Consequently, NHS waiting lists grow longer, and frustration mounts on all sides. Sorting through thousands of pages of medical notes to approve a single paragraph is a significant undertaking. Smartbox.ai aims to alleviate this burden. 

DSARs and the NHS: a snapshot

Daily, the NHS faces complex DSARs from ex-employees and patients requesting their medical records for various reasons, such as insurance or further treatment investigations.

The sheer volume of data involved is significant, including emails with numerous attachments. Manually reviewing these documents to identify and redact personal data takes approximately 52.5 hours per request, based on our analysis. It’s not only time-consuming but also monotonous for the staff involved.

In addition, our research suggests that each DSAR costs around £1,258 to process. With an organisation handling 120 requests annually, this amounts to 5,985 hours at a cost of £143,432. As mentioned above, the NHS deals with thousands – if not tens of thousands – of these requests every year.

There’s also the issue of duplication, with up to 60% of the dataset being redundant. This increases the time required and the risk of errors, such as accidentally disclosing sensitive information.

The NHS also faces significant challenges

In addition, the following challenges arise when dealing with patient DSARs: 

• Differentiating between third-party names and those of doctors and clinicians, as all third-party names must be redacted. This is a complex and time-consuming task. 

• Identifying medical record contamination, where records may have been mixed up during digitisation. This is difficult to detect and poses a significant risk, since the NHS can face substantial fines for disclosing third-party medical records.

• Accurately detecting harmful information within the dataset, such as details of abusive relationships, drug problems or sexual abuse.  

Together, these steps amount to an additional and significant manual burden for already stretched teams.

Overcoming real-world obstacles with Microsoft solutions

Smartbox.ai improves the accuracy and speed of servicing DSARs using Microsoft Azure’s form recognition and natural language processing capabilities. By leveraging these and other Azure tools, Smartbox.ai can automate the conversion of files to PDFs at the rate of around 10,000 pages per hour, while automatically identifying and highlighting personal data and duplicates.

We also developed tools to address challenges specific to the NHS. We use regular expressions to identify medical record numbers within a dataset, flagging any discrepancies. Smartbox.ai is able to locate and delete unwanted data, preventing the disclosure of incorrect records.

We work with NHS boards to create dictionaries that differentiate between third-party names and doctors/clinicians. We can list all names in a dataset, redact third-party names and retain relevant doctor/clinician names using our Bulk Redaction technology. We’ve also created a dictionary for sensitive words related to abuse, sexual assault and other critical information – allowing users to navigate to the relevant pages and decide if redaction is necessary.

While human interaction is still required, Smartbox.ai simplifies the process, enabling clinicians to focus on their core duties. Our complex tagging system highlights areas needing review, reducing the time spent on lengthy documents.

Extending innovation to local government

Local government bodies face similar challenges with DSARs, particularly when dealing with requests for personal data from residents and employees. The volume of data and the need for meticulous redaction can be overwhelming.

Smartbox.ai can streamline this process by automating data conversion, identifying personal information and flagging duplicates.

This reduces the time and cost associated with manual data review, allowing local government staff to focus on more critical tasks and improving overall efficiency.

Results that make a difference

With Smartbox.ai, the cost per case is just over £17 according to a customer survey we carried out in May 2025, and this frees up thousands of hours for NHS and local government staff. Giving doctors and government employees more time to focus on their primary responsibilities.

We’ve seen significant results with the NHS. For example, one customer reported a reduction of 36,000 files to 18,000 by eliminating unnecessary information, and cut that even further to 374 relevant files using our technology.

In another case, a high-security psychiatric hospital using Smartbox.ai reported a 70% reduction in time and effort when responding to DSARs, while also increasing accuracy and reducing risk.

Smartbox.ai has helped free up valuable resources and alleviate a significant burden for staff in our vital public services.

Working in partnership with Microsoft

Microsoft is focused on helping industry customers drive transformation, and working with AI companies like Smartbox.AI is an important part of this strategy. By integrating Microsoft solutions into our AI stack, we’re extending their capabilities to our global customer base – helping drive shared innovation at scale. The opportunity is significant, given Microsoft’s world-class AI capability and the impact of its solutions across industry.

All data points and case study examples are based on Smartbox.ai research or customer-reported outcomes and have not been independently verified by Microsoft.

Find out more

Download the e-book: Transform ISV Applications with Intelligent AI Personalisation
Watch the webinar: What is New in ISV Success – AI benefits and More 

About the author

With nearly 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, Darren currently holds the position of CRO for the 2023 AI Company of the Year, Smartbox.ai. The company uses AI to detect and redact personal and sensitive information buried within datasets and IT environments. Prior to his role at Smartbox.ai, Darren was the Managing Director at Bytes Document Solutions, and the founder and Managing Director of the channel services group, Boost Technology Group. He has been a CRN IT industry judge every year since 2016 and is a regular commentator on IT industry matters.

The post How Smartbox.ai and Microsoft are reducing DSAR costs for the NHS and local government appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The emergence of AI agents is poised to further accelerate innovation. In this article, we’ll explore the impact of these agents on the insurance sector and how organisations are using them to transform business operations.   

What are AI-powered agents?  

Often referred to as “orchestrator agents”, autonomous AI agents are designed to achieve specific goals with reduced intervention from us. Extracting greater value from existing data, reducing operational costs, automating processes and improving decision-making. They can also learn from past interactions and even execute tasks autonomously.

While these improvements are promising, safety is key to rolling out agentic systems. This means prioritising security, privacy and safety throughout AI development. Drawing on decades of expertise in building AI products, Microsoft is committed to industry-leading practices and capabilities. This includes our Secure Future Initiative and Responsible AI principles, providing a solid foundation to unlock AI’s transformative potential with confidence.  

These efforts enable insurers to enhance the customer experience while maintaining outstanding standards of trust and reliability.

Using agents in the insurance industry 

Here are some significant industry use cases. 

Transforming underwriting through time-saving

AI-enabled tools in underwriting can automate data ingestion, translate unstructured data into structured data, and help underwriters access and interpret information from multiple, isolated sources.  

For example, Markerstudy Group built an app for its claims department on Azure OpenAI to summarise claims calls for handlers. With 300 claims handlers using the app, the organisation saved around four minutes per call – and a total of 7,500 working days.

AI agents can also provide real-time cross-checks, ensure compliance with new regulations, and help underwriters evaluate more policies by removing manual tasks from their workflow. For example, Zurich Insurance Group is using tools like Azure OpenAI to support more accurate, efficient risk evaluations – accelerating underwriting and boosting customer satisfaction.

Automating claims processes and data analysis

Agentic AI can automate the extraction and validation of claims data from forms, emails or portals. It can also cross-reference claim information with policies and coverage terms, and route claims for approval or escalation based on pre-defined rules.  

Insurance platform Nsure.com has created a customer copilot which draws data from Microsoft Fabric and helps customers submit payments, review renewal offers and request discounts. Along with text, the copilot offers an interactive voice response option and handles around 60% of customer questions. In scenarios like this, agents can reduce the claims process from weeks to hours.  

Improving customer services and empowering employees

With chatbots available 24/7 and capable of understanding natural language, AI agents can increase customer choice, personalisation and satisfaction. 

When a customer initiates a claim, they typically complete a form to gather general information and open the damage case. To streamline this process and improve service quality, insurance company DOMCURA has developed an AI-powered agent called Claimens, capable of handling calls, guiding customers through the claim form and outlining next steps.  

By handling simple tasks, the agent enables case workers to focus on more complex claims, which helps improve the experience for both customers and employees. 

Take the next step with trusted support 

With the UK government’s Action Plan emphasising the role of AI in driving economic growth, implementing AI-powered agents is now a key strategic priority and differentiator for businesses.  

The value of agents comes from their potential to support complex use cases across business functions, particularly for workflows that involve time-consuming tasks or require multiple sources of data. To get started with Microsoft as your partner, we invite you to co-innovate AI use cases to ensure we’re transforming priority areas.  

By leveraging proven solutions, you can streamline processes and improve customer satisfaction while maintaining the highest standards of trust and reliability. 

To learn how to build your strategic plan today and discover the five stages of AI value creation, download a free copy of our AI Strategy Roadmap.  

Find out more

Read the blog: Insurance in the era of generative AI – use cases that transform the industry

About the author

James has held leadership positions across Microsoft Consumer and Enterprise teams. With a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success, he has been at the forefront of cloud and digital transformation for over a decade, developing new revenue streams and significantly accelerating growth.

The post Transforming insurance with AI-powered autonomous agents  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

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.

Today, the pressures are different. The global workforce is shrinking as the population ages. Labour productivity is in the doldrums. And, with a more connected global population, security threats emerge and evolve faster than ever. While human ingenuity and expertise will always be needed to defend against these threats, 87% of leaders see AI as a market advantage.  

Whether you’re looking to improve agility and security in your SAP workloads, wanting to innovate without disrupting core business processes or looking for more control over your SAP migration, the cloud and AI offer a unique opportunity.

Here are five ways the Microsoft Cloud can help you harness the power of AI and extend your SAP capabilities. 

1. Create faster with AI-powered data insights

In a world of deadlines and labour-intensive tasks, innovation and creativity can suffer. By integrating Azure AI services to your SAP data, you can optimise your workflow and empower your employees to create ideas and content faster. Our AI-powered data platforms also help you complete time-consuming tasks with ease, offering instant and intelligent insights that propel your work forward. 

An example is the Microsoft Fabric platform. It delivers data analytics in a software-as-a-service model, with an open, lake-centric data architecture and deep integration with Microsoft 365. Its built-in AI Copilot helps you find out what you need to know using natural language. In addition, it’s built to work across clouds, so you can easily migrate elsewhere in the future. 

Part of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is Power BI, relied on by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies. With easy-to-use AI analysis capabilities and AI-powered data summarisation, it helps you find insights, make decisions and take appropriate action with ease.  

2. Improve collaboration and productivity

To get the most from your employees, they need to be freed from siloed technology, software and business processes. You can enhance employee productivity by integrating and giving access to SAP data in Microsoft 365. 

With Microsoft 365 Copilot, your AI assistant can help you keep work organised and your employees productive. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph – your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more – and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. 

Copilot for Microsoft 365 works alongside your favourite day-to-day office apps. Just a few examples:

• You can be more creative in Microsoft Word, as Copilot writes, edits, summarises and creates alongside you. Rapidly find key information or get a head start by generating (and then re-generating) a full client brief.

• Copilot helps put all the rich capabilities of Microsoft Excel at your fingertips. It will review and edit data with simple prompts, make sheet-wide updates in seconds, and visualise key insights from large data-sets. 

• In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can now quickly summarise an entire presentation deck, or organise your deck into sections. Copilot also makes it easy to transform existing written documents into full decks, complete with speaker notes and sources – all with a few simple, spoken prompts. 

• With Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Copilot lightens the load and provides the gift of clarity. Summarising long email or message threads (with bullet points and all), pulling out different opinions expressed in meetings, and quickly drafting suggested replies and action items, all in real time. So you can unlock the magic of efficient and effective meetings. ​ 

Combining Microsoft Generative AI with SAP’s SuccessFactors and Joule enables new experiences for HR leaders, recruiters, hiring managers and employees. They can now create tailored job descriptions based on SAP SuccessFactors data and external data. Or rapidly generate interview questions based on an applicant’s CV. Using Microsoft Viva Copilot, employees will be able to curate their own learning paths. 

3. Simplify with automation and innovation

When great ideas or highly productive employees are held back by repetitive or labour-intensive business processes, it can stifle progress and creativity. Simplify your business process with AI-powered development and automation, using your SAP data. 

For over a decade, we’ve been progressively unifying the Microsoft Power Platform into a unique, fully integrated and cloud-powered suite. With solutions such as Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and AI Builder, we’ve reinvented how all makers develop software, further democratising access to innovative business solutions.

Today, all employees have access to the tools they need to create applications, solve problems, automate workflows and analyse data more effectively. With Copilot working as your AI assistant in Power Apps, the development process is more accessible and less repetitive, so your development cycles don’t get slowed down.

Just describe your goal verbally, and Power Apps will use integrated AI to generate code, and even build complete apps. Check out the latest AI and other advances built into Power Apps.

You can also auto-generate working apps and data within seconds from images and design files. Save time, build more complex solutions, and reimagine business applications. Empower anyone across the business to create apps quickly and easily. 

4. Improve developer productivity with Copilot

Working faster and smarter can be crucial when it comes to business competitiveness and innovation. One of the most exciting new capabilities we’ve recently launched with GitHub is a new service we call GitHub Copilot. It can empower developers to save time and energy with AI-generated code, and helps easily integrate AI capabilities into SAP ABAP applications. 

GitHub Copilot provides an AI-pair programmer that works with all of the popular programming languages. This dramatically accelerates developer productivity. Up to 46% of all new code written by developers using Copilot is now fully AI-generated, with developers reporting a 55% productivity boost by using Copilot. 60% to 75% of developers who use GitHub Copilot also say it helps them focus on more satisfying work and enjoy their jobs more. 

5. Stay ahead with AI-powered security

Keeping protected against cyberthreats in today’s security landscape means being able to respond quickly and effectively. With Microsoft Security Copilot, you can do just that. 

Security Copilot combines the most advanced GPT4 model from OpenAI with a Microsoft-developed, security-specific model. It’s powered by Microsoft Security’s unique expertise and scale, sifting through 65 trillion signals daily. So whether you need to detect hidden patterns, harden defences or respond to incidents in your SAP systems, it’ll help you do it better and faster. 

As the first and only generative AI security product to help defend organisations at machine speed and scale, Security Copilot helps you be more effective and efficient while also supporting your teams to solve security challenges. It runs on our security and privacy-compliant hyperscale infrastructure, which is unique to Microsoft and brings the full benefit of being on the Azure cloud platform. And over time, it will work with a growing ecosystem of products from third-party vendors. 

With this comprehensive approach, and all your security capabilities in one place, you’ll benefit from unparalleled simplicity, visibility, automation, and intelligence.  

Extend SAP and innovate on Microsoft Cloud

Redefine what’s possible by integrating AI and Microsoft into your SAP data. It can help empower your employees, accelerate savings in your business, optimise your workload and enhance your productivity.  

To learn how AI can benefit your organisation and how we’ll support you through the change, please contact the authors, Sean Pilkington and Tom Payne, or your Microsoft representatives. 

Find out more

Microsoft Discovery Day: SAP on the Microsoft Cloud

Maximize SAP Investments by Migrating to the Microsoft Cloud: On-demand webinar

Innovate on Your SAP Data with Power Platform Integration: On-demand webinar

About the authors

Sean Pilkington

As the SAP on Azure UK Lead at Microsoft, Sean draws on over 20 years of experience in SAP design and solutioning to help clients visualise how their SAP solutions can be deployed into the Azure cloud. He thrives on demonstrating innovative technology that seamlessly blends with SAP to give customers the best experience, while enabling their business to drive down costs, increase ROI on technology and accelerate their digital transformation.

Tom Payne

As the SAP on Azure Sales Lead at Microsoft, Tom brings a wealth of experience to empowering SAP customers as they embrace cloud transformation with Microsoft Azure. He is adept at simplifying complex technology applications while optimising the customer journey.

The post Embrace the art of the possible: 5 ways Microsoft AI can enhance your SAP workload  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

For those looking for the full history behind the first release, please see the Cross Government Collaboration Blueprint – History Refresher content at bottom of this blog.

The story so far…

In June 2021, we partnered with the Central Digital and Data Office and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and set out to improve the collaboration experience for UK government organisations by creating a Cross-Government Collaboration Blueprint. The blueprint was created by focussing on key scenarios developed in consultation with several government organisations. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the other guidance we have published, which focuses on Secure Configuration, BYOD, and Information Protection (more on that later). Please be sure to check out those too, so you have the full ‘box set’.

Fast forward to today, we’ve given that ‘box set’ a new name that makes it clear how the guidance fits together, seen in this illustration:

We also updated the guidance based on real-world feedback and product evolution to include the following:

• Addition of Shared Channels guidance
• Updates that clarify Calendar Availability guidance
• Azure AD B2B updates
• Brand and naming updates to align with changes to Microsoft technology
• Teams 2.0 Release
• A statement in the Strategy regarding Google Federation

A notable recent development is the update to the Government Security Classification Policy (GSCP). Microsoft has partnered with Government Security Group, the Central Digital and Data Office and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to provide configuration guidance for those wishing to implement the OFFICIAL tier of the GSCP using Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MPIP), available as part of Microsoft 365. The guidance assists those wishing to classify and protect files, control who can access them, and allow greater control when sharing information between departments, partner organisations, and customers. You can read about the Microsoft 365 Guidance for UK Government: Information Protection in another blog post.

Download the documents

About the authors

James has spent his entire IT career of 25 years specialising in the security arena, the last 20 of which have been for Microsoft. Based in the UK, he works in the key areas of security and identity in the public sector as a Cyber Cloud Solutions Architect. He is a regular contributor to Microsoft docs for Securing Privileged Access and was the lead architect for the Office 365 and BYOD guidance produced for Cabinet Office and NCSC.

Steve is an experienced IT Professional with over 20 years’ experience, working with clients across the world in multiple industries to help them achieve their goals in digital transformation. Recently Steve has been aligned to public sector clients, leading them to get the most out of their investment in the Microsoft cloud.

Cross Government Collaboration Blueprint – history refresher

We started this work in 2021 by consulting a broad group of end users from across government, and we found that there was an inconsistent user experience when working with colleagues from other organisations due to differences in configuration. The guidance helps to address this, and it is important to keep up with the recent developments of Microsoft 365, which is why we have updated the guidance.

We determined that a baseline configuration for government organisations would enable a more consistent and secure approach to collaboration. The recommended configuration we’ve produced focuses on these key areas:

• Keeping control of documents and allowing real-time co-authoring by sharing links rather than sending documents as email attachments.
• Making it easier to arrange meetings by allowing people to share their calendar availability across government.
• Allowing people to work more effectively as a team by enabling instant messaging and other features of Microsoft Teams.

Crucially, we’ve recommended an open approach to collaboration by default, giving users the freedom to choose who they collaborate with. This is a move away from a more restrictive ‘allow list’ approach which can create barriers to collaboration.

Does this approach make it less secure? No. Here’s what the NCSC have said:

“By following the Secure Configuration Alignment and applying the cross-government collaboration guidance on top, it is the NCSC’s view that Microsoft 365 can be appropriately configured to protect an organisation’s data against the threat profile for the OFFICIAL classification when collaborating and sharing information between government departments. The NCSC expects that guidance related to collaboration and security is implemented in its entirety to avoid gaps and weaknesses leading to increased risk of a data breach.

“The NCSC believes that modern cross-organisation collaboration services that share access to information via its originating system will be more secure than traditional methods such as sending copies as email attachments to external organisations. By using modern collaboration practices, such as those described in this guidance, organisations have greater auditing and visibility of how their data is being handled and more options for owning who and where their information is handled.”

National Cyber Security Centre

The Blueprint is intended to be a baseline upon which individual organisations can build. For example, if an organisation identifies specific needs that aren’t met by the Blueprint, there is flexibility for them to go further and implement even tighter controls, while being mindful that this could impact on people’s collaboration experience.

Find out more

Visit the Microsoft for Government website

Guidance on protecting government data using Microsoft Purview

Explore Microsoft UK Industry blogs: Government

The post Microsoft 365 Guidance for UK Government: External Collaboration appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The guidance assists those wishing to classify and protect files, control who can access them, and allow greater control when sharing information between departments, partner organisations, and customers.

A spokesman from the Government Security Group said: ”The Government Security Classifications policy (GSCP) sets out the administrative system used by HM Government (HMG) and our partners to appropriately protect information and data assets against prevalent threat actors. The GSCP was updated in 2023.

“This gave us a significant opportunity in UK government to modernise and standardise how organisations apply technical controls in line with security classifications. Microsoft 365 is widely used across UK government, so we partnered directly with Microsoft to define a standard approach to applying sensitivity labels and data loss prevention features of Microsoft 365 in line with the GSCP.

“The resulting technical guidance provides a baseline from which organisations can select the most relevant elements and tailor them for their specific use cases. Our objective is that this will be an enabler for the GSCP and that it will also create a better user experience for civil servants and our partners.”

Building on the Government’s Secure Configuration Blueprint

This guidance builds upon the Microsoft 365 Guidance for UK Government: Secure Configuration Blueprint for the UK Public Sector, which outlines how to configure a Microsoft 365 tenant for use at OFFICIAL (which includes OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE), and sits alongside the Cross Government Collaboration guidance and the Bring Your Own Device guidance.

Figure 1. Relationship with other NCSC and Microsoft guidance.

The guidance draws on experience gained working right across UK government and the public sector industry and incorporates existing best practice that has previously been published by Microsoft.

We determined that a baseline configuration for government organisations would enable a more consistent and secure approach to configuring classification and protection policies by providing a starting point for technology and compliance professionals alike. The recommended configuration we’ve produced focuses on these key areas:

• Increasing visibility of where data is located to data governance teams.
• Providing protection that follows documents as they are accessed internally or when shared externally by assigning the relevant GSCP label.
• Providing visual labels that indicate how a document should be handled.
• Providing visual labels for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to control whether external users are allowed access to content stored within them.
• Complementing the Cross Government Collaboration Blueprint to mark and protect documents as they are shared and co-authored between Government departments and partners.

Important note about this guidance

This guidance has been written as a starting point and organisations should consider how they may wish to supplement it with additional controls, as appropriate for the environment and risk appetite.

The blueprint guidance has been structured to follow a Microsoft-recommended three-phase approach for implementation: ‘Crawl, Walk, and Run’.

Figure 2. Microsoft’s recommended three-phase approach to implementation.

With the ‘Crawl, Walk, Run’ approach, changes can be introduced in phases across your organisation, focusing on small sets of users first and then expanding to broader audiences. This will allow you to deploy quickly whilst minimising disruption and help you establish a baseline of user behaviour before introducing tighter restrictions. It will also help you identify early potential conflicts or compatibility issues between different tools, so you can address them before they have further impact.

Using the visual indication provided with sensitivity labels is a small, but important benefit of the capability that sensitivity labels can provide. The guidance is based on an outcomes-based approach which aims to reduce the likelihood of accidental data loss or oversharing.

The guidance looks to provide ‘outcomes-based’ controls that use the features available in Microsoft Purview Information Protection to restrict access to content based on the label selected.  The sensitivity labels are broken down into two distinct areas: content labels and container labels.

Content labels

Content labelling applies the label directly to documents and emails. This stamps the data with label metadata, which is maintained wherever the data resides.

Figure 3. How content labelling relates to data, controls and policy.

Content labels are used to provide visual indicators for the scope where the document or email should be accessed.

Figure 4. Access areas that may be denoted by content labels.

Container labels

Container labels apply to a workload (e.g. SharePoint, Teams or M365 group) where content is stored.  The labels are used to define whether External Guest users are allowed to access the container and collaborate with internal member users.

Figure 5. Container labels define access permissions for External Guest users.

Container labelling applies the sensitivity label at the container. Container labels are named differently from the data labels as they serve a different function – namely to control access to the containers. These labels provide a visual representation of the Privacy level, Public or Private, and whether external guest users are allowed to be members of the Team or SharePoint site, Internal or External.

Find out more

Microsoft for critical infrastructure

Microsoft 365 Guidance for UK Government: External Collaboration

UK OFFICIAL and UK NHS Regulatory Compliance built-in initiative

About the author

James has spent his entire IT career of 27 years specialising in the security arena, the last 22 of which have been for Microsoft. Based in the UK, he works in the key areas of security and identity in the public sector as a Security Technical Specialist. He is a regular contributor to Microsoft docs for Securing Privileged Access and was the lead architect for the Microsoft 365, Cross Government Collaboration and BYOD guidance produced for Cabinet Office and NCSC.

The post Guidance on protecting government data using Microsoft Purview appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Microsoft Azure is a platform that can cater to your analytical workloads – picking the right tool for the right job is the key. Fortunately, the core offerings can be broken down into three platform as a service (PaaS) offerings for storing and managing your high scale data workloads, Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks and HDInsight, and a well-integrated tool for visualising it, Microsoft Power BI.

Storing and managing your data

Analytics in the cloud is ultimately about storing your data in the cloud where it can be conveniently processed using powerful services. There are three Azure services for processing your data. One is built by Microsoft and the other two are popular non-Microsoft platforms hosted as first-party services on Azure.

Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) is a massively parallel job service that can ingest file data and dynamically process it into more manageable data. ADLA uses U-SQL, a query language that is a mix of C# and SQL. It is deeply integrated with Visual Studio for development and debugging. It is also integrated with Active Directory, so if you are already using Microsoft for your identity management, it is a convenient way to extend your prior technology investments.

Azure Data Lake Analytics works hand-in-hand with another Azure service called Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS). ADLS Gen2, which was made available to the public earlier this year, takes many of the features of the original ADLS and builds them on top of Azure Blob Storage. Since Azure Data Lake Storage is built around Apache YARN, it will also play well with any platform that uses the open Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) standard, such as Databricks or HDInsight.

Azure Databricks is based on the popular Apache Spark analytics platform and makes it easier to work with and scale data processing and machine learning. The team that developed Databricks is in large part of the same team that originally created Spark as a cluster-computing framework at University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, the Databricks team worked with Microsoft to develop Azure Databricks as a first-party Microsoft service that integrates natively with Active Directory and other Azure tools.

If you prefer to process and analyse data using open source frameworks, HDInsight is a platform that combines several of them, including Apache Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Hive, and Storm. This is the most cost-effective option for Azure-based analytics in the cloud. Using open source frameworks also allows you to enjoy community support and community apps while having access to Azure security and service level agreements (SLAs).

Viewing your data

Housing and analysing your data is only part of the story. To visualise your data, Microsoft provides Power BI, a powerful data visualisation tool that integrates with Data Lake Storage, Databricks, and HDInsight.

Produce dashboards and reports with rich visualisations in Power BI. There are 3 components to note when using Power BI:

• Power BI Desktop is a Windows desktop application for your data analysts to build and create dashboards and reports to share with your wider organisation and business users .
• Data Analysts will publish their content to the Power BI service, this is a cloud service where you you store and share the reports you create  with others members of your organization.
• For those roles within your business that are away from their main devices there are also IOS, Android and Windows apps to access from your mobile devices to get access to your content wherever and whenever you need it.

Power BI offers a variety of visualisation types out-of-the-box such as bar charts, pie charts, gauges, KPIs, scatter charts, and maps. Besides these standard charts, Power BI also enables you to create your own custom visualisations. You can share your visualisations with others on a community site or  become inspired by other people’s charts. In addition, you have the ability to create even more impact with Report Themes. As with custom visualisations, you can share your custom designs in the community themes gallery.

Summary

Azure analytics in the cloud provides multiple ways to process and analyse your high scale data, whether you want to use Microsoft solutions or prefer to use open source solutions hosted on Azure. Either way, Azure provides the security, data storage and compute resources, data storage and compute resources to allow you to work with big data in a manner of your choosing through Data Lake Storage, Databricks, and HDInsight. Once your data is processed and analysed, you can use Microsoft Power BI to visualise and present your results on both desktop and mobile platforms and paint a picture of your cloud data.

Learn more

• Create and use analytics reports with Power BI
• Get started with Microsoft data analytics
• Implement a Data Streaming Solution with Azure Streaming Analytics
• Transform data by using Azure Stream Analytics

The post An introduction to cloud analytics appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.