#SuccessStory Archives | Americas Partner Blog

Announcing Season 2 of the podcast – No Slides Attached

Fede Pacheco — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 13:00:38 +0000

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #News #SuccessStory #GrowSkills #CrossSolution

We kicked off FY25 with the launch of No Slides Attached: AI Stories with Microsoft Partners, an exciting new podcast designed for partners who want to learn from the inspiring stories of their peers. Now, by popular demand, we’re back with Season 2!

Season 1 focused on how our Microsoft Copilots are already transforming businesses. In Season 2, we’re building on that momentum, diving even deeper into AI innovation across industries.

What’s new in Season 2

Season 2 features in-depth conversations with some of the brilliant minds behind AI transformations across key industries—from financial services to education, healthcare, retail, and more. Join hosts Helane Cohen and Fede Pacheco as they showcase the success that Microsoft Partner of the Year winners and finalists have found and ask them questions like:

What is a milestone achieved in this industry that seemed impossible just a few years ago?
What is something that hasn’t been solved yet, but they expect to see happen in the near future?
What is the role of Security in this industry?
What advice do they have for anyone looking to innovate in this industry?

Take a break

Need a breather from all the emails, meetings, and presentations? Connect on the go to get invaluable insights from industry experts and their inspiring stories. Whether you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve or searching for practical AI solutions, you won’t want to miss these latest episodes.

Subscribe today to listen wherever you get your favorite podcasts:

YouTube* | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | RSS

*With closed captions in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

Season 2 episodes

The first two episodes of our second season are available now, with new episodes coming out every two weeks:

Episode	Featured Guests	Available
Open Innovation Is Crucial for AI + Unveiling the Industry Series!	Dr. Henry Chesbrough, the pioneer behind the concept of Open Innovation -and- Pam Salzer, Sr. Director for Microsoft’s Industry GTM Team	Now
[AI in Finance] Zafin is revolutionizing product and pricing in banking	Chris Dickin, EVP of Global Partner Strategy at Zafin -and- Ryan Blakely, Microsoft FSI GTM Lead	Now
[AI in Education] Territorium helps 160,000 students in Costa Rica advance their careers every year	Guillermo Elizondo, CEO and co-founder of Territorium -and- Brooke Daniel and Rob Curtin, Microsoft EDU Leads	October 23
[AI in Healthcare] 3Cloud unlocks massive potential to improve patient lives through data analytics	Dan Rodriguez, CMO of 3Cloud -and- AJ Nolte, Microsoft HLS GTM Lead	November 6
[AI in Retail] Avanade is empowering workers to automate and personalize their customer’s experience	Rob Want, Industry Director at Avanade -and- Ricardo Belmar, Microsoft RCPG GTM Lead	November 20
More episodes to come on Energy, Sustainability, and State & Local Government

We hope you enjoy listening to No Slides Attached: AI Stories with Microsoft Partners and are as excited as we are by what’s happening in the world of AI and industry innovation. Look for updates in our weekly Top Stories blog as new episodes are released and, if you haven’t already, subscribe today!

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

Controles Empresariales sees a world of possibilities for education with AI

Microsoft Americas Partner Team — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:00:28 +0000

Partner Audience: #AllPartners
Relevant to: #SuccessStory #GrowYourBiz #CrossSolution

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept but a reality that’s revolutionizing multiple sectors, and education is no exception. As AI technologies advance, new opportunities are arising to improve and transform education, from personalized teaching to streamlining administrative processes. But how can AI, in combination with digital tools, radically change the education sector and better prepare students for the future? Controles Empresariales partnered with Microsoft to explore the possibilities.

Personalized learning is at the heart of this educational revolution

One of the biggest benefits of AI in education is the ability to deliver personalized learning on a large scale. With the use of advanced algorithms, it’s possible to tailor educational content to the specific needs of individual students. This means that students can learn at their own pace, focusing on areas where they need more support and advancing faster in the subjects they’ve mastered.

In addition, AI can be used to analyze large volumes of data to identify patterns in student learning. These trends allow educators to adjust their teaching methods and offer additional resources to those who need them. This not only improves the quality of education, but also reduces dropout rates by keeping students engaged and motivated.

Leveraging AI to optimize administrative processes

The implementation of AI is not limited to the classroom. Educational institutions can leverage it to optimize their administrative processes, such as enrollment management, student progress tracking, and resource allocation. For example, AI systems can predict the demand for certain courses or educational resources, allowing institutions to plan better.

Likewise, AI can be a powerful tool for automated assessment of tests and assignments, reducing the workload of teachers and allowing them to focus on teaching. With the help of AI, educational institutions can achieve greater operational efficiency, resulting in a better experience for students and teachers.

AI in action in educational environments

In Colombia, we have added several experiences that reflect the power of technology in educational spaces. For example, we collaborated with the Secretary of Education of Medellín to strengthen education during the pandemic crisis in 2020 that resulted in 102,000 students dropping out of school.

Together with Microsoft, we implemented Microsoft 365 in 118 educational institutions, benefiting 1,960 users, including teachers and students, through 167 workshops and more than 330 hours of training. This project not only improved connectivity and reduced dropout rates, it also boosted educational productivity and personalization. Through the integration of tools such as Code Combat and Educaplay, Controles Empresariales demonstrated leadership in the digital transformation of education.

In this scenario, we used AI to transform educational processes by personalizing learning, adapting curricula according to the needs of each student, especially in rural areas with limited resources. In addition, AI was used to predict student dropout rate by analyzing behavioral patterns, enabling early interventions to keep students in the education system. Virtual assistants were also implemented to guide students and teachers in the use of digital tools, offering real-time support and improving accessibility.

AI was also used to automate repetitive administrative tasks, such as attendance management and test marking, allowing teachers to focus more on teaching. Interactive, AI-powered tools were able to deliver more dynamic educational content, while education leaders used predictive analytics to make more informed policy and resource decisions. The result: AI can be leveraged to optimize existing resources and improve the efficiency, accessibility, and personalization of education, generating a lasting positive impact.

The future of education with AI

The implementation of AI in education is not just about improving teaching methods and administrative processes. It also has the potential to transform the way we think about learning and education. As technology continues to advance, it’s critical that educational institutions and governments prepare to integrate these tools effectively, ensuring that all students, regardless of location or socio-economic status, have access to quality education.

AI has the power to bridge gaps, personalize education, and optimize processes. The integration of AI into the education sector is undoubtedly one of the keys to preparing future generations for the challenges of the modern world. Together with Microsoft and the right strategy, Controles Empresariales has shown it’s possible to build a more equitable future full of opportunity for all with AI.

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

Elevating our MXDR solution through automation with Drift Detector

Security technology is no longer something that evolves every few years; it’s evolving in real time. For some customers, this can cause a deviation or, as we call it, a “drift” from the established best practice-based configuration, which can leave a gap and cause a security risk.

With the Drift Detector solution, we can detect deviations from the best practice configuration within minutes.

The Drift Detector solution is available to our Bulletproof 365 Enterprise (B365E) customers. Best practice security configurations are used; however, the customer can make updates and changes to their tenant. If the security configuration is changed after the onboarding, the drift detection technology will provide that visibility. It will periodically scan the tenant for changes and drifts from the previous B365E configurations. Scans don’t have to be manually initiated; the solution will do this automatically. This strengthens the posture and confidence of a customer’s B365E settings and speeds up detection and response time if a drift from the Gold Standard occurs.

Here’s how it works

The control hub for the solution, which will constantly scan for drifts, is an Azure-hosted, .NET web service. There is also a Gold Standard based on best practices for each security solution in the stack; the solution will compare customer settings to this Gold Standard. Deviations will be reported and the Security Operations Center (SOC) team at Bulletproof will immediately triage drifts to proactively fix drift-related security incidents within minutes.

Information about the Gold Standard settings and deviations will be stored within a geo-redundant Azure SQL Server secured with the latest Microsoft Entra ID authentication. The solution will update the database with any drifts detected, which are then cleared at the next scan. This allows the Bulletproof SOC team to act with the latest and most up-to-date information possible. The only scan information from a customer environment that will be stored is that which deviates from the accepted Bulletproof Gold Standard. This solution scans and compares security configurations on Microsoft Sentinel, Intune, Entra, and Defender.

Putting Drift Detector to the test with our Microsoft customers

Bulletproof worked with a municipality that was hit by a serious ransomware attack. After reviewing their security environment and pain points, we knew the best solution for the customer. Bulletproof 365 Enterprise (B365E), the end-to-end enterprise security solution built on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Sentinel, was key to restoring services quickly for the city.

As a customer of B365E, the municipality was eligible for Drift Detector. They’ve been onboarded to further improve the security posture for the city. If a drift in Gold Standard configurations is automatically detected, Bulletproof will create a ticket that will be managed by the SOC team.

Learn how Bulletproof empowers organizations with enterprise-class security and productivity solutions.

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

Learnings from a Microsoft customer’s Azure OpenAI implementation

John Turk — Wed, 22 May 2024 13:00:23 +0000

Partner Audience: #AllPartners #ISV
Relevant to: #SuccessStory #GoToMarket #Azure

87% of customers believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage,¹ but not every customer knows how to get started. Providing viable use cases, sharing best practices, and setting clear desired outcomes help organizations undergo successful AI implementations.

Azure OpenAI Service is a powerful offering that integrates OpenAI’s advanced language models and services into the Microsoft Azure platform. With Azure OpenAI, customers get the security capabilities of Azure while running the same models as OpenAI.

Let’s explore how the testing of various Azure OpenAI use cases led one innovative company to realize increased productivity and cost-savings across the business.

A culture of innovation drives AI initiatives

North Atlantic Industries (NAI) supplies rugged embedded computing solutions and power supplies for the world’s largest and most demanding defense, commercial aerospace, and industrial applications. With over 65 years of experience and a focus on delivering rapid, reliable solutions that meet mission-critical needs, NAI defines every action and investment based on the ability to help its customers “accelerate their time-to-mission.”

A small company of 250 employees, NAI fosters a culture of innovation and exploration of new technologies to help improve processes and drive initiatives around reducing technical debt and maximizing efficiency. This culture sets the stage for employees to test various AI use cases and take a company-wide, iterative approach to AI adoption, resulting in numerous successful implementations that enable intelligent automation of routine tasks to deliver significant time, cost, and efficiency gains.

I am extremely supportive of our teams leveraging emerging technologies to solve previously unsolvable problems. Azure OpenAI is a force multiplier that is accelerating our productivity and letting us compete on a higher playing field.”

– William Forman, President and CEO, NAI

Leading the charge and realizing impact with AI

Staying true to its innovation-driven culture, NAI’s software engineers began looking for ways to incorporate AI to drive efficiency in their daily tasks and, ultimately, for the business. The first use case that became apparent was during a modernization effort to add comments to and clean up a code base of over 100K lines of code, all written in C#. Making the updates manually proved to be an enormous effort, which inspired the idea to implement an AI-driven solution to help automate and accelerate the process. “We wrote a program with Azure OpenAI that takes the source code and writes a comment for every function automatically, and everyone is excited about that because it ensures consistency and helps save programmers a lot of time,” says Lacey Stein, Software Engineer at NAI. “It really got everyone interested in wanting to explore AI more.”

When it came to selecting an AI solution, Tim Campbell, Director of Workplace Technology at NAI, notes several reasons that made Azure OpenAI the obvious choice. “From a cost perspective, the context window and rate limit Microsoft is giving us is beating anything else on the market,” shares Campbell. “We were also already familiar with OpenAI, so realizing the partnership with Microsoft led us right to Azure OpenAI services, which is our bread and butter right now.”

Taking Azure OpenAI company-wide

Following the success that the engineering team was finding with its initial Azure OpenAI use case, interest and involvement in AI initiatives grew across the company. They established a regular “best practice” session with other business groups to share how AI initiatives are performing and discuss ideas for additional use cases that could bring improvements to other departments. “It’s not just IT or engineering who participate in these discussions, we bring everyone together across sales, purchasing, program management, and manufacturing to talk about this AI and how we can use it to our advantage,” says Campbell. “Every corner of the company knows about it.”

These company-wide sessions have led to a growing number of AI use cases that have driven productivity and efficiency gains across the business.

Engineering

To meet customer assurance requirements for embedded software, NAI must perform software testing at many levels of the electronic system integration process. This effort includes writing and executing unit tests covering 500 different product functions on hundreds of hardware modules. Despite bringing in a third-party vendor to help aid in this extensive, manual task, progress was too slow to meet customer schedules. To accelerate the testing process, NAI brought testing back in-house, leveraging Azure OpenAI to detect missing unit test cases and significantly reduce the manual work and time necessary to complete each test. Ultimately, this strategy will save the company thousands of outsourcing hours and millions in costs. The team is seeing additional efficiency gains with Microsoft Copilot. “All of our engineers now have Copilot installed on their IDEs and love it. When AI can scaffold out a bunch of code that would take them a lot of time to do themselves, it is a huge time saver,” remarks Campbell.

Sales

When statements of work (SOWs) and client inquiries are received, program managers have traditionally needed to manually review and respond by locating and referencing past SOWs, which is time-consuming and inefficient. “Now, when we feed a statement of work into OpenAI it can refer to our prior proposal responses and assist our proposal writers. This improves the quality of SOW responses and gives our program managers a head start, saving them about 16 hours of manual work per proposal while improving accuracy and accelerating response times,” notes Campbell. NAI is also expecting to implement AI to streamline the request for proposal (RFP) process in a similar way.

Service

Currently in the proof-of-concept phase is a new AI-driven return merchandise authorization (RMA) system that improves the data infrastructure. With unstructured data, the current system requires service technicians to manually note problems and resolutions and then appropriately categorize the issues for future reference. The new system will leverage OpenAI to use the unstructured data and a set of standardized reason codes to automate RMA categorization and save technicians considerable time and manual effort.

In addition to the millions in cost savings achieved by eliminating outsourced code testing, NAI estimates that Azure OpenAI has delivered 60-70% time and efficiency gain by automating time-consuming, manual processes while dramatically increasing employee productivity.

Figure 1. Azure OpenAI delivers both cost savings and a gain in time and efficiency for customer NAI.

NAI has no plans to slow its exploration and expansion of AI use cases across the business and has several new implementations already in mind. One such initiative is creating an AI-driven Microsoft Teams site that has a complete knowledge base of the company’s products and manuals to answer queries on things like tolerances and tests right within the collaborative foundation of Teams.

The marketing team is similarly looking to incorporate a customer-facing AI bot for the company website that can leverage a deep knowledge base to help answer customer questions, as well as exploring AI-generated content to help the marketing team accelerate customer-facing content creation.

The engineering team is also working toward creating an AI program to automate hardware documentation. Currently, module manual writers must search and gather information across various sources, which is difficult and inefficient. Knowing how AI needs to ingest information has already inspired the team to start creating a central database of information in the hopes of eventually harnessing an AI-driven program to automate the documentation process. “Even if the program isn’t ready yet, just the thought of having AI has already been really helpful to our process,” says Stein.

Learn more about Azure OpenAI

What is Azure OpenAI Service? – Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn

Azure OpenAI Service | Microsoft Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

¹Expanding AI’s Impact with Organizational Learning, Findings from the 2020 Artificial Intelligence Global Executive Study and Research Project, MIT Sloan Management Review, October 2020.

Offer	Markets
Copilot 15% off, 1 year Upfront	All markets

Offer	Markets
Copilot 15% off, 1 year Upfront	All markets
Microsoft 365 E3 10% off, 3 years Upfront, annual	LATAM, ASEAN, Japan, Korea, India
Office 365 E1 Plus 30% off, 1 year Upfront, monthly	LATAM, ASEAN, Africa, Middle East, Asia, India
Office 365 E1 40-60% off, 1 year Upfront, monthly	LATAM, ASEAN

#SuccessStory Archives | Americas Partner Blog

Top Stories: October 15, 2024

Announcing Season 2 of the podcast No Slides Attached

October 22 Workshop: Build Security Culture and Governance with Microsoft’s SFI

Last chance to register for the October 17 Copilot Partner Prompt-a-Thon

Announcing Season 2 of the podcast – No Slides Attached

What’s new in Season 2

Take a break

Season 2 episodes

Join the conversation

Top Stories: September 24, 2024

Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2

Copilot for Microsoft 365 promo

October 2 Americas Partner Insider Call

No Slides Attached podcast—Season 2 kicks off September 25

Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast—inspiring stories and innovative solutions

Controles Empresariales sees a world of possibilities for education with AI

Personalized learning is at the heart of this educational revolution

Leveraging AI to optimize administrative processes

AI in action in educational environments

The future of education with AI

Join the conversation

Top Stories: September 3, 2024

No Slides Attached podcast—Episode 6 coming September 4

Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program benefits are evolving

Take this Skillsoft survey for a chance to win

Top Stories: August 20, 2024

September 4 Americas Partner Insider Call: Copilot and Co-op

No Slides Attached podcast—Episode 5 coming August 21

Hybrid Cloud Partners podcast—inspiring stories and innovative solutions

AI Create | Tech Track

Top Stories: August 6, 2024

August 14 Americas Partner Insider Call: FY25 updates

No Slides Attached podcast—Episode 4 coming August 7

AI Create | Business Track

Using Copilot in Marketing

Bulletproof partners with Senserva to innovate security solutions for Microsoft customers

Elevating our MXDR solution through automation with Drift Detector

Here’s how it works

Putting Drift Detector to the test with our Microsoft customers

Join the conversation

Top Stories: July 23, 2024

No Slides Attached podcast—Episode 3 coming July 24

Americas Start for Partners—Watch on demand

Learnings from a Microsoft customer’s Azure OpenAI implementation

A culture of innovation drives AI initiatives

Leading the charge and realizing impact with AI

Taking Azure OpenAI company-wide

Learn more about Azure OpenAI

Join the conversation