invoicing.

Your organisation’s existing Azure cloud commitment means you can benefit from faster time-to-value, integrating solutions that work with your current technology. In addition, software/IP costs incurred by buying solutions contribute 100% off your Azure Marketplace invoice. You can also rest assured that you’re buying and running solutions on a trusted cloud that boasts industry-leading security. 

We hope you enjoy the other blogs in our series. Meanwhile, why not check out more solutions on the Azure Marketplace? For more information and partner introductions, contact our ISV team.

Other blogs in this series

Blog 2: Safeguarding your business with AI-powered security solutions 

Blog 3: Optimising business operations through AI-powered solutions 

Blog 4: Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions

About the author

James joined Microsoft 15 years ago and has held leadership positions across the Consumer, Enterprise, and the Partner teams at Microsoft. James is currently the ISV Ecosystem Lead and has a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success. James has been at the forefront of Cloud & Digital transformation for the last 10 years launching new business models and driving transformation through the Microsoft Partner ecosystem resulting in and contributing to exciting new revenue streams and significantly accelerated growth for Microsoft and Partners.

The post Driving AI transformation with the Microsoft commercial marketplace  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

causaLens is at the forefront of Causal AI innovation, providing solutions through the Microsoft marketplace that help organisations move beyond existing predictive models.  

In this third of our four-blog series, we’ll explore how causaLens has productised Causal AI to reimagine problem-solving across supply chains, customer journeys, manufacturing processes and more.

AI that answers your business questions 

“If I increase the price of my product by 5%, how will that affect my customer retention rate and revenue?”  

Standard machine learning struggles to provide answers to certain business questions, due to its tendency to forecast outcomes. The power of Causal AI models, which are fully transparent and explainable, is that they capture underlying causal relationships in data, not mere data correlations. This enables them to respond confidently to hypotheticals and provide actionable recommendations to optimise your business KPIs.  

While recent years have seen growing academic interest in this emerging technology, causaLens is the only company to have productised it through the decisionOS platform. 

Workflows built to answer “what-ifs” 

decisionOS lets you build and deploy decision workflows leveraging Causal AI – going from raw data to a production-ready decision-making application seamlessly. Data scientists can use decisionOS to access the latest Causal AI algorithms and build best in class Causal AI models. Business users can access “decisionApps” deployed within decisionOS to surface actionable recommendations for their use-cases and improve decision-making.  

Using decisionOS, your team is empowered to build models that go beyond correlations and understand cause and effect relationships that can predict accurately, but, more importantly, assess the impact of interventions and counterfactuals. 

decisionOS tracks decisions from data, to recommendation, to ultimate outcome and reports that back in the KPIs which your enterprise cares about That way, you can track success by the value-generating decisions you make, rather than technical metrics like model accuracy. 

Buy better outcomes 

According to Forrester, marketplaces for SaaS sourcing help alleviate issues such as SaaS sprawl, excessive cost and security risks “while still supporting business-led purchasing, which contributes to increased business agility, better business outcomes, and improved employee experience.” (Source: The Forrester New Wave™: SaaS Marketplaces, Q2 2020.)

That’s true for causaLens, which has seen customer ROI across a range of use-cases:  

• Working with a marketing team saw a 5% decrease in marketing costs by optimising allocation across campaigns. 
• Working with a European bank saw a return of $12mn from using decisionOS to manage risk. 
• Working with a leading IT manufacturer generated $19mn in savings from optimising inventory. 
• Working with a manufacturer saw a $4mn return from optimising their manufacturing lines. 

With support from the Microsoft cloud, causaLens is making an end-to-end Causal AI platform accessible to Enterprises globally via the Microsoft marketplace. This simplifies the overall process, allowing you to efficiently adopt this state-of-the-art technology while spending smarter and reducing complexity. 

Unlock the value of the cloud 

AI software published on the marketplace forms a powerful mix of innovation, reliability, security and convenience. If you’re looking for solutions to fuel your cloud transformation and grow your business, it’s the place to shop.   

To move at the speed of business today, many companies prefer buying to building cloud apps. This allows you to offload the associated costs and management onto SaaS partners.  You’re able to use private offers to get exactly what you need, including customised terms and conditions, negotiated pricing, prototypes for proof of concept, and tailor-made solutions.  

Better still, transact in a single, accessible place, reducing procurement complexity, saving time and simplifying billing. Apply 100% of the value of eligible purchases to your organisation’s Azure cloud commitment and get faster time-to-value with solutions that work with your current technology. 

All while enjoying the peace of mind that comes from buying and running solutions on a trusted cloud with industry-leading security.    

Go from raw data to decisions  

Ready to upgrade your decision making with Causal AI?  

Visit the Microsoft marketplace to buy decisionOS now, or contact our team at ISVUK@Microsoft.com.

Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Driving your AI transformation with the Microsoft marketplace 

Blog 2: Safeguarding your business with AI-powered security solutions 

Blog 4: Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions

About the author

James joined Microsoft 15 years ago and has held leadership positions across the Consumer, Enterprise, and the Partner teams at Microsoft. James is currently the ISV Ecosystem Lead and has a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success. James has been at the forefront of Cloud & Digital transformation for the last 10 years launching new business models and driving transformation through the Microsoft Partner ecosystem resulting in and contributing to exciting new revenue streams and significantly accelerated growth for Microsoft and Partners.

The post Optimising business operations through AI-powered solutions  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In this second of our four-blog series, we’ll see how prevention is truly the best defence. And as organisations continue to transition to the cloud, independent software vendors have been instrumental in building innovative cyber security solutions that appeal to customers in the fast-paced world of digital transformation.  

Darktrace, one of TIME magazine’s “Most Influential Companies” in 2021, is one such vendor. Currently protecting nearly 8,900 organisations around the world, including Royal Caribbean, City of Las Vegas, and McLaren, Darktrace works with companies of all sizes and in all verticals – from enterprises to governments, or small and medium businesses.  

Darktrace AI is designed to work with your security team across the entire attack lifecycle, providing clear analysis and context in ordinary language to drive understanding and efficiency. The solution integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure Sentinel and hosts its email service on Azure. Read on to discover how Darktrace’s AI-powered security products, available on the Microsoft marketplace, can help protect your organisation, building even greater confidence that your business, data and staff are safe.

On a mission to mitigate cyber-disruption  

As a global leader in cyber security AI, Darktrace is on a mission to tackle and minimise cyber-disruption. Breakthrough innovations in their Cambridge-based Cyber AI Research Centre have resulted in over 160 patents filed and research published to contribute to the cybersecurity community. That’s great news for stretched security teams, who are struggling with increasingly complex digital systems and an escalating threat landscape – from fending off ransomware attacks and data leaks, through to phishing and supply chain attacks.  

In fact, Darktrace research found that traditional email security tools, which rely on knowledge of past threats, take an average of 13 days from the launch of an attack to detection of it. (Source: Major Upgrade to Darktrace/Email™ Product Defends Organizations Against Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape.)

Darktrace has tackled the challenges of traditional cyber security efforts by turning the entire approach on its head. 

Responding to threats by knowing you

Rather than study attacks, Darktrace’s technology continuously learns and updates its knowledge of your business. Its distinction lies in the algorithms and data it uses, and how the two interact. Instead of training an AI on historical attacks – an approach that requires constant updating and maintenance – Darktrace takes their “Self-Learning AI” to your data. It’s plugged into your enterprise and learns in real time from everything that happens in your digital world – including email, cloud environments, manufacturing and operational systems, and physical locations.  

From this, the AI builds up a sense of “normal” for your organisation. This allows it to identify unusual patterns that indicate a cyber-threat – and then take targeted action to contain emerging attacks.  It then applies that understanding to optimise your unique state of cybersecurity.  

In effect, Darktrace is fuelling a continuous end-to-end security capability that can spot and respond to novel in-progress threats within seconds.  

In reality, that translates to increased threat detection accuracy and time savings – freeing you up to focus on what matters most: running your business. 

Bespoke solutions that build confidence 

According to Dan Fein, Director of Product at Darktrace, “Cyber-criminals will do whatever it takes. Daily, we see attackers impersonate CEOs or compromise vendors’ accounts to send out targeted, topical emails that look legitimate. Our security products align perfectly with Microsoft’s, allowing us to build even greater confidence among our mutual customers that their business, data and staff are protected.” 

What could that mean for your business? With Darktrace, you’ll be equipped to:  

• Detect and respond to cyber-attacks, including unknown and highly targeted attacks that evade traditional tools trained on historical attack data.   
• Stop phishing attacks with increasing accuracy, based on an understanding of “normal” user behaviour and communications.   
• Defend against threats across the entire digital enterprise – from cloud and email systems to networks, endpoints, and Operational Technology – with the same underlying AI technology.  
• Reduce triage and investigation time by automating tedious, repetitive tasks.   

Businesses are already seeing the benefits, with Darktrace customers reporting significant improvements in threat detection accuracy and time savings. One real estate enterprise reported a 95.83% reduction in time to identify potential threats. Another healthcare organisation reported a 90% reduction in triage time.  

Driving cognitive AI with Microsoft Security Copilot 

Helping to take cutting-edge cybersecurity to new levels, Darktrace is taking part in Microsoft’s Security Copilot Partner Private Preview.  

Security Copilot is Microsoft’s next-generation AI-powered security product that enables security professionals to respond to threats quickly, process signals at machine speed, and assess risk exposure in minutes. It combines an advanced large language model (LLM) with a security-specific model that’s informed by Microsoft’s unique global threat intelligence and more than 65 trillion daily signals. 

Selected for their proven experience with Microsoft security technologies and their close relationship with Microsoft, Darktrace will give feedback on Security Copilot product development, helping to refine new scenarios and drive future product releases. 

Get added benefits of buying through the marketplace 

Trust, simplicity and efficiency all count for a lot. Buying from the Microsoft marketplace means all solutions are certified and optimised to run on Azure. You’re able to use private offers to get exactly what you need, including customised terms and conditions, negotiated pricing, prototypes for proof of concept, and tailor-made solutions. 

Better still, transact in a single, accessible place, reducing procurement complexity, saving time and simplifying billing. Apply eligible purchases to your organisation’s Azure cloud commitment by contributing 100% of the purchase off your Azure Marketplace invoice.  

All while enjoying the peace of mind that comes from buying and running solutions on a trusted cloud with industry-leading security.  

Start protecting the Darktrace way today  

See what Darktrace discovers in your environment. Visit the Microsoft marketplace to buy Darktrace/Email or DarktraceDetect now, or contact our team at ISVUK@Microsoft.com.  

Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Driving your AI transformation with the Microsoft marketplace 

Blog 3: Optimising business operations through AI-powered solutions 

Blog 4: Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions

About the author

James joined Microsoft 15 years ago and has held leadership positions across the Consumer, Enterprise, and the Partner teams at Microsoft. James is currently the ISV Ecosystem Lead and has a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success. James has been at the forefront of Cloud & Digital transformation for the last 10 years launching new business models and driving transformation through the Microsoft Partner ecosystem resulting in and contributing to exciting new revenue streams and significantly accelerated growth for Microsoft and Partners.

The post Safeguarding your business with AI-powered security solutions  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Zellis is the largest provider of payroll and HR software and managed services to companies in the UK and Ireland, trusted by 42% of FTSE 100 companies. 

In this final blog of our four-part series, we’ll take a look at their flagship product, Zellis HCM Cloud. Read on to discover how your organisation can benefit from AI-powered payroll solutions that drive efficiencies right across your business.

Modern experiences that navigate challenges 

Organisations and employees are still navigating challenging times in the wake of Covid and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. These macro events have fuelled ongoing legislative change and increased complexity across the board. In today’s fast-moving and often unpredictable world of work, it’s no longer enough to ensure efficient payroll and HR processes. Organisations need the very best AI-driven HCM technology to ensure compliance with complex regulations, unlock data-driven insights, and provide people with modern, digital experiences.  

Zellis has tackled the challenge by providing the most engaging, empowering, and efficient AI-powered HR and payroll solution in the UK and Republic of Ireland markets. 

Delivering award-winning solutions 

Zellis HCM Cloud can help you achieve a lot more than the smooth running of payroll and HR processes. It’s a data-driven, cloud-based, and open HCM software platform, complete with award-winning solutions for payroll, HR, benefits and recognition. Built on Microsoft Azure, Zellis HCM Cloud also connects into the AI-based Microsoft Power Platform – PowerBI for analytics and Power Automate – to create business-wide efficiencies. 

Let’s start with Zellis’ cloud payroll software. It’s automated, accurate and compliant, affording the flexibility and peace of mind that organisations need. You can either use it as a standalone, best-in-class payroll solution, or together with their HR solution. 

Then there’s the HR management software. This empowers your employees, creating process efficiencies via automated AI-driven workflows that free up time for HR to spend on strategic activities. From hire to retire, it supports productivity, enables intelligent reporting, and supports exceptional experiences. 

In addition, the MyView PayNow app is designed to support financial wellbeing. This self-service app, available as an extension to the MyView portal, helps your employees to better understand their pay and benefits, manage their budgeting, choose when to get paid (also known as flexible pay), access free guidance, and save for a rainy day. 

Building innovations of tomorrow 

Leveraging Microsoft technology has enabled Zellis to establish a dedicated Zellis AI Lab to build expertise in AI, exploiting the potential of the Zellis Intelligence Platform combined with Microsoft Azure and OpenAI.  

One of the first products developed in the Zellis AI Lab is a Generative AI-powered chat user interface for use by customers’ colleagues. This is designed to support their engagement and drive HR efficiencies by helping employees to perform HR tasks and understand payslips and employment conditions without needing to raise a ticket.  

This frees up time for the HR and Payroll teams to concentrate on more strategic areas, such as strategy planning by using Zellis AI-driven predictive analytics, instead of spending hours on purely reactive work such as answering employee queries.  

Early indications show that by using AI in this way, customers could reduce the time it takes to respond to employee queries by around 75%.  

Unlock the value of the cloud 

AI software published on the Microsoft marketplace forms a powerful mix of innovation, reliability, security and convenience. If you’re looking for solutions to fuel your cloud transformation and grow your business, it’s the place to shop.   

To move at the speed of business today, many companies prefer buying to building cloud apps. This allows them to offload the associated costs and management onto SaaS partners.  You’re able to use private offers to get exactly what you need, including customised terms and conditions, negotiated pricing, prototypes for proof of concept, and tailor-made solutions.  

Better still, transact in a single, accessible place, reducing procurement complexity, saving time and simplifying billing. Apply 100% of the value of eligible purchases to your organisation’s Azure cloud commitment and get faster time-to-value with solutions that work with your current technology. 

All while enjoying the peace of mind that comes from buying and running solutions on a trusted cloud with industry-leading security.   

Boost your HR and payroll solutions with AI power 

Ready to deploy transformational employee experiences across your organisation? 

Visit the Microsoft marketplace to buy Zellis HCM Cloud now, or contact our team at ISVUK@Microsoft.com.

Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Driving your AI transformation with the Microsoft marketplace 

Blog 2: Safeguarding your business with AI-powered security solutions 

Blog 3: Optimising business operations through AI-powered solutions 

About the author

James joined Microsoft 15 years ago and has held leadership positions across the Consumer, Enterprise, and the Partner teams at Microsoft. James is currently the ISV Ecosystem Lead and has a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success. James has been at the forefront of Cloud & Digital transformation for the last 10 years launching new business models and driving transformation through the Microsoft Partner ecosystem resulting in and contributing to exciting new revenue streams and significantly accelerated growth for Microsoft and Partners.

The post Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In 2022, only 4% of people were employed in digital roles throughout the public sector, highlighting the need to embrace technology, upskill internally and produce better outcomes for everyone. The way to do it is by employing public sector employees as ‘change agents’.

Usually recruited from within the organisation, change agents help to manage the relationship between the organisation and the individual for a smooth digital transformation. The best change agents have extensive experience in department processes and technology and can offer moral support to those cautious of change.

Full-time change agents can be expensive and may divert some of the best and most productive people from a team. So organisations should make smart decisions about how a change agent programme is staffed, managed and supported.

As part of Microsoft’s Innovate Together programme, the Change Agent programme aims to train at least one person in every public sector service to be a catalyst for change. Delivered through expert training sessions and an online community of UK public sector change agents, the programme will provide a platform for the rapid exchange of ideas and solutions to maximise your journey to digital transformation.

This article offers insights into the powerful role of the change agent and allows you to register for the next Change Agent training programme in June 2023, open to those from Local Government organisations.

Delivering transformation benefits on the ground with a change agent

A change agent supports strategic transformations to deliver benefits locally on the ground. They also act as transformation conduits from a technology and a culture perspective. On one hand, they need to supply the central team with regular progress reports and flag up potential issues. On the other hand, they need to win over colleagues and support them in embracing new technologies and ways of working that may be unfamiliar to many.

Using technology to overcome complexity

Given the right training, change agents can match an organisation’s needs with the technology that it already has and advise on other opportunities. The Change Agent programme provides training on a whole host of transformational technologies such as AI and Power Automate, along with insights into how to leverage the tech you are likely already using day to day, from Microsoft Teams to SharePoint.

The training also equips participants with an understanding of the principles of change, how to lead and support change, different learning styles and meeting accessibility requirements through technology; providing attendees with the confidence, theory and practical examples to embrace and lead change within their own organisations.

Confidence in these ‘softer skills’ is crucial in enabling change within a complex industry, which is why one day in the five-day Change Agent programme option is dedicated to providing attendees with the skills to enable change. This content is delivered by industry experts; supporting colleagues to adopt digital tools requires empathy and an understanding of human psychology as well as knowledge of the products being used.

The programme also offers a bespoke version for managers within local government, providing them with sessions on how to support their teams with change, as well as technology specific sessions. This is imperative to fostering a culture of change through a top-down approach.

What really brings the training to life is the real-world examples of how other public sector organisations have leveraged these technologies as the catalyst for change within their own teams. After completing the sessions, the change agents are invited to join a digital community of alumni to further share best practice, providing access to a wider support network at anytime, anywhere.

Even where organisations across the public sector provide completely different services, most have shared common problems and therefore benefit from understanding what technologies others have implemented to resolve these issues. For example, many have a similar approach to technology-enabled time and task management, automation of document ingestion, and reporting. Collaboration between change agents should therefore be encouraged, even if that means overcoming competitive instincts.

How change agents enable transformations that differ in scale

Whilst all public sector transformations differ in scale and scope, the success of a change agent depends on a close understanding of how people respond to – and eventually accept – the introduction of technology into their working life. Leaning on a community of change agents continues to be an invaluable resource to previous alumni.

Large scale transformations could include the introduction of a new HR system. For a smaller transformation, a change agent might help a local council save time on admin by enabling the adoption of some simple digital tools. The Change Agent training programme looks at a wide range of common problem statements and the technologies that help to address some of those issues, with digital breakout rooms to discuss and collaborate.

The first key to achieving measurable benefits from change lies in finding opportunities for efficiencies that might start small or incrementally but can then scale across an entire organisation. The second key is to persuade colleagues to collaborate with the transformation programme and embrace technologies that empower them to do more with less. This usually begins by showing them that change is possible, even on a small scale. This is why change agents benefit from training in technology acceptance strategies throughout the course.

Acquiring change-agent skills

Change agents can be full-time professionals who are qualified to optimise a large-scale programme, or enthusiastic volunteers who work within their teams to deliver measurable results on the ground.

Giving these proactive individuals a forum to update their skills and coordinate their efforts adds value to any organisation’s transformation effort by enhancing its collective intelligence. In other words, a coalition of change agents is greater than the sum of its parts.

Change agents can benefit from learning new skills and putting them into practice at the same time. This is often more efficient than attempting to accelerate onboarding with an intense training schedule at the outset. Enabling new recruits to gradually build their confidence through practice lessens the risk of overwhelming them with too much information. Not all change agents are volunteers; some are nominated by their manager to gather insights on the transformation programme, or to develop their career.

The Microsoft Change Agent programme

This free programme is a national initiative designed to support local and regional government (LRG) in its digital transformation efforts. It is open to Microsoft customers, and offers a five-day version aimed at the ‘change agents’ within an LRG organisation, and a two-day version for managers.

The training employs industry experts from Microsoft and Socitm, and experienced local authority staff to help prepare delegates in theories of change, using a wide variety of Microsoft technologies to address common industry problem statements. Delegates will have the opportunity to learn and engage with others in similar roles across LRG. The programme also provides an opportunity for participants to join a collaborative network of Change Agent alumni practitioners, while learning about digital transformation technologies such as Power Platform, Power Automate, and Power BI.

Read more about our Change Agent programme and partnership with Socitm in the Financial Times – Equip the public sector with digital skills for better government.

Find out more

Microsoft Learn for government
Microsoft Adoption Score
Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative
Digital Skills Hub

About the author

I am an Account Technology Strategist (ATS) at Microsoft, with an MSc in managing and leading IT systems change. I help customers understand how Microsoft products can solve business problems, and I lead the Change Agent programme within the Innovate Together programme. I’m passionate about technology acceptance and supporting scalable, sustainable change across public services.

The post Digital public services: How to drive transformation with change agents appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The way forward for getting your P&L in line is to drive revenue. However, each business is unique, and its situation depends on the company’s leadership function, ownership structure, recent financial history, CapEx and OpEx exposure, and industry-specific concerns.

While digital transformation can often be mistaken as a ‘silver bullet’, it is, in fact, the cost of doing business in today’s environment. So how should finance leaders proceed? 

Balancing cost with ROI: the three biggest challenges for CFOs 

There can be a temptation to make immediate cost savings at every turn. Yet by investing in digital transformation programmes now, astute CFOs: 

• Can deliver a rapid return on investment with efficiency savings, thanks to automation and the cloud. 

• Will future-proof their company at a time of significant technological change. 

• Will make it easier to meet sustainability targets. 

While senior leaders recognise the need for digital investment, they want returns quickly. According to the Gartner Global CFO Poll 2022, 69 percent of CFOs are looking to increase spend around digital transformation initiatives – but their expectations for returns are one to two years. Agility, flexibility, and speed have become more pressing. 

To map out where savings can be made and how best to plan ahead, we advise considering the three most pressing, intersecting challenges faced by CFOs today – and crucially, where technology can win much-needed reprieve, helping organisations ultimately achieve more with less.  

These three challenges are:  

1. Cost optimisation

2. Supply chain

3. Energy

Let’s look at each factor in turn. 

1. Cost optimisation 

Following the global economic crisis of 2007-08, the world’s economy was fuelled by cheap money. With inflation making a return, this has become more difficult to find. Supply-side costs, including scarce affordable energy, have driven up inflation as never before. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the annual rate of input inflation has lurched beyond 20 percent, while input cost inflation for manufacturers leapt 24 percent compared to the same time last year (end of 2022 data).  

How to balance growth aspirations with priorities around spend

This pain may not have hit every business yet. But when companies are forced to respond to it, many will go into survival mode, and some will fail. 

CFOs are having to evaluate their areas of investment to remain competitive when consumer expectations are high, but confidence is low. They also have to prioritise incremental investments designed to deliver efficiency gains. 

Organisations, in turn, are under pressure to ensure every part of their business is working as well as it can – and the digital imperative is key to resolving this. Businesses need more innovation, agility and resilience, with less complexity and at a lower cost, quickly. Put simply, they need to do more with less. 

Making the most of existing infrastructure and technology roadmaps 

We believe organisations should look to their existing infrastructure and technology roadmaps to drive further efficiencies with the assets they already own. They can reduce operational costs by digitising based on unified platforms. 

Rolls-Royce succeeded on both counts by leveraging benefits available in its existing Microsoft stack. The company trained staff to use our low-code Power Platform – including Power Automate, Power BI and Power Apps – which has since become its most popular upskilling solution. In a few months, Rolls-Royce saw a financial benefit of about 8M across the organisation, a figure that can grow organically as more staff and teams use the platform. 

Retaining talent by digitising 

At first, the COVID-19 crisis stalled attrition rates; later, it saw employees reassess their career priorities. Many left their roles in what was sensationally termed the ‘great resignation’. As a result, the war for talent heated up.  

Retaining talent is now more pressing than ever. With employee turnover forecast to be 50 to 75 percent higher than businesses have ever experienced, they need to ensure staff are both happy and productive, with enough investment in skills to keep top talent within the organisation.  

Digital investment is the only way to meet higher staff expectations. Employees want modern technology that works effortlessly, and are increasingly expecting hybrid or remote roles as a given, with all the associated technology support. 

What the pandemic demonstrated to CFOs is that every business must strive to be a technology business, or fail. Those unable to swiftly pivot to digital were punished harshly.  

2. Supply chain

The wider supply chain is the core of most businesses and must absolutely be on every CFO’s radar – but using history to make decisions for the future no longer works. Customer demand is constantly changing, whether it’s influenced by the economic climate or making environmentally conscious purchase decisions.  

To shore up customer confidence, organisations can take advantage of intelligent automation to reduce costs, maximise operating margins and recalibrate their supply chains from ‘just-in-time’ to ‘just-in-case’. 

Take the UK company Spy Alarms, for example. By switching to Microsoft Dynamics, the service team have reduced the time it takes to book a service interview from six minutes to a few seconds. Their sales operations have also benefited from a much simpler and faster quotation process for its 45,000 customers. With the seamless integration of Power BI and Microsoft Teams, all levels of the team have access to data insights – empowering data-driven decision making with incredible precision and foresight.  

3. Energy 

Energy is a hot topic and is central to the boardroom conversations CFOs are becoming involved in. Data centres and offices are an enormous cost factor; a more cost- and energy-efficient answer is to retire data centres and invest in the cloud.  

Investing in the cloud to reduce energy consumption 

At Microsoft, our customers want to use energy management tools to reduce complexities around staffing and save costs in the near to long term. Cloud-native organisations can deliver more core value, with fully managed, end-to-end Azure cloud solutions to boost developer productivity, optimise and allocate resources, and speed up the pace of innovation. 

The East London NHS Trust has been a shining example of this. By taking advantage of Microsoft’s Intelligent Data Platform such as Azure Synapse Analytics and BI, staff can sense-check, monitor metrics and look at trends to see what’s happening on the ward. These insights are accessible from any device and even off the network, building a truly efficient integrated data system. 

Three takeaways: simplify, unify, innovate 

Every business can use technology to become more efficient and effective, whether it’s driving more value from existing platforms and assets, consolidating to reduce cost and complexity, or introducing deployments with rapid payback. 

By leveraging data and AI, businesses are armed with the data and insight on how to increase agility and growth with the assets they already have. 

At Microsoft, we’re working with our customers to define how they will survive, and even thrive, in a continually changing environment. If you’d like to understand more, visit The Microsoft Cloud – Trusted Cloud Platform. 

Find out more

Read Microsoft Azure case studies and customer stories

Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy: Enable your data to do more in the cloud

Imagining more: How organizations are reinventing operations and finding opportunity in the face of volatility

Understanding Microsoft’s digital transformation

About the author

As CFO of Microsoft UK, Mark leads the Finance Organisation supporting Clare Barclay and the UK Senior Leadership team by delivering against the strategic priorities of the company, through influencing key decisions around people, business processes and performance.

Prior to this role, Mark held the position of International CFO at Adobe and Rackspace, where he was a key part of leadership teams driving growth across all markets outside the US. With a career spread across banking, the oil industry and technology, a breadth of finance experience contributes to his dynamic, objective approach as we pursue great customer outcomes with our product portfolio.

Mark returned to the UK recently after spending time in Zurich and Amsterdam in previous roles, is a trained accountant with the ACCA, studied Economics at the University of Leeds and is married with 3 children.

The post How to future-proof your business: a CFO’s-eye view   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In the current economic environment, banks and other financial services firms recognise the need to embrace digital transformation to get maximum value from their technology investments and do more with less. Leveraging technology also helps businesses to navigate emerging risks while driving sustainable and responsible business outcomes internally and with their customers. But how are they approaching these challenges? Last week I attended Sibos 2022 in Amsterdam, where business leaders, policy makers and technologists came together for deep dive debates and big picture outlooks on the future of the corporate banking market, including lending, trade and treasury solutions, and the related capital markets instruments. The energy and excitement on the pace of innovation was clear and I saw many themes that resonate with where we aim to lead the market in our Microsoft UK Financial Services business.  

Geopolitical tensions, the economic environment, evolving cyber threats, the race to Net Zero, the competitive landscape and ongoing reimagination of business models, modernising policy and regulation, and the continuous innovation of what is possible with people, process and digital technology are driving rapid change in the industry. When managed correctly, this change can unlock new opportunity. 

The industry is leading in many areas of technology, product and operating-model innovation, but a responsible business purpose and sustainable societal outcomes are now firmly embedded as objectives that banks are expected to deliver. “We should not seek innovation for innovation’s sake,” noted HM Queen Máxima of the Netherlands in the opening plenary. “With each new technology, we must always ask ‘What problems are we trying to solve?’” At the same time, we need to ensure any innovation is done securely and collaboratively while being additive to interoperability of data and platforms. The IMF predicts technological fragmentation can cut a country’s GDP by five percent; the benefit of collaborative industry approaches and ecosystem business models is clear. 

Through all the customer, partner, and colleague conversations at Sibos 2022, and while contributing and learning as much as we could about new ideas and technologies, the Microsoft UK Financial Services team took away four main action points: 

1.      Transform securely  

One of the key things that was highlighted by industry leaders was the importance of getting cyber security basics right to enable secure transformation. “The human firewall is the first line of defence,” said Nicolas Trimbour, Head of Fraud Prevention and Chief Data Officer for Cash Management at BNP Paribas. It’s important to educate employees and customers to recognise phishing, scams and ransomware attempts especially while the attach surface grows with increased digitisation and growing ecosystem business models. 

AI/ML solutions can work at high performance across large amounts of data to spot fraud or suspicious activity in transactions and endpoints. An industry-specific cloud solution that uses a completely private data model, while offering full data portability can help organisations as they shift from on-premise to hybrid or cloud-native architectures. At the same time, organisations can benefit from built-in security and compliance offerings that infuse healthy cyber hygiene. 

Our security experts have pulled together resources, training and more to help your teams empower and educate your employees and customers to be cyber aware. This is the right time to focus on this with October being Cyber Security Month. Check out our Cyber Security Awareness Month resources. 

2.      Build a talent and collaboration model that supports your digital ambitions   

Banks need access to the right engineering and digital skills at scale to drive industry digitisation and innovation. This is not just about attracting the talent, but re-skilling and up-skilling current resources and creating an empathetic, flexible culture. I’ve often heard it said that the number one headwind on many banks’ ability to execute on their digital transformation strategies is access to the right talent and skills. “We need to make sure we invest in our people and support them in their growth,” says Erika Irish Brown, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and Global Head of Talent at Citi.  

At Microsoft, we’re helping financial services institutions give their employees the digital skills they need. Whether that’s showing how decentralised teams can work collaboratively while working remotely, using tools to securely automate processes and workflows, or empowering pro dev, citizen dev and fusion dev teams to develop new apps, processes and reporting to make their work simpler in their domains. With 53 percent of employees more likely to prioritise health and wellbeing over work, leaders must take an empathetic approach to building a hybrid workplace. A culture that embraces flexibility and prioritises wellbeing will build a thriving organisation and drive long-term sustainable growth. This webinar with my colleague Craig Wellman goes into the importance of planning, leadership and culture in transforming financial services. 

3.      Align your ESG objectives to your business value 

The banking industry has a societal obligation to direct funding, capital, investment and lending to businesses in the real economy that will move the needle positively on ESG measures and on carbon reduction. And not only do customers, stakeholders, investors, regulators and governments expect it, but it’s also good for business. “$97 trillion needs to be invested to get to net zero. That’s a massive opportunity. It’s the most strategic and important thing we can do as an industry,” says Marisa Drew, CSO at Standard Chartered. 

The best way to start building effective ESG strategies is to tie it into your business value. Some institutions are already including their sustainability results in their financial statements. However, the industry faces challenges. A lack of global standard around climate reporting, mixed with slow manual processes and siloed data can affect how quickly you can build an effective strategy. “We don’t have perfect data, but we have actionable data,” says Gill Lofts, Global Financial Services Sustainable Finance Leader at EY. 

A unified and resilient cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can help you gain visibility across your data, drive efficiency, track and minimise your environmental impact and create sustainable value chains. We also need to drive more cross-industry collaboration.

“This is a planet-scale problem that needs planet-scale innovation and collaboration,” says Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft.

When we made our sustainability commitment in 2020, we also decided to share our learnings, results and practices, and increase our focus on supporting our customers drive their own ESG agendas. 

4.      Lead on innovation that can open new sources of value  

Recent innovations are increasingly moving from POC to production adoption across digital assets such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). 

While AI has been leveraged in organisations for a long time to reduce risk and streamline operations, organisations need to take a novel approach to AI to create new avenues of growth. “People don’t think of AI as a way to get to a new digital business,” says Sameena Shah Managing Director, AI Research Executive, and Chief Transformation Officer for Client Onboarding at JP Morgan Chase. “You need to bring people with a business mindset together with people with AI knowledge.” These groups, known as fusion teams, can help organisations deploy solutions up to two and a half times faster than siloed teams. 

“Cash as a form of payment has been declining, but cash in circulation is growing. We have also seen over the past 10 years the rise of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and CBDCs,” says Marion Laboure, Senior Economist at Deutsche Bank. 

One thing digitisation can do is help with financial inclusion. The 1.7 billion people who don’t have access to financial services can potentially use CBDC to start using financial services without a bank account. 

NFTs are currently used to tie ownership to a digital asset. However, as they evolve, it could allow the construction of the end asset to be more sophisticated. “That’s when it becomes more interesting to us in Finance. We can look at a new type of securitised asset, a new type of yield profile that may or may not be totally uncorrelated with traditional markets and assets,” said John Egan, CEO of L’Atelier at BNP Paribas. In fact, the US Securities and Exchange Commission are already looking into NFTs as a security. With no intermediaries, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is less complex and more agile than the traditional central counterparty model. However, it is probably riskier. Experts suggest a hybrid model for DeFi, with the right regulatory guiderails to manage AML, fraud, conduct risk, and cybercrime. 

“Web3 and blockchain technologies are unique because they create a different, efficient way of executing processes. They can be best served to decrease complexity, increase security and transparency,” says Willayna Banner, Microsoft’s Head of Web3/Blockchain in Financial Services. Learn how organisations are using blockchain to transform functions such as trade finance and commercial specialty insurance. 

Collaborating for industry growth and responsible innovation 

As we shared these thoughts and ideas on the future of banking at Sibos 2022, a recurring theme was industry collaboration across the widest perimeter of stakeholders. To drive growth while being resilient, secure and compliant in our changing industry, our key priorities must be removing friction, increasing interoperability and improving the service experience for our customers, empowering our teams, and driving inclusive, sustainable innovation. 

Find out more 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service Webinar for Financial Services: The changing role of the Digital Contact Centre

Rethinking the Customer Experience | Microsoft

About the author 

Niall is responsible for defining and leading Microsoft’s strategy for Financial Services in the UK. His focus is on helping Microsoft’s customers’ address industry-wide challenges, adapt to new regulatory frameworks and achieve business transformation through the adoption of Microsoft technology and partner solutions. He works to deliver on the cost, growth, risk and regulatory agenda front-to-back through the enterprise. 

Niall has experience in consulting, partner ecosystems, and large programme delivery in Financial Services. Niall has focused on operating model transformation and technology solutions for business challenges in Banking and Capital Markets, often in the regulatory change context. He has worked mostly with international banking groups and has lived in Hong Kong and London. 

The post The future of banking: How to stay innovative, collaborative and secure appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Yet those that have taken the transformation leap can now stand as exemplars to newcomers. Their innovation has prompted the creation of many media-specific tools and services in the cloud which are now tried, tested and good to go.

In its new report, The Cloud for Media, the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) examines the practical benefits of the cloud for media companies and software vendors to the industry. It guides companies through cloud technology, strategy, migration, economics, and the skills and governance they’ll need to make transformation a success.

So what are the advantages of migrating media workflows to the cloud? What kind of changes do you need to prepare for? And what are the key takeaways from this report?

Benefits of the cloud

To leverage the full potential of cloud technology, media companies will need to commit to a new business strategy. That’s because migration changes existing business practices and relationships. To carry these changes through, your finance, technology and operational teams really need to be fully behind them.

In theory, this shouldn’t be controversial. The cloud will enable them to simplify processes, cut costs, and be more productive through being able to automate tedious tasks. Meanwhile, it can also free the wider business to adapt, experiment and innovate.

Let’s look at five more industry-specific benefits.

1. Collaborative production

The cloud enables more collaborative workflows, especially in content production. Many producers have successfully adopted Software as a Service (SaaS) tools such as collaborative document editing, file storage and resource planning. With very little training, they can quickly benefit from an excellent user experience.

2. Secure remote work

The cloud’s role in enabling remote and mobile working – supported by premium collaboration tools – is well known. Powerful cloud security solutions will also help protect your employees’ applications, data and devices. For example, single sign-on and multi-factor authentication (MFA) free staff to securely access their tools and resources whenever they need them. From anywhere.

3. Agile content delivery

With cloud-based workflows, you can speed up the supply chain. That’s because, once content is in the cloud, both software and people can access it directly, without a series of distributions. This can be especially useful for news broadcasting and live sports, in which breaking news or a winning goal can be shared with all distribution channels in near-real time. Better still, you could even look to automate the process.

4. Global distribution

A lot of large OTT platforms are run in the cloud, serving video to viewers using content delivery networks (CDNs). If you’re dealing with multiple regions, demand can be unpredictable. But the cloud allows you to scale delivery, without over-provisioning, to match changing demand. You can also use it to deliver live, broadcast-grade content and channels online (as several providers do for major sports).

5. Broadcast

Cloud-based channel playout and linear channel origination is finally on the rise. Protocols like RIST, SRT, and Zixi, combined with gradually improving connectivity and bandwidth, have enabled live streams to be transported into, around and out of the cloud. A note of caution: connectivity remains an area for attention.

Three practical tips for cloud migration

Each organisation will have its own migration journey, dictated by its individual business and customer needs. But the report highlights three key takeaways that will apply for all media companies.

1. Engage your whole organisation

First, get your CFO on-side. You’ll need their support, because the cloud uses an OpEx rather than a CapEx model. Next, work with the business to rethink workflows – don’t just migrate them to the cloud. Finally, to build support on your journey, regularly communicate the end to end strategy and provide training so your teams have the right skills to work alongside the latest technology.

2. Go ‘cloud native’

In other words, create solutions that exploit the cloud’s capabilities. That means taking advantage of its scalability, agility, resilience, performance and cost-effectiveness. Make sure your solutions are also built with security in mind. Consider factors like identity, access management, and encryption.

3. Commit to the process

Define a strategy and plan, and get going. Break your migration journey into manageable steps by migrating individual business areas or workflows one at a time. Move whole workflows to avoid migrating content in and out of the cloud too often (which adds cost and time to the process).

A practical way to learn about technology is to get hands-on with it – perhaps with a straightforward use case. The cost of experimenting is low, so why not try building a component that takes advantage of cloud capabilities, then tracking its performance and fine-tuning it? Or build a different component. Either way, it’s time to seize the day.

Find out more

Download the report: The Cloud for Media

Discover more: Azure Media Services’ new AI-powered innovation

Read about NBA and Microsoft’s new partnership: Redefining and personalising the fan experience

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

As a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry, Stuart has played both sides of the fence having started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is now an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

The post 5 benefits of cloud technology for media companies and how to migrate appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.