The 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report is designed to prepare leaders and employees for this shift. As in previous years, it draws on a large global survey, Microsoft 365 telemetry and LinkedIn hiring and labor trends. New this year are insights from AI-native startups, economists, scientists and academics — all pointing to a seismic shift already underway. In fact, 82% of leaders say this is a pivotal year to rethink core aspects of strategy and operations.

The data reveals the emergence of a new kind of organization: the Frontier Firm — built around intelligence on tap, human-agent teams and a new role for everyone: agent boss. While the shift ahead is profound, human ambition, creativity and ingenuity will continue to create new economic value and opportunity. In fact, 71% of workers at these firms say their company is thriving, compared to just 37% globally.

You can buy intelligence on tap

Imagine if you knew, before the internet took off, just how much it would reshape business. That’s where we are with AI. Intelligence is no longer bound by headcount or expertise. It’s an essential durable good: abundant, affordable and scalable on-demand. As economic and shareholder pressures grow, this on-demand intelligence offers a new lever for growth — one that can close the growing gap between business demands and human capacity. While 53% of leaders say productivity must increase, 80% of the global workforce reports lacking the time or energy to do their job. And on average, employees are interrupted by a meeting, email or ping every 2 minutes. To bridge this Capacity Gap, 82% of leaders expect to use digital labor to expand their workforce in the next 12 to 18 months.

Digital labor will spur the reinvention of even the most established firms — and the birth of new companies we haven’t even thought of yet. On LinkedIn, top AI startups are hiring at 2X the rate of Big Tech. Much of that talent is flowing out of Big Tech and staying in the startup world, pointing to a deeper shift where innovation — and opportunity — are rising. As incumbents adapt and challengers scale, like we saw in the .com boom, the rules of talent and competition are being rewritten in real time.

Human-agent teams will upend the org chart

As AI continues to democratize expertise, we’re seeing a move from rigid org charts to more fluid, outcome-driven Work Charts. These structures flex with the needs of the business, drawing on the right mix of humans and agents to get the job done. While every function will evolve at a different pace and scale, 46% of leaders say their organization is using agents to fully automate workstreams or business processes — with customer service, marketing and product development as the top AI investment priorities.

To maximize the impact of these human-agent teams, organizations need a new metric: the human-agent ratio. Leaders must ask two critical questions: How many agents are needed for which roles and tasks? And how many humans are needed to guide them? Getting that ratio right will be critical — and task-specific. Organizations will need to consider if there are times when human and digital labor outperform AI alone, when customers prefer a human touch or when society expects people to be responsible for the consequences — like a high-stakes product or finance decision. Whether it’s a customer conversation, a strategic decision or a product launch, knowing how to staff the right mix of humans and agents will define how work gets done — and how success is measured.

Every employee becomes an agent boss

As agents increasingly join the workforce, we’ll see the rise of the agent boss: someone who builds, delegates to and manages agents to amplify their impact and take control of their career in the age of AI. From the boardroom to the frontline, every worker will need to think like the CEO of an agent-powered startup. In fact, leaders expect their teams will be training (41%) and managing (36%) agents within five years.

For those ready to lean in, AI will be a career accelerator — but leaders are ahead. We measured the agent boss mindset across seven indicators — from regular use and trust to career impact. Leaders outpace employees on every measure: 67% are familiar with agents (vs. 40% of employees) and 79% believe AI will accelerate their careers (vs. 67%). But this shift won’t stop at the top. As agents become embedded into daily work, roles across every level and function will evolve — along with the broader workforce. While 33% of leaders are considering headcount reductions, 78% are considering hiring for new AI roles. And 83% say AI will enable employees to take on more complex and strategic work earlier in their careers.

This shift is multifaceted — every industry and role will evolve differently as the technology diffuses across business and society. Just as the internet era created billions of new knowledge jobs — from social media managers to UX designers — the AI era is already giving rise to new roles, with many more to come. Preparing for what’s next is no longer optional. Employees must build AI skills and companies must support them with the right tools and training. This moment calls for honest conversations, intentional communication and real investment in reskilling. The companies that invest now won’t just keep up — they’ll shape what comes next.

Copilot is the new UI for AI

Today we’re announcing the Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Spring release — designed to power the next era of human–agent collaboration. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is now your window into the world of agents, with new capabilities for this next phase — driven by more advanced models, adaptive memory and reasoning agents that work alongside you. Updates include:

• Researcher and Analyst agents powered by OpenAI’s deep reasoning models rolling out to customers through the Frontier program — and with our new Agent Store, you can easily find, pin and use agents — from partners like Jira, Monday.com and Miro — or your own custom agents.

• Create brings OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI image generator to work, unlocking design and content creation skills for everyone. Easily modify or customize brand images or generate AI images aligned to your company’s approved brand guidelines and create everything from marketing copy and social assets to newsletter banners, videos and more.

• Copilot Notebooks transforms your notes, documents and data into immediate insights and actions. By grounding Copilot in a notebook containing specific chats, files, meeting recordings and more, it can focus on the most relevant information — all while constantly scanning your source material to update in real time as your data evolves. Notebooks can even create an audio overview of your content with two hosts that walk you through the key points — a fun, flexible way to stay informed.
• Copilot Search is a new AI-powered enterprise search that helps you find what you need instantly with rich, context-aware answers from across your organization’s apps and data. It connects to first- and third-party apps — from ServiceNow to Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, Jira and more — so you get fast, relevant results at work no matter where your data lives.
• New capabilities in the Copilot Control System empower IT pros to enable, disable or block agents for specific users or groups — to help ensure the right agents are being used by the right people.

2025 will be remembered as the year the Frontier Firm was born — the moment companies moved beyond experimenting with AI and began rebuilding around it. Like the digital native companies of a generation ago, they understand the power of pairing irreplaceable human insight with AI and agents to unlock outsized value. We’re giving customers the insight to anticipate what’s next — and the technology to help shape it.

Read the Annual Work Trend Index on WorkLab and visit the Microsoft 365 Blog to learn more about our product announcements. Learn what this year’s Work Trend Index findings mean for small and medium-sized businesses.

For all the blogs, videos and assets related to today’s announcement, please visit our microsite.

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Subtle and complex in nature, social inflation impacts profitability by driving up claims payments. Outpacing economic inflation by 1.7% in the United States from 2017 to 2022,¹ social inflation drove a 57% surge in liability claims over the past 10 years,² and led to a USD20 billion increase in commercial auto liability payouts from 2010 to 2019.³ 

In response, insurers are increasingly turning to technology, particularly AI, to help predict trends, enhance underwriting processes, and automate workflows. And now, with the potential application of a cloud-based solution that lets companies explore insights collaboratively, insurers can have more options.  

Helping insurers forge effective long-term technology strategies is core to our vision for intelligent insurance and our work with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. In the case of social inflation, cloud and AI can help insurers mitigate the incidence and impact of unpredictable outcomes. 

How cloud and AI can help solve the social inflation challenge 

To improve competitiveness amid a volatile landscape, most insurers have invested in cloud modernization over the past decade. This provides an essential foundation for many critical benefits. For example, solutions built on Microsoft Power BI can track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs), perform predictive analytics, and generate real-time insights.  

Generative AI is now expanding upon these core benefits to deliver dramatic improvements in productivity, operations, and enhanced workflows. For many firms, the first step in realizing value from generative AI is to adapt Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is integrated seamlessly in Microsoft productivity applications. Drawing on the full scope of Microsoft 365 data within the firm (such as emails, Word and Excel documents, Teams communications, and more) Microsoft 365 Copilot can, for instance, help a claims analyst generate a report that draws on the best available information from research reports, emails, calls, and external data sources.  

Many firms are also building custom agents to address specific use cases on challenges such as streamlining processes, enhancing claims processing workflows, and improving overall productivity. Additional value is also being unlocked as firms transform their unstructured data into structured formats, which enables even more robust predictive models and other advanced data analytics.  

To help address social inflation, generative AI and agent functionality can be used to gain important new insights, such as the following:  

• News monitoring: AI-powered tools can continuously scan and analyze news articles from myriad sources. Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), these tools can identify relevant news items, summarize key points, and highlight trends or significant events. This helps businesses stay updated on industry developments, competitor activities, and market shifts.
• Market insights: AI can process vast amounts of market data, such as economic indicators, consumer behavior patterns, and stock prices. With the power of machine learning algorithms, AI can detect patterns, predict market trends, and offer actionable insights. An AI agent can then present these insights seamlessly in daily workflows, helping decision-makers to make informed choices. 
• Marketing campaigns: AI can track the performance of marketing campaigns by analyzing data from multiple channels such as social media, email, and web analytics. It can measure engagement, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI), providing real-time feedback on campaign effectiveness. AI agents can also assist in generating reports and suggesting optimizations based on the data. 

Looking forward, these capabilities will be further enhanced with agentic AI—autonomous systems that can plan, adapt, and act to achieve goals, requiring minimal human input as they interact with other tools and environments. For insurers, agentic AI can help in ways such as the following: 

• Automating data collection: Agents can autonomously gather data from multiple sources, helping ensure that information is always up to date.
• Providing real-time alerts: Agents can monitor and respond to specific events or changes in data and send real-time alerts to stakeholders to help ensure prompt responses.
• Generating insights: By continuously analyzing data, agents can identify patterns, correlations, and trends, helping businesses to stay ahead of the curve. 

Confidential computing: Opening new opportunities while protecting sensitive data 

To gain new benefits from more sensitive data, such as claims or confidential information, an additional layer of security and confidence is now offered by Azure confidential computing.

Azure confidential computing creates a protected environment called Azure Confidential Clean Rooms that lets different teams within a company or across multiple companies perform joint data analysis and develop risk models, fraud detection models, and more, using advanced encryption techniques to anonymize data.

Across the financial services industry, confidential computing is increasingly being enlisted to help unlock new opportunities. For example, financial messaging provider Swift is using it in an innovative anomaly detection model, enabling the model to be trained on distributed datasets without copying or moving data from secure locations. Beyond regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, confidential computing is also being used for solutions in retail, manufacturing, and energy sectors. 

In addressing social inflation, confidential computing can help insurers understand the hidden drivers that contribute to rising costs, distort risk assessments, and influence claim outcomes. This involves identifying patterns and connections between contributing factors, such as litigation trends or the influence of social media and viral campaigns that can amplify public sentiment.  

With the power of AI combined with confidential computing, actuaries, underwriters, and claims professionals can use natural language prompts to ask questions of data, semantic search can recognize their meaning and intent, and the system can write coherent responses and deliver appropriate resources. This offers an entirely new and transformative way where, by analyzing interconnected factors, insurers can identify high-risk cases and insights that suggest propensity towards social inflation claims, enabling insurance to develop proactive strategies such as early settlements or policy adjustments in high-risk areas. 

Of course, bringing teams or organizations together to consider the adoption of a broad solution approach like confidential computing involves more than just technology. It also requires structure, guidance, cooperation, and leadership. Microsoft is here to help for the long run and enable such collaboration starting with the industry leading Microsoft Azure cloud platform, and our ongoing commitment to security and responsible AI, and our long-term leadership in insurance and financial services.  

We are excited to partner with insurers and the industry at large to help innovate new solutions and business opportunities through cloud and AI. To get started with your business, reach out to your Microsoft representative and we’ll be happy to explore the possibilities. 

Learn more 

• To learn more about our solutions for insurers, visit our Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services website.
• For a deeper look at confidential computing, read the Azure Confidential Computing Blog.  

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¹ Swiss Re Institute, Social inflation: litigation costs drive claims inflation, September 2024.

² Risk and Insurance, Social Inflation Drives 57% Surge in US Liability Claims Over a Decade, September 2024.

³ Boston Consulting Group, P&C Insurance topics for 2024.

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By using more intuitive, natural interfaces to knowledge and information, retailers can start addressing some of retail’s age-old challenges—like finding and retaining the best talent, getting them up to speed quickly, and simplifying store operations so associates can focus on delighting and assisting shoppers.

No matter the size of the retailer, choosing which AI technologies to prioritize and where to start can be challenging. However, there are many ways retailers are now using AI to deliver measurable value and real return on investment (ROI). Research shows that for every $1 a company invests in generative AI, the ROI is 3.7 times across industries and regions (compared to 3.5 times in 2024).¹ Top leaders using generative AI are realizing significantly higher returns, with an average ROI of $10.30—nearly three times more.¹

To build a foundation for AI success, focus on your business strategy—how AI supports your business goals. Start by identifying the business outcomes you’re aiming for and how AI can help you achieve them.

Here’s a glimpse into how you can start making gains with your AI investments today by focusing on store operations and the frontline.

The frontline is first in line with AI

As the face of retail, frontline workers play a crucial role in the shopper experience. According to recent research by McKinsey, there is a strong relationship between the employee and customer experience, as empowered employees are more likely to deliver superior customer service.² Yet many frontline workers spend too much time searching for information, and this is one of the top five reported obstacles to their productivity.³

Generative AI offers significant potential for enhancing frontline productivity and wellbeing, with evidence that most frontline workers think it could help, and they would be comfortable using AI for administrative tasks.³ Generative AI can automate routine tasks, allowing associates to engage more with customers. This shift can lead to a more stimulating work environment, which leads to higher job satisfaction and can help retailers combat ongoing challenges with employee turnover, seasonal hiring, and training.

At a more macro level, generative AI can also allow retailers to continuously learn and feed insights back into their business processes and to grow their products, services, and competitive differentiation. Retailers can do that by identifying patterns in recurring employee questions so they can get to the root cause of operational challenges and address key gaps in training and store processes.

Here are some other ways retailers are using generative AI today:

• Swedish retailer Lindex created Lindex Copilot to offer tailored support to store associates and better understand store needs. Generative AI facilitates this bidirectional learning.
• MediaMarktSaturn lets associates to have voice conversations with generative AI, accessing details for every product, service, and warranty while staying engaged with the in-store customer, maximizing conversion and increasing customer satisfaction—all while wearing an earbud.
• Store associates at gourmet chocolatier Venchi use detailed product knowledge and customer insights to address the diverse chocolate preferences of shoppers, achieving a customer satisfaction score of 4.9 out of 5.

While generative AI technologies are still relatively new, these examples offer a glimpse of what’s possible, and help retailers build an AI foundation for more powerful capabilities emerging with agentic AI.

Agents are revolutionizing retail operations

Investing in generative AI is crucial for retailers looking to reinvent customer engagement, empower store leadership and employees, and stay competitive—and now that opportunity has skyrocketed with agents.

Agents use AI to automate and execute business processes, working alongside or on behalf of a person, team, or organization. Now retailers can leverage agents to help their teams work more efficiently and effectively by giving them faster access to information so they can better support customers and be more productive.

Agents vary in levels of complexity and capabilities depending on the need. Agents can help frontline workers with a variety of time-saving tasks—from quickly surfacing real-time product information or details about store policies and procedures to support Q&A or troubleshooting. In addition to helping speed information retrieval, agents can help frontline workers with more advanced features like automated task creation or even advising and summarizing information—such as listing open tasks for a shift handover or flagging missed communications. Agents can also operate independently to dynamically plan, orchestrate other agents, and learn to improve over time. For example, an automated stock transfer agent might scan sales velocity across multiple stores and automatically transfer goods between locations if one store is oversupplied while another is understocked, minimizing manual intervention.

Find in-the-moment answers fast

One important way to get business value from agents is to help store associates find information about company policies or procedures when a customer is waiting for an answer.

SharePoint agents can help store associates find quick answers from internal company sources in seconds. Using the power of natural language, associates simply ask what they’re looking for on their tablet or mobile device and the agent responds in natural language with a link to the policy documentation for reference.

These agents go beyond information retrieval to also generate step-by-step instructions, synthesize product information, and support frontline managers to create and smart-assign shifts, and auto-validate task completion.

Agents can help associates reduce customer wait time, increase information accuracy, and possibly facilitate sales.

Simplify store processes

Complex business processes are another ongoing operational challenge and opportunity for custom agents to help improve productivity.

Custom-built agents can help retailers connect to external data sources and systems so store associates can find information such as product inventory availability in or near their store, shipping status, or how to initiate a return.

Frontline workers simply ask, “Help me initiate a return,” and the agent guides them through the process by clarifying the worker’s intent and providing them with next steps, all through a chat interface.

Custom agents are best suited to also streamline complex workflows like task management, that often involves multiple steps. Using custom agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio, frontline workers can easily create a task and send it through a task management system that sends automatic alerts as needed, all from a single pane of glass.

Meeting you where you are on your AI journey

Microsoft offers AI solutions that you can customize to meet your unique needs and scale. There are several ways agents can be deployed, from no code to low code and pro code. Here are a couple options available today.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is a new offering that adds pay-as-you-go agents to our existing free chat experience for Microsoft 365 commercial customers. Copilot Chat empowers retailers to get started on their AI journey today and includes querying the public web (such as a retailer’s website) for free. To enhance Copilot Chat, retailers can also build custom agents using Copilot Studio and SharePoint agents that enable access to retail systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and product information management (PIM), and to documents on SharePoint. These paid agents are available on a metered basis, so you only pay for what you use.

Store Operations Agent is a pre-built agent available on Copilot Studio enabling retailers to get started fast with a prebuilt solution that acts as an “associate” to your store associate. With this agent, retail employees can:

• Access data from LOB systems: Look up product inventory, check order status, find customer information and compare products.
• Access store policies and procedures: Quickly find answers to questions from knowledge bases such as SharePoint, websites, and across select internet portals.
• Raise incidents for quick resolution: Connect to incident management tools by using more than 1,000 connectors in Power Platform to raise incidents and alert store teams.

Using Store Operations Agent, employees at leading Nordic retailer Kappahl can quickly and securely surface product information, store policies and procedures, and more, increasing store associate productivity and upleveling the shopping experience for customers.

A new era of retail fueled by AI, powered by people

The range of potential gains with AI extends across retail operations—from people to processes to customers, helping make retail more human at every step of the way. From delighting shoppers to helping associates feel more supported and productive, AI can boost store operations efficiency, creating an environment where both shoppers and workers thrive.

Savings achieved using AI can be reinvested to create a better employee experience, fostering a work environment where employees are enthusiastic ambassadors of the brand, bringing the life of the store to customers every day.

Microsoft is the proven leader for AI transformation with the full technology stack and portfolio to help retail and consumer goods organizations power their business with AI. We can help you assess your agent environment, ideate on agent use cases, and establish success criteria for evaluating ROI so you can decide what agent is best for you.

Learn more

Learn more about how these forward-thinking companies are driving ROI with Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents—and illuminating the path ahead for every organization.

• Microsoft’s responsible AI principles
• How CMOs can personalize marketing and optimize spend with AI
• How merchants can drive velocity with AI
• Enhancing supply chain efficiency in the retail and consumer goods industry with agentic systems
• How unifying data improves shopper experiences

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¹ Generative AI delivering substantial ROI to businesses integrating the technology across operations: Microsoft-sponsored IDC report – Middle East & Africa News Center.

² How retailers can build and retain a strong frontline workforce in 2024.

³ Work Trend Index: Will AI Fix Work?

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Manufacturers face existential challenges around several key and often conflicting goals; the need to increase revenue whilst at the same time reducing costs across the value chain—spanning engineering, manufacturing, and supply chains, starting with product design and engineering. These challenges have impacted everything from product requirements and capabilities to product development all the way to sourcing and production. A recent IDC report highlighted how for product managers, investing more in engineering and research and development (R&D) correlates with lower cost of goods sold (COGS) and higher revenue growth for manufacturers, suggesting that investments in product engineering investments drive financial success.¹    

Benefits of generative AI in product engineering  

As product complexity and connectivity has continued to increase, engineers’ roles have become multi-disciplinary, requiring interaction with various data sources and tools, such as product lifecycle management (PLM), computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), application lifecycle management (ALM) for software requirements, and computer-aided engineering (CAE). In addition to manufacturability, engineers need to incorporate aspects such as sustainability, regulatory compliance, quality, materials, and supplier and supply chain considerations much earlier in the product design process. The many lines of software code now prevalent in physical products and the growth in software requirements, also pressures traditional manufacturing information technology (IT) to support a proliferation of software tools, data, and infrastructure.      

Generative AI is transforming product engineering and R&D to enable manufacturers to realize these benefits:  

• Cost reduction: Optimizing product designs for cost, sustainability, and manufacturability can reduce product development and production costs.  
• Better decision-making: Facilitated through data analysis and scenario simulation, generative AI provides valuable insights for informed decisions that can enhance product development, improve product quality, and better meet customer demands.  
• Productivity and skills gap: Helps experienced designers automate tasks they do often, and inexperienced designers to get up to speed quickly and avoid errors with best practice guidance.  Assists with analysis and optimization of existing designs and can even generate new designs with user input.   
• Efficiency: Reduce the time taken by engineers to both search across, and interact with, product data from various sources across the product lifecycle.  
• Faster time-to-market: Shorter product development cycles mean products can reach the market faster to capitalize on new opportunities more quickly. 
• Innovation: Continuously analyzing product-related data from various sources, customer feedback, and learning from it with generative AI can suggest innovative solutions that might not be more readily apparent.   

Microsoft partners play a pivotal role in transforming product engineering and R&D by building industry-specific solutions that integrate data unification and contextualization capabilities with Microsoft technologies which, combined with the Microsoft Cloud, are revolutionizing engineering functions.    

Establishing a secure engineering data foundation  

Product engineering and R&D involve handling many types and modalities of data, including CAD files, technical specifications, product data and configurations, requirements, and process data. Manufacturers commonly use a range of systems, including PLM, ALM, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, to manage this complex data. These form a secure data foundation on which transformation of product engineering is built upon, and sensitive IP can be protected.     

The following are examples where generative AI is helping to deliver value in a secure, engineering data foundation with AI on the Microsoft Cloud.  

• Siemens has integrated Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, and Siemens’ Teamcenter PLM solution into an app to facilitate real-time communication and collaboration among frontline workers and engineers.
• Aras has introduced AI-assisted search and an intelligent copilot, using Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio on Azure, enhancing user interaction with PLM data, facilitating quicker access, analysis, and action on critical information through scalable search and conversational AI, user interaction with PLM data, facilitating quicker access, analysis, and action on critical information through scalable search and conversational AI.
• PTC Codebeamer Copilot focuses on requirements authoring and analysis for the flagship Codebeamer Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. This AI-powered agent, being used by Volkswagen Group, improves the efficiency of the design phase, helping to ensure potential issues with system requirements are identified and addressed early in the process and a productivity boost as users manage complex hierarchies of requirements.
• Bluestar PLM are leveraging Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 to automatically generate summaries for an engineering object based on data both from Dynamics 365 and Bluestar PLM, and automatically generating item descriptions in multiple languages to make it easier to generate quotes, bills-of-materials (BOMs), invoices, and other documents in different languages.  

Accelerating product engineering and R&D 

Engineers use a range of complex solutions in product engineering when producing product designs from CAD, CAM, and CAE applications. This also involves creating and using many different data types, from 3D CAD and CAM files, to CAE simulation datasets, documents, specifications, and various knowledge repositories.   

The following are examples where customers and generative AI-powered partner solutions are helping to deliver value in accelerating product engineering and R&D with AI on the Microsoft Cloud: 

• HARTING reduced design time from weeks to minutes by introducing an AI-powered assistant fueled by Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, interoperating with Siemens NX CAD for rapid design. This solution reduced configuration time by 95%, a significant improvement in efficiency and the rapid creation of custom electrical connector prototypes that are speeding up time-to-market.
• Hexagon AI-powered automated CAM programming solution, ProPlanAI, reduces the time taken to program factory machine tools by 75%. This solution is part of Hexagon’s cloud-based Nexus connectivity and collaboration platform for discrete manufacturers, and is powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, and Microsoft Azure Databricks.
• Siemens copilot for NX X software uses an adapted industry AI model to help users ask natural language questions, access technical insights, and streamline design tasks for faster product development. It provides CAD designers with AI-powered recommendations and best practices to optimize the design process within the CAD experience, aiding engineers in implementing best practices quickly, ensuring high-quality results from design to production.
• Rescale is transforming engineering innovation by integrating AI-powered tools with Microsoft technologies to enhance simulation data workflows with Rescale Automations, automating data processing for real-time insights, improving decision-making and collaboration with AI models including Phi-4 to reduce cycle times and costs while maximizing simulation insights.
• Siemens has announced an industrial foundational model (IFM) to enhance the productivity of engineering and automation tasks across the industrial sector. For example, it will help engineers automate CAM programming with context-aware recommendations, support Structured Control Code (SCL) generation and accelerate the creation of Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs) and Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID). The IFM is built on Microsoft’s Azure platform. 

The next step: Unlock innovation in product engineering with AI-powered digital threads 

The next stage in revolutionizing product engineering and R&D sees the addition of multi-agent AI systems that can orchestrate, collaborate, and scale across complex enterprise workloads, including product engineering solutions, supply chain, manufacturing execution systems, customer relationship management, field service, and enterprise resource planning.   

Microsoft, along with partners like PTC, Autodesk, and Aras, believe that digital threads are becoming a reality for industrial customers due to unified data foundations and generative AI. Unified data foundations make data usable by securely sourcing it from various systems and automating contextualization. Generative AI agents use this data to provide insights and take actions, unlocking numerous use cases across the manufacturing value chain, including product engineering, all through unified data foundations and generative AI.  

The following are several such examples of innovations that are fueling the emergence and promise of AI-powered digital threads: 

• Aras InnovatorEdge is a new low-code API management framework for extending product digital thread ecosystems, which will also integrate with Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, enabling seamless connectivity for advanced analytics and AI-powered insights.
• Autodesk Fusion connects people, data, and process through the product development lifecycle. Autodesk Data Solutions in Fusion Manage and Microsoft Fabric enable data management and process optimization. Additionally, Autodesk’s digital twin offerings through Tandem, factory simulation through FlexSIM, and factory operations management with Fusion Operation all benefit from this collaboration across the IT and operational technology (OT) ecosystem.
• PTC is collaborating with Microsoft on an enterprise data framework and agentic model for PLM scenarios in PTC Windchill within Microsoft Fabric to accelerate manufacturers digital thread strategies and unlock insights and workflows across the value chain using AI-powered agents.
• Toyota is deploying AI agents to harness the collective wisdom of engineers and innovate faster and more efficiently in a system named “O-Beya,” or “big room” in Japanese. The “O-Beya” system currently has nine AI agents—from a Vibration Agent to a Fuel Consumption Agent, bringing together numerous functional experts.  

By using Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and AI-powered solutions from our partner ecosystem, manufacturers can securely unlock new levels of impact. The integration of AI-powered solutions and AI agents unlocks innovation, reduces costs and improves operational efficiencies, meaning manufacturers are better equipped to navigate challenges and seize opportunities.    

Microsoft in manufacturing and mobility industries 

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and Microsoft for automotive, and how companies are using Microsoft AI capabilities in Microsoft AI in Action. 

Learn more about the unique use cases and solutions driving innovation in product engineering and R&D from our presence at Hannover Messe 2025.

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¹ IDC Research, Investing in Product Engineering — Increase Revenue and Decrease Cost, Doc # US51892224, February 2025. 

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Microsoft’s Unified Security Operations for Public Sector

Discover how Microsoft helps public sectors modernize security operations to enhance cyber defense and streamline processes.

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Microsoft’s unified security operations for public sector

Embracing modern security technology, processes, and continuous skill development is vital for protecting public sector organizations. By leveraging innovations powered by generative AI, unparalleled threat intelligence, and best practices, public sectors can transform their security operations to effectively defend against emerging cyberthreats.

AI-powered security operations: Microsoft delivers innovations to effectively protect against today’s complex threat landscape. The AI-powered unified security operations platform offers an enhanced and streamlined approach to security operations by integrating security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), extended detection and response (XDR), posture and exposure management, cloud security, threat intelligence, and AI into a single, cohesive experience, eliminating silos and providing end-to-end security operations (SecOps). The unified platform boosts analyst efficiency, reduces context switching, and delivers quicker time to value with less integration work.

Microsoft is committed to helping public sector customers accelerate threat detection and response through improved security posture across organizations with richer insights, multi-tenant management, early warnings, and increased efficiency through automation and generative AI. Through automatic attack disruption, Microsoft Defender XDR utilizes robust threat intelligence, advanced AI and machine learning to detect and contain sophisticated cyberattacks in real time, significantly reducing their impact. This high-fidelity detection and protection capability disrupts more than 40,000 incidents each month, like identity threats and human-operated cyberattacks, while maintaining a false positive rate below 1%.

“Speed is an important factor against adversaries, and gaining situational awareness across a complex landscape of threats is therefore key.”

—Customer in the healthcare industry

People and process modernization: Public-private partnerships play a vital role in fostering the exchange of best practices and developing standardized processes that drive efficiency in incident response and threat intelligence sharing. For example, adapting the threat triage process to leverage generative AI agents can enable teams to scale significantly with agents autonomously analyzing and triaging vast volumes of alerts in real time, prioritize critical cyberthreats, and recommend specific remediation steps based on historical patterns. These collaborations also empower organizations to build teams equipped with cutting-edge skills and a comprehensive understanding of generative AI capabilities, helping them stay ahead of emerging cyberthreats.

Collective cyber defense and threat intelligence: Using Microsoft’s global threat intelligence insights, public sector organizations can collaborate with each other and across other sectors to share deeper cyberthreat insights efficiently. This partnership enables public sector organizations to exchange threat intelligence in a standardized manner within a region or country.

“Collective defense collaborations are driven by mutual interests with industry peers and cybersecurity alliances on improving security postures and responding more effectively to emerging threats.”

—Customer in the transport industry

The power of generative AI in cyber operations

Generative AI brings several transformative benefits to cybersecurity, making it a cornerstone for public sector security operations center (SOC) modernization.

Enhanced threat detection and response: Generative AI has the potential to sift through data from firewalls, endpoints, and cloud workloads, surfacing actionable cyberthreats that might go unnoticed in manual reviews. Unlike traditional rule-based detection methods, generative AI can identify attack patterns, adapt to emerging cyberthreats, and prioritize incidents based on risk severity, helping security teams focus on the most critical issues. Generative AI can go beyond simply surfacing cyberthreats; it can contextualize attack signals, predict potential breaches, and recommend guided responses for remediation strategies, reducing the burden on security analysts. Microsoft Security Copilot is already covering a range of use cases and is expanding rapidly to seize the full potential of generative AI. By providing guided incident investigation and response, Security Copilot helps security operations center (SOC) teams to detect and respond to cyberthreats more effectively. It can help teams to learn about malicious actors and campaigns, provide rapid summaries, and even contact the user to check for suspicious behavior. Adoption is associated with 30% reduction in security incident mean time to resolution (MTTR).²

Reduced operational overheads: By automating routine tasks, generative AI can free analysts from repetitive processes like alert triage or patch validation, enabling them to focus on advanced threat hunting. Security teams can already leverage Security Copilot to translate complex scripts into natural language, highlighting and explaining key parts to enhance team skills and reduce investigation time for advanced investigations as much as by 85%, helping security teams operate at scale.³

“Increased support from AI is critical given the significant capacity challenge in the public sector: a shortage of talent, an influx of threats, and an ever-increasing volume of data, assets, and organizations.”

—National SOC customer

Building a resilient digital future together

As nation-state threat actors and cybercriminals increasingly employ generative AI in their cyberattacks, public sector organizations can no longer rely on fragmented, manual defenses. The path forward lies in public-private collaboration, centered on co-designing and innovating solutions tailored to the public sector’s unique needs.

By adopting Microsoft Security solutions, public sector organizations can leverage combined resources, expertise, and cutting-edge technology to fortify critical infrastructure, safeguard citizen data, and strengthen public trust.

Now is the time to act: Modernize your cyber defense in the AI era to collectively forge a more secure and resilient digital future for government and public sector operations.

Learn more

Learn more about the AI-Powered Security Operations Platform for more details on the unified Security Operations platform.

Learn more about Microsoft Sentinel.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024

²Generative AI and Security Operations Center Productivity: Evidence from Live Operations, Microsoft study. James Bono, Alec Xu, Justin Grana. November 24, 2024.

³Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Sentinel. The Total Economic Impact^(TM) Of Microsoft Sentinel, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, March 2024. Results are based on a composite organization representative of interviewed customers.

The post Transforming public sector security operations in the AI era appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Over the last decade, this end-to-end view, has been the promise of digital threads in the industrial space, a holy grail of data touchpoints that provide a real time view of the entire lifecycle of a product or a specific process, from design all the way to end of life. This has largely out of reach for most industrial companies for two key reasons:

1. The data problem: Fragmented, siloed, and uncontextualized mountains of data across a heterogenous stack of technologies and modalities, that require prohibitive investments in data science techniques to be able to leverage for a specific use case, with little scalability.
2. Return on investment (ROI): Traditionally, it has been difficult to prove ROI for digital thread initiatives, partly due to the challenges presented by the data problem, and partly because of the complexity to action on insights, from cultural resistance to skills gaps, to mention a few factors.

Microsoft, alongside partners like PTC, believe we are at the pivotal moment where digital threads are becoming an attainable reality for industrial customers due to two key innovations. First, the rise of unified data foundations that make data usable by securely sourcing it from systems like customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES), and automating the contextualization aligned to any given standard or custom data model.

Secondly, the rise of generative AI, specifically, AI agents that reason using this unified data foundation and provide insights or take actions—unlocking thousands of use cases across the manufacturing value chain.

The role of AI agents

AI agents are sophisticated software systems designed to automate complex analyses, support decision-making, and manage various processes. They are productivity enablers who can effectively incorporate humans in the loop through the use of multi-modality. These agents are designed to pursue complex goals with a high level of autonomy and predictability, taking goal-directed actions with minimal human oversight, making contextual decisions, and dynamically adjusting plans based on changing conditions. AI agents can assist in various business processes, such as optimizing workflows, retrieving information, and automating repetitive tasks. They can operate independently, dynamically plan, orchestrate other agents, learn, and escalate tasks when necessary, however, AI agents are only as good as the data used to train the models that power them, and the current landscape of AI agents in the industrial space is domain specific, so these agents are confined to exclusively operate within the constraints of a single data domain, for example a CRM agent or an MES agent.

A leading example of domain specific agent is PTC’s Codebeamer Copilot. The Codebeamer Copilot supports software development process for complex physical products, like software-defined vehicles. Codebeamer Copilot leverages the Codebeamer data graph, for a connected and comprehensive view into the product development process. From requirements management to testing to release, the Copilot provides rapid insight into key areas of application lifecycle management (ALM). The result is automated requirements handling, enhanced quality control, and boosted productivity due to drastically reducing the time it takes for engineers to write and validate requirements.

Application Lifecycle management is just the beginning. The AI-powered digital thread provides agents with the combined knowledge of the entire manufacturing data estate, with multiple domains: removing their previous limitations confining them to one function.

Real-world applications of AI-powered digital threads

The era of AI and digital threads has arrived, and it’s delivering real value for the world’s leading manufacturers today.

Schaeffler

A manufacturer of precision mobility components faced a need to modernize data management, as its data previously took days to decode. Their goal was clear: find a scalable solution to uncover factory insights faster. An agent was implemented to allow frontline workers to immediately uncover detailed information when faced with unexpected downtime. This allows operators to get the line running again faster, reducing costly delays in production.

Bridgestone

The world’s largest tire and rubber company leverages manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to accelerate the productivity of their frontline workforce. As a private preview customer, in collaboration with a Microsoft partner, the company uses digital thread and AI technology to address key production challenges, like yield loss. The query system solution enables frontline workers, with various levels of experience, to easily interact with their factory data, and efficiently uncover insights to improve yield, and enhance quality.

Toyota O-Beya

Toyota is leveraging AI agents to harness the collective wisdom of its engineers and accelerate innovation. At its headquarters in Toyota City, the company has developed a system named “O-Beya,” which means “big room” in Japanese. This system consists of generative AI agents that store and share internal expertise, enabling the rapid development of new vehicle models. The O-Beya system currently includes nine AI agents, such as the Vibration Agent and Fuel Consumption Agent, which collaborate to provide comprehensive answers to engineering queries. This initiative is particularly crucial as many senior engineers are retiring, and the AI agents help preserve and transfer their knowledge to the next generation. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the O-Beya system enhances efficiency and reduces development time.

The road ahead

The journey to fully realizing the potential of AI-powered digital threads involves phased implementation. Starting with identifying the right use cases aligned to business goals, where AI agents can play a role. Secondly, identify if the right data is available and in the right standards for usability. Lastly, quickly proving value by implementing a set of initial use cases with a minimum viable digital thread and measuring and socializing its results. Achieving the AI-powered digital thread with the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing capabilities:

• Azure adaptive cloud approach to source data from the edge, while supporting application modernization following cloud patterns.
• Partner applications as systems of records, like PTC Windchill.
• Microsoft first party manufacturing agents, like Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI Foundry, to unlock high-value factory use cases.
• Microsoft AI platforms like Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio to support development and orchestration of custom AI agents.
• Partner applications with agentic AI capabilities embedded, for example PTC ServiceMax AI.

Learn more

• Read the PTC whitepaper on AI-powered digital threads authored in partnership with Microsoft.
• Watch the Microsoft video series with Forrester and NVIDIA on AI-powered digital threads.
• Join us at Hannover Messe 2025 to see the AI-powered digital thread come to life.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Manufacture a sustainable future

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The post Unlocking the future of manufacturing with AI-powered digital thread appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Across industry sectors, 80% of finance teams report challenges in their ability to do strategic work beyond operations.¹ For public finance organizations, this is made even more difficult due to the pressures unique to government: budgetary constraints, revenue volatility, public demands for transparency, complex regulations, and workforce challenges, to name just a few.

Modernization plays a major role in helping public governments navigate this landscape. New cloud and AI solutions are helping governments reignite economies by simplifying taxation, improving budgeting, and mitigating fraud and corruption. Now, a new level of impact is at hand with the Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance, an AI-powered, role-based Copilot agent designed to help government agencies accelerate time to business impact. Copilot for Finance is now in public preview and will be delivered in the coming months.

Helping government finance organizations take full advantage of this new opportunity is core to our work at Microsoft for public finance, where our focus is to help governments achieve more through technology.

How Copilot for Finance empowers finance professionals in new ways

Imagine a typical day for a budget officer or a procurement operations manager. These professionals spend hours each day reviewing emails, preparing for meetings, and analyzing data. Despite their best efforts, much of their time is consumed by drudgery—essential tasks that demand complete and precise attention—time that is not available for more strategic (and satisfying) work.

Generative AI has already proven effective in easing the burden, with Microsoft 365 Copilot delivering significant productivity gains in just its first year.² Users reported it made them 29% faster in doing such time-consuming tasks as searching, writing, and summarizing.² The power to explore financial data with natural language, reduce time spent on financial processes, and turn raw data into presentation-ready visuals and whitepapers—all integrated into everyday productivity applications such as Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams—is truly transformative for public finance.

Copilot for Finance extends the core power of Copilot with new features designed specifically to enhance financial operations. By drawing on a complete range of financial data sources, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the organization’s complete Microsoft 365 data, it’s built to help professionals and teams accelerate their impact by speeding time to financial insight.

Here at Microsoft, we’ve seen the value firsthand. A group in our treasury and financial planning and analysis team piloted Copilot for Finance to automate and simplify the data reconciliation process and improve productivity. The results were impressive. The team realized a 22% cost savings in reconciliation tasks, reducing what used to take one to two hours down to only about 10 minutes.³

4 important benefits of Copilot for Finance for public finance

Copilot for Finance is designed to be an everyday assistant for finance professionals to reimagine how they operate and serve the public. Here are four ways it aims to deliver new benefits to improve cost as well as impact.

1. Optimizing processes

Copilot for Finance helps automate many labor-intensive tasks that finance professionals typically do manually, such as data consolidation, verification, and updating financial data across systems. This can significantly reduce the time and effort required, freeing people to do more strategic work. For example, during financial period close, Copilot for Finance can streamline data reconciliation by using intelligent data structures comparisons and guided troubleshooting in Excel. It analyzes results with an auto-generated report summary that highlights discrepancies and provides recommendations and actions to resolve them. This not only speeds up the reconciliation process but also helps ensure higher accuracy and reduces the risk of errors.

2. Controlling expenses

Beyond saving time and money with optimized processes, Copilot for Finance helps organizations focus better on expense control with AI-powered reconciliation and data set preparation. By using new methods of cost variance identification, analysis, and reporting, teams can find more opportunities to save costs, earlier than they might have otherwise, thanks to variance analysis and insights drawn from myriad supplementary data sources.

3. Improving collections

Copilot for Finance gives public finance professionals new ways to work with taxpayers and drive productive communications that lead to better collections and reporting in less time. Drawing on information from multiple sources about an individual’s or organization’s status, a collections manager can quickly review payment history and any issues or details relevant to collection activities. Generative AI summarization can also expediate communication and reporting on multiple fronts.

4. De-risking revenues

Copilot for Finance helps improve the strategies and processes to reduce financial risks associated with revenue streams. With AI monitoring and summarization, it can shift the focus from reporting to planning and forecasting, with less time spent closing books, and more for ad hoc analysis that can lead to better outcomes. Revenue forecasting and budgeting can be improved by more accurately spotting external macro-economy signals and using revenue variance analysis to spot revenue softness earlier and enable macro-analysis collaboration.

Learn more about Copilot for Finance

The future of public finance is here, and for many governments it’s powered by AI. Copilot for Finance offers a powerful new opportunity for finance teams to operate more successfully and efficiently than ever before. Learn more about how Microsoft is helping governments solve society’s biggest challenges and how we’re helping to drive financial accountability with public finance technology solutions.

• Copilot for Finance (preview) overview and documentation
• Sign up for Copilot for Finance preview

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance

Accelerate time to business impact

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¹ Future of Finance Trends, 2023.

² Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report, 2023.

³ Internal Microsoft data.

The post 4 keys to the future of public finance with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

For over two decades, we have consistently delivered front-end speech capabilities that have helped clinicians document billions of patient records and that have become a cornerstone of clinical documentation. Five years ago, we took a significant leap forward by pioneering the ambient AI category in healthcare. Today, we announce the integration of these proven technologies with fine-tuned generative AI, healthcare-adapted safeguards, and new capabilities on a scalable platform. This powerful combination brings unprecedented levels of efficiency and care, offering wide-reaching benefits for all.

Our robust voice solutions have consistently delivered outcomes for clinicians, patients, and healthcare organizations. Outcomes like 5 minutes of time-savings per encounter on average that have enabled 13 additional appointment slots per provider, per month.¹ A 70% improvement in clinician work-life balance and reduction of feelings of burnout and fatigue.¹ And the delivery of better patient experiences, where 93% of patients say their physician is more personable and conversational due to our technology.²

Dragon Copilot builds on this evolution to streamline documentation, surface information, and automate tasks across care settings. It’s an AI extensible workspace that offers a unified experience, integrates with electronic health records (EHRs) such as Epic, and supports clinicians across all stages of their workflow. Part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, it’s built on a secure, modern architecture and can take clinical productivity to new heights while helping boost clinician wellbeing and the patient experience, increasing efficiency, and improving financial impact.

Streamline documentation with new levels of customization

Dragon Copilot uses the latest AI models to help produce accurate documentation efficiently and consistently.

• Create clinical documentation automatically: Captures multiparty, multilingual patient-clinician conversations and orders ambiently during the visit and converts them into high quality, comprehensive, specialty-specific notes allowing clinicians to connect with patients rather than screens.
• No internet? No problem: Recordings are captured and processed once users are reconnected. 
• Produce high quality, customizable documentation: Allows clinicians to customize documentation, save templates, AI prompts, and frequently used text.
• Talk naturally: Provides natural language speech capabilities, dictation at the cursor, custom vocabularies, and intuitive voice correction capabilities across devices.

Surface information without leaving your workflow

From querying notes and getting medical information to receiving encounter recording suggestions, Dragon Copilot gives users access to pertinent information when they need it.

• Query notes: Provides details and answers questions like whether a patient is taking a certain medication, has a relevant family history, or mentioned something specific during the conversation. Copilot uses conversation transcripts and notes to address your requests.
• Get credible medical information: Clinicians can access a broad range of medical information and clinical topics, allowing them to check the latest protocols for managing a condition or check drug interactions, for example. Dragon Copilot uses grounded AI with citations to ensure trust in its responses.
• Receive suggestions: Create more complete notes. Dragon Copilot analyzes the transcript and makes suggestions to help clinicians capture specific information, such as temperature, BMI, and family history.
• Put conversational data to good use: Get insights at scale with Microsoft Fabric and Dragon Copilot. Tap into point-of-care data to better analyze usage and adoption and help improve research, patient care, engagement, outreach, and more.

“Using all these tools together is going to be a great in-room, in-office assistant for taking care of the patient. It’s just remarkable.”

Dr. Lance Owens, Chief Medical Information Officer, University of Michigan Health-West

Automate tasks with a single click

Dragon Copilot helps clinicians automate clinical and non-clinical tasks. From summarizing notes and evidence, to prepping orders and drafting referral letters and after visit summaries, it saves time and increases clinician productivity and efficiency.

• Make orders easy: Automatically capture over a dozen order types during clinician-patient conversations. With supported EHRs, orders are directly entered into the EHR order module. 
• Summarize notes: Get an instant synopsis of each encounter, including key facts and details, streamlining workflow and reducing cognitive load. Dragon Copilot makes it easy to get a quick refresher on the patient before finalizing a note.
• Summarize evidence: Receive more than just linked notes to transcripts. Dragon Copilot curates diagnosis evidence from subjective elements such as symptoms, objective elements such as labs and imaging, and other relevant information shared during the encounter.
• Create referral letters: Have Dragon Copilot quickly draft a referral letter from clinical notes by using the information gathered during an encounter. It automatically extracts key details—including medical history, requested services, and pertinent test or imaging results—and repurposes them for the letter.
• Generate after visit summaries: Dragon Copilot converts clinical documentation from encounter visits into written patient-friendly after-visit summaries, providing an easy reference for key clinical highlights and important directions.

“This is a complete transformation… it’s going to make it easier, more efficient, and help us take better quality care of patients.”

Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, Co-President and Chief Executive Officer, Cooper University Health Care

True anywhere access

From a full-featured web app with no client installation, to dedicated mobile and desktop apps with added functionality, Dragon Copilot goes wherever you go. And for even greater workflow efficiency, Dragon Copilot is natively embedded in supported EHRs.

Access in-app training and support—whenever and wherever it’s most convenient

Dragon Copilot offers some of the best product support and insights to help healthcare organizations get the most out of their AI investment.

• On-demand training: In-app training videos and on-demand content provide access to training content.
• Integrated live chat and virtual support room: Need help? Dragon Copilot comes with immediate support without leaving the app and a virtual support room staffed by experts.
• Product and AI feedback: In-app feedback and dedicated channels enables clinicians to rate Dragon Copilot and provide feedback that helps improve the product experience, note quality and AI responses.

Our expansive partner ecosystem

Dragon Copilot is bolstered by our collaboration with healthcare industry experts across our global ecosystem of trusted partners. We work with leading independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), and cloud service providers (CSPs) so our customers in every region can access the healthcare solutions and offerings they need.

Dragon Copilot is coming to you

Dragon Copilot will be generally available in the United States and Canada in May 2025, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Microsoft is also committed to bringing a new Dragon experience to other key markets that are using Dragon Medical today.

Built on a foundation of trust

We are dedicated to helping customers use and build AI that is trustworthy, secure, safe, and private. By using the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative, we support the highest standards of security, privacy, and compliance. Our AI aligns with Microsoft’s responsible AI practices and incorporates healthcare-specific clinical, chat, and compliance safeguards to ensure accurate and safe outputs. Additionally, our data is grounded in privacy principles, backed by transparent policies, and protected by rigorous safeguards.

“Microsoft has invested a lot in security. It gives me peace of mind that Dragon Copilot is part of the whole Microsoft suite.”

Novlet Mattis, Senior Vice President, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Orlando Health

Ready to take the next step?

• Visit us at HIMSS Booth #2221.
• Not attending HIMSS 2025? Join us for our livestream event.
• Learn more on Dragon Copilot.
• Explore the latest with our new healthcare AI models.

Dragon Copilot

A new groundbreaking solution that transforms the way clinicians work

Discover more

¹ Microsoft survey of 879 clinicians across 340 healthcare organizations using DAX Copilot; July 2024.

² Survey of 413 patients conducted by multiple healthcare organizations whose clinicians use DAX Copilot; June 2024.

The post Meet Microsoft Dragon Copilot: Your new AI assistant for clinical workflow appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Instinct has always played an essential role. A great advisor has a feel for people as well as markets, with an innate ability to match the two. In the digital world, however, instinct alone can no longer ensure success, particularly as the scope and scale of advice expands. AI is evolving in ways that don’t just make advisors more efficient but also more proficient in a broad range of critical competencies. The arrival of agentic AI promises to help advisors work smarter and serve clients more personally and comprehensively than ever before. 

Empowering financial institutions to achieve more with advanced AI and cloud technologies is our primary goal with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, which provides tailored solutions built on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and supported by our global partner ecosystem. In wealth management, we are helping innovative firms improve client retention, revenue growth, and profitability. 

As the financial landscape shifts and client preferences change, AI is creating an opportunity for wealth managers to innovate differentiated client experiences. This will be powered by three things: 

1. The explosion of data from a firm’s own digital activities plus an ever-expanding universe of new information sources.
2. The power of AI to reason over huge volumes of data, identify patterns, and unlock insights.
3. A new breed of AI agents that will assemble data and orchestrate activities to accomplish entire processes. 

How Microsoft 365 Copilot improves advisor effectiveness and success  

Financial services firms are already gauging the transformative impact of generative AI. For example, IDC reports that 62% of firms in the securities and investment services sector have seen generative AI already disrupt their business, start to disrupt their business, or expect it to impact their business significantly within the next 18 months.¹ 

A powerful example of the value of generative AI is Microsoft 365 Copilot, which in its first eight months delivered broad productivity gains, with 70% of users surveyed across industries reporting it made them more productive and better able to focus on high-value activities.²  

For many advisors, the impact of Copilot becomes obvious in the Microsoft Teams experience. Firms commonly use virtual meeting solutions that integrate call recording and transcription capabilities, but Teams with Copilot takes this to another level. In addition to familiar features like summarizing calls and capturing notes in customer relationship management (CRM), it brings essential context from documents and emails. Thanks to a Microsoft 365 feature called Microsoft Graph, which links data across emails, documents, calendars, and more, Copilot expands the power of AI to the full scope of information within the firm.  

To illustrate the value this can deliver, consider this example. An advisor named Matt gets an email from his client, Jane, whose mother has decided to move into assisted living for reasons including health and companionship. Matt uses Copilot to gather the context he needs to advise Jane on possible next steps. He asks Copilot to find content related to Jane’s email and receives the following: a power of attorney (POA) document Jane has on file for her mother, an article entitled “Caring for aging parents,” and a meeting transcript where Jane expresses concern about her mother’s estate plan.

Armed with this context, Matt can act quickly to help Jane. He prompts Copilot as follows: 

Draft an email response to Jane offering our help as her mother makes the transition to assisted living. Use a supportive and sympathetic tone. Summarize relevant key recommendations re: transitioning into assisted living from our “Caring for aging parents” article. Attach a copy of the POA we have on file and ask if any other family members should be added. Reference the most recent time Jane mentioned her mother’s estate plan and offer to introduce her to our estate planning colleague Joe. Suggest a time to meet ASAP. 

In response, Copilot generates a draft email for Matt, pulling from data sources across the firm. Matt can revise it to make it appropriately personal and send it with confidence that the references and resources are complete and correct.  

The benefits here go beyond additional productivity gains to empowering advisors in new ways. They can now take advantage of all of the firm’s data (as allowed by policy) to conduct research, generate ideas, and produce documents. It’s like having a super-assistant who knows every available resource, offers insights and ideas, and delivers workable artifacts—literally in seconds.  

Beyond Copilot: Agentic AI can orchestrate action at scale 

Agentic AI is poised to take this experience to the next level. AI agents are specialized AI tools that can work autonomously on behalf of a user or another system to perform specific tasks or solve business challenges. An agent can orchestrate a mix of AI components and tools—including other agents—to ensure smooth collaboration and task handoff. This enables the automation of processes, while adhering to predefined guidelines and guardrails. 

Triggered by business events, an AI agent can collect and analyze relevant data to either act directly or recommend actions. It’s like a virtual team manager or facilitator who can assess situations, make decisions, and lead a group of assistants to achieve a goal.  

For example, if you wanted to schedule your participation in a series of industry events, generative AI could suggest a plan and recommend steps. Agentic AI, by contrast, could execute that plan for you by finding available dates and times on external sites, registering you as required, navigating conflicts, and scheduling the meetings on your calendar—even consulting you along the way if you prefer. 

In wealth management, agentic AI can help firms handle a wide range of important tasks, such as proactive portfolio management or driving complex workflows for onboarding or other key processes. Over time, agentic AI also holds the potential to help advisors deliver hyper-personalized client service.  

To see how this could work, let’s return to the example of Jane and her mother. It’s easy to imagine a series of “practice management” agents that could help Matt deliver highly personalized support for Jane as her mother transitions to assisted living. The agents could use data from Microsoft 365 and a variety of external sources.

For instance, as Jane gains control of her mother’s finances, she sends Matt a statement from one of her mother’s investment accounts, which Matt’s firm does not manage. The practice management agent sees the attachment in Jane’s email, extracts details from the statement, and collaborates with a data or research provider to understand the asset mix, risk profile, and other attributes. Matt can then enlist the agent for tasks such as evaluating the account, offering recommendations based on the new circumstances, and crafting ongoing communications with Jane. This also opens the opportunity to potentially move the assets under the management of Matt’s firm.

When it’s this easy to assess and respond to complex life events, advisors can engage clients on an array of new topics. Expanding the scope of advice in this hyper-personalized way paves the way for asset growth, improved retention, increased referrals, and higher returns. 

How to get started 

To realize the full potential of generative AI benefits and set the stage for innovation with agentic AI, wealth management firms should consider making the following available for everyone in the organization: 

• Microsoft 365 Copilot on every desktop.
• Microsoft Teams for all client communications.
• A knowledge bank of specific Copilot prompts to help educate users.
• A strategy for agentic AI innovation built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, focused on high impact use cases.

Learn more 

• Meet Copilot, your AI assistant for work, by visiting Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• To learn more about how Microsoft empowers financial services organizations to achieve more, visit Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.
• To learn how your organization can adopt AI, start by engaging with your Microsoft representative or service provider, or get in touch with a Microsoft representative today. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

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¹ IDC Research, The Future of Wealth Management Is Generative, Doc # US51459324, September 2024.

² Work Trend Index Special Report, What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work?, November 15, 2023.

The post From instinct to insight to action: How AI drives growth in wealth management appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

In the current AI landscape, inspiration and information are more important than ever for security professionals to stay ahead of threat actors. So if you’re looking to boost your skills and stay ahead of the threat landscape, join Microsoft Security at the top cybersecurity events in 2025.

Whether you join us at an industry staple like RSAC or one of our own events like Microsoft Secure, you can benefit in several key ways:

• Get insights and strategies needed to overcome obstacles and drive your security initiatives forward with confidence.
• See live demos of the latest products, product features, skills, and tools you can use in your work. Be among the first to hear about Microsoft Security innovations, such as Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative and XSPA (cross-site port attack) updates attendees of Microsoft Ignite 2024 heard.
• Learn from Microsoft Security experts on global threat intelligence.
• Network with other like-minded security pros, learn best practices from your peers, and meet one-on-one with our experts.

Whatever your role, there’s an event for you and a path to successfully safeguarding your organization.

Microsoft at RSAC

From our signature Pre-Day to hands-on demos and one-on-one meetings, discover how Microsoft Security can give you the advantage you need in the era of AI.

Register now

Conferences to inspire and engage everyone

Security professionals of all levels can benefit from attending one of the biggest cybersecurity events, including RSAC, Black Hat, plus two premier Microsoft events—Microsoft Secure (virtual) and Microsoft Ignite (in-person and virtual). If you love being the first to hear about Microsoft product innovations, don’t miss these Microsoft events with insights every security professional can put to good use.

Microsoft Secure

Date: April 9, 2025
Location: Online only

Microsoft Secure is Microsoft’s cybersecurity conference. This year’s one-hour digital showcase will spotlight AI-first, end-to-end security innovations with clear use cases and customer stories of how they use our tools daily. Attendees will deep-dive into cybersecurity products and strategies along with thousands of other cybersecurity professionals.

RSAC

Dates: April 27-May 1, 2025
Location: San Francisco, CA

RSAC 2025 is a can’t-miss security conference, bringing together more than 40,000 security professionals to discuss the latest cybersecurity challenges and innovation with the best of the best. With the theme of “Many Voices. One Community,” RSAC will feature keynotes, track sessions, interactive sessions, networking opportunities, and an expo designed to foster advanced security strategies.

Throughout RSAC, Microsoft Security will showcase end-to-end security innovations and share world class threat and regulatory intelligence to give you the advantage you need in the era of AI. From our signature Pre-Day to hands-on demos and one-on-one meetings, discover how Microsoft Security can give you the advantage you need in the era of AI.​ Check out the full Microsoft at RSAC experience.

Black Hat

Dates: August 2-7, 2025
Location: Las Vegas, NV

The Black Hat Conference is a premier learning event in the cybersecurity industry, known for its in-depth technical sessions and cutting-edge research presentations on topics like critical infrastructure and information security research news.

Microsoft is a key sponsor of the conference each year, where we showcase our latest discoveries and AI research on real-world problems and solutions. Last year, our AI Red Teaming in Practice training sessions and our AI Summit roundtables were a hit. Black Hat is also known for its security community celebrations, including the Cybersecurity Woman of the Year Awards and the Researcher celebrations, which we take part in every year.

Microsoft Ignite

Dates: November 17-21, 2025
Location: San Francisco, CA, and online

Microsoft Ignite is Microsoft’s biggest annual conference for developers, IT professionals, business leaders, security professionals, and partners. Thousands of security professionals like you attend every year to hear the biggest security product announcements from Microsoft Security and gain training and skilling to prepare for future advancements in AI. Security professionals of all levels can join interactive labs, workshops, keynotes, technical breakout sessions, demos, and more, led by Microsoft Security leaders and experts.

Over the past few years, we’ve really boosted Microsoft Security experiences at Microsoft Ignite. Last year, we hosted the Microsoft Ignite Security Forum for security leaders and two workshops on AI red teaming and Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment. Plus, we hosted more than 30 sessions demoing new features to help you secure your environment, use your favorite Microsoft tools safely and securely, and make sure your organizational processes prioritize security first.

If you attend Microsoft Ignite in person this year, you won’t want to miss our Security Leaders Dinner or the security community party. If you’re not able to attend in person, you can register for our virtual event.​ Sign up to learn more.

Events for security leaders and decision-makers

Microsoft AI Tour

Dates: Through May 30, 2025
Location: Multiple worldwide

The Microsoft AI Tour is a free, one-day event for executives that explores the ways AI can drive growth and create lasting value in multiple cities around the globe. Whether you’re a functional decision-maker who evaluates investments, an IT team member charged with security, or a CISO revamping your security strategy, there will be valuable security content tailored to your needs.

Microsoft Security’s top business leaders attend AI tour locations worldwide to share with you how Microsoft Security Copilot lets you protect at the speed and scale of AI. They are also available to meet with you.

Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit

Dates: June 9-11, 2025
Location: National Harbor, MD

The Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit (Gartner SRM) explores trends in cybersecurity risk management, including the integration of generative AI, being an effective CISO, the importance of balancing response and recovery efforts with prevention, combating misinformation, and closing the cybersecurity skills gap to build a resilient workforce.

Microsoft Security executives host sessions at Gartner SRM to help you ensure the security of AI systems and adopt AI to drive innovation and efficiency. Our most popular topics center around securing and governing AI.

Events for technical and security practitioners

Security teams look for conferences that provide specialized knowledge on the industry in which they work or on a narrow cybersecurity topic.

Legalweek

Dates: March 24-27, 2025
Location: New York, NY

Legalweek is a weeklong conference where approximately 6,000 members of the legal community will gather to network with their peers, explore emerging trends, spotlight the latest tech, and offer a roadmap through industry shifts. Topics explored at past Legalweek conferences include the ethical and regulatory impact of using your data to train AI, litigation in the age of cybersecurity, and maximizing efficiency and legal automation.  

This year, we’ll be sponsoring three sessions on AI and one on collaboration in complex litigation. As in years past, Microsoft is hosting an Executive Breakfast at Legalweek from 7:30 AM ET-8:45 AM ET on Tuesday, March 25, 2025. RSVP today and stop by Booth #3103 in New York Hilton Midtown Americas Hall 2 to learn more about the latest Microsoft Purview innovations. If you’d like to meet with our team while at Legalweek, sign up for a one-on-one meeting.

Identiverse

Dates: June 3-6, 2025
Location: Las Vegas, NV

Limiting access to AI, apps, and resources to those with the proper permissions is a crucial part of security. The Identiverse conference provides education, collaboration, and insight into the future of identity security. More than 2,500 attendees will share insights, develop new ideas, and advance the state of modern digital identity and security.

The event features sessions on best practices, industry trends, and latest technologies; an exhibition hall to showcase the latest identity solution innovations; and networking opportunities. Microsoft will host a booth where attendees can connect with Microsoft Security experts and leaders.

Events for developers

The cybersecurity talent shortage is requiring many to step up even if cybersecurity isn’t in their official job description. If you are an IT professional being tasked with cybersecurity or someone with an eagerness to learn cybersecurity tactics, join our Microsoft events aimed at helping you uplevel your cybersecurity skills.

Microsoft Build

Dates: May 19-22, 2025
Location: Seattle, WA

Security is a team sport and developers are increasingly the first string team members who build security into the development of applications. Microsoft Build Conference 2025 is Microsoft’s developer-focused event. It will showcase exciting updates and innovations from Microsoft Security for developers to create AI-enabled security solutions for their organizations.

The event includes connection opportunities, demos, and security-focused sessions. Past topics have included using AI to accelerate development processes, tools for enhancing the developer experience, and strategies for building in the cloud. Stay up to date on Microsoft Build news and find out when registration is open.

Find your inspiration at an event this year

Cybersecurity events foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, empowering you to stay ahead of emerging cyberthreats and maintain a resilient security posture. The ideas will flow freely at these events. Whether you attend one of the biggest conferences of the year or a smaller event (or both), you’ll be in good company. Microsoft Security will be there be, too, excited to share and eager to learn.

Hope to see you at a future event!

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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