In India, one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, the sector sustains over 43% of India’s workforce.¹ However, many Indian farmers face challenges due to limited access to crucial information and agronomic expertise. This gap can hamper their ability to access time-sensitive information, like changes in monsoon patterns, making it even more challenging to adapt to the rapidly growing demand for agricultural products. As India’s agricultural landscape evolves, leveraging generative AI not only supports the shift away from harmful pesticides and fertilizers, but it also helps farmers boost efficiency. 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

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Copilots: Working toward sustainable change 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is a powerful tool designed to enhance agricultural practices by leveraging high-quality datasets and AI capabilities. This platform connects farm data from various sources, enabling organizations to develop innovative solutions that provide valuable insights into farming operations. With Microsoft copilot templates, organizations easily create custom copilots to seamlessly retrieve and analyze data in natural language—making it easier to gain actionable insights. Microsoft supports its customers and partners by offering comprehensive tools and resources, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation across the agricultural value chain. Microsoft is working closely with customers like ITC, a versatile Indian multi-business company, to optimize agricultural decision-making and promote sustainable farming practices. 

ITC is deeply committed to sustainability and the welfare of small holder farmers, and they have developed Krishi Mitra, aptly named “farming friend.” This agricultural super app, created using Microsoft’s copilot template, enables farmers to ask questions in their own language and uses generative AI plugins to provide answers on weather and agronomy. By incorporating natural language chat functionality powered by generative AI, Krishi Mitra offers tailored guidance on crop management, pest control, soil health, water conservation, and more. Additionally, Microsoft language localization tools enable the app to cater to a diverse linguistic audience, ensuring that farmers across various regions can access crucial farming information in their preferred language. 

Microsoft is working closely with partners like ITC to extend Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Supporting farmers by providing AI-powered tools, Microsoft and its partners are working together to provide optimized agricultural decision-making. ITC plans to bring generative AI to over 100,000 farmers in India by end of 2024, with an anticipated user base of around 10 million by 2030. Plans include integrating the copilot with Azure Data Manager for Agriculture in subsequent phases, allowing for access to a wide range of additional data sources.

A streamlined development process using plugins 

The development process of Krishi Mitra was streamlined using orchestrated plugins, which access specific functionalities—such as weather data and farming advice. This method ensures a flexible and efficient user interface from ITC, eliminating the need for substantial modifications to the core system architecture. Moreover, the application of contextual indexing and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques has significantly refined the quality of the app’s responses. 

Krishi Mitra’s queries are meticulously processed by a Semantic Kernel-based orchestrator, which then gets responses from Microsoft plugins. This feature empowers farmers to pose questions on weather forecasts and get agronomic advice for crops while the app identifies and utilizes the most suitable plugin to retrieve the optimal answer for each inquiry. This seamless integration and user-friendly interface are what set Krishi Mitra apart, making it an essential tool for farmers aiming to enhance their agricultural efficiency and outcomes. 

Boost productivity and profitability with AI 

In addition to conventional farming challenges such as soil fertility and climate, many farmers contend with limited access to agricultural technology and relevant information that can support their work. Krishi Mitra delivers a comprehensive array of benefits to farmers by equipping them with the necessary tools and information to refine their agricultural practices and market strategies. The app’s core objective is to provide instantaneous access to critical information, boosting the productivity and profitability of smallholder farmers while promoting sustainability and climate resilience.  

In 2021, approximately 61,000 metric tons of pesticides were used in India for agricultural purposes.² Some pests that were once minor have become major threats thanks to rising temperatures that alter insect-crop interactions. With access to Microsoft AI tools, Krishi Mitra can continuously learn and adapt from new agricultural data and user interactions. This feature allows the app to improve its recommendations and stay updated with the latest farming techniques and information, helping farmers stay ahead of pest issues and use fewer pesticides when they catch problems early. 

Personalized data enhances farming opportunities  

Maximizing profits for small farmers hinges on determining the optimal harvest time to ensure crops are of the highest quality and yield, while also capitalizing on the best market prices. Krishi Mitra empowers farmers with immediate access to essential information like precise weather forecasts, enabling farmers to align their farming operations with upcoming weather conditions. Additionally, it provides comprehensive market insights, including detailed data on market locations, pricing, and other critical factors. Data like this helps farmers make strategic decisions regarding irrigation, the timing of their harvests, and choosing the most profitable buyers located nearest to their farms.  

The diversity of languages in India has traditionally posed challenges to widespread technological adoption among farmers. Krishi Mitra addresses this barrier with its capability to process natural language queries and offer translations in local languages. This functionality allows farmers to use their smartphones not just for communication but as a tool for receiving actionable farm management advice in a language they understand. The app’s personalized advisories are tailored to meet the specific needs of each farmer, ensuring that the guidance they receive is not only relevant but comprehensible. This personalized support is instrumental in improving agricultural yields and subsequently increasing the income of the farmers, truly making Krishi Mitra a transformational tool in the hands of the Indian agricultural community. 

Discover agriculture solutions 

• Learn more about Azure Data Manager for Agriculture features.
• Explore Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions for agriculture.
• Learn about Headstorm’s AgPilot tool.

¹ World Bank Group, Employment in agriculture (% of total employment)(modeled ILO estimate)—India, February 2024.

² Statista, Volume of pesticides used for agriculture in India from 2011 to 2021, March 2024.

The post AI in the fields: Copilot powers smarter farming appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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Driving change with copilots 

By leveraging advanced technologies such as machine learning, AI, and data analytics, copilots can provide farmers with real-time insights and recommendations to improve crop yields, reduce waste, and increase profitability. For Microsoft, part of facilitating the adoption of AI and use of copilot templates involves empowering partners. We assist partners by leveraging our unified data estate platform to create tailored, role-specific AI solutions that provide meaningful experiences to customers.  

AgPilot, designed by Microsoft’s partner Headstorm, leverages generative AI along with data from Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and agricultural retailers to create actionable insights for agronomists in real time. AgPilot gives them access to essential information ranging from customer purchase histories and product inventories to weather data, enabling proactive management and strategic decision-making. 

Microsoft is working closely with partners like Headstorm to extend Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, a cloud-based platform that enables farmers to collect, store, and analyze data from various sources—including sensors, drones, and satellites. By using this platform, farmers and organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their operations and make data-driven decisions to improve their yields and reduce costs. Supporting agronomists by providing AI-powered tools, Microsoft and its partners are working together to provide optimized agricultural decision-making. 

Enhance communication using AI-generated insights 

AgPilot enhances communication between agronomists and growers, which is crucial for the efficient management of agricultural operations. By leveraging advanced data analytics and AI-driven insights, AgPilot facilitates real-time access to critical agricultural data like soil health, crop conditions, weather forecasts, and pest and disease information. This allows agronomists to quickly gather and analyze relevant information and communicate necessary actions to growers. For example, AgPilot pulls relevant weather data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, and if an unexpected frost is predicted, agronomists can promptly advise growers on protective measures to mitigate crop damage. 

AgPilot also includes features that allow agronomists to draft and send customized messages and recommendations directly to growers. These communication tools make it easier to maintain regular contact and ensure that all advice is clear, concise, and actionable. By streamlining and enhancing communication channels, AgPilot helps agronomists deliver a higher level of service, making agricultural management more collaborative, informed, and proactive. This improved communication is key to achieving the ultimate goal of increased productivity and sustainability in farming.

Facilitate sustainable practices with real-time data 

Growers and agronomists working towards more sustainable farming methods—agronomists working with specialty crops (like tree fruit, tree nuts, vineyards) can particularly benefit from AgPilot. Growing specialty crops usually requires more intensive management practices compared to traditional crops. This includes closer attention to the specifics of plant care, such as precise water needs, specialized pest and disease management, and labor-intensive harvesting processes.  

Agronomists can use AgPilot to identify potential pest and disease threats before they become widespread. This proactive approach allows for more effective and minimal use of chemicals, supporting eco-friendly pest control methods. For specialty crops in particular, water management is crucial. AgPilot offers insights into optimal irrigation schedules based on weather data and soil moisture levels, promoting efficient water use and helping to prevent over-irrigation. 

Deployment is simple 

Headstorm has made it very straightforward for existing Microsoft Azure customers to get started right away by subscribing to AgPilot through the Azure Marketplace, available soon. This approach ensures that the setup process aligns with Microsoft cloud infrastructure, leveraging its security and scalability features. Once subscribed, AgPilot is deployed directly into the customer’s Azure instance, adhering to the established data privacy and security protocols of Azure. This setup helps maintain data integrity and compliance with industry regulations, providing peace of mind for users.

Users can tailor AgPilot to align with their specific data sources and systems, integrating it with internal mechanisms such as inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), and agronomy systems utilized by agricultural retailers. AgPilot combines proprietary customer data with real-time, real-world data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. This integration facilitates the generation of alerts that link crop health insights with current weather conditions sourced from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, enabling quicker and more informed decision-making. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture delivers up-to-date, predictive weather information using an extension-based and provider-neutral framework, permitting integration with any chosen provider. 

AgPilot, leveraging Azure and Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, helps agronomists provide enhanced decision-making to support sustainable management of both traditional and specialty crops. Future roadmap items for AgPilot include leveraging Azure Data Manager for Agriculture satellite imagery to provide on-demand scouting intelligence to the agronomist simply by requesting the intelligence about a particular farm through the chat prompt interface.  

Learn more

• Explore our Azure Data Manager for Agriculture resources.
• Discover how you can accelerate innovation with Microsoft Cloud for Agriculture.
• Learn how Headstorm’s AgPilot tool can help your business.

The post AgPilot: Enhancing productivity and efficiency with AI for smarter farming appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

This progress was clear at World Agri-Tech 2024 in San Francisco, California where Microsoft joined more than 2,500 global leaders and organizations who came together to share knowledge about building sustainable agri-food supply chains. We’re excited that many of our partners joined us on the floor to share their AI capabilities including: Accenture, Sonata Software, Kin + Carta, Magoya Software, Tavant, Publicis Sapient, Click2Cloud, Aditi Consulting, AGRIVI, and SWARM Engineering.

Reflecting on our continued momentum with partners and customers, we were excited to work with Bayer, ITC, and Headstorm on a mix of new solutions and announcements that uniquely help to address the needs of farmers and agronomists.

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Powering agriculture with new copilot templates and generative AI

Copilots and generative AI solutions have great potential to help address the rising demands for increased efficiency and productivity in agriculture. Copilots are large language model (LLM)-based, generative AI interactions designed to help people be smarter, more productive, more creative, and more connected to the people and things around them.

Recognizing this potential, in San Francisco, we launched new Microsoft copilot templates empowering organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. The copilot templates are an evolution of our previously announced agriculture LLM APIs, enabling more data source inputs and expand capabilities for broader use cases.

Leveraging planning and observational data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and legacy data sources, the copilots deliver insights to farmers and others on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts on crops, and harvest windows. By enabling the seamless retrieval of data, farming-related context and insights can be easily queried in conversational context.

Organizations can extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain, from insurance agents to agronomists and beyond. Users can seek answers to help optimize crop management, minimize environmental impacts, maximize agricultural productivity, and more.

ITC empowering farmers with fast, hyper-localized answers

ITC, a multi-industry enterprise is making generative AI real for farmers with Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot showcased at World Agri-Tech 2024. The application is built using Microsoft copilot templates and is intended to serve 300,000 farmers in India during its pilot phase, with an anticipated user base of 10 million. With this app, ITC aims to empower farmers with timely and relevant information that can enhance their productivity and profitability, and help them build climate resilience.

In addition to conventional farming challenges such as soil fertility and climate, many farmers contend with limited access to agriculture technology and relevant information that can support their work. Using Krishi Mitra, farmers can gain tailored insights to help them work more efficiently and profitably. The app supports various aspects of farming, such as crop management, pest and disease control, soil health, water conservation, weather forecasting, market linkages, and government programs.

Using a smart phone, the user can pose a question with natural language. The app then promptly delivers a detailed, personalized response, spoken in the user’s local language. For example, in response to questions about weather conditions or where to sell a harvest, Krishi Mitra replies with forecasts and detailed market locations, pricing information, and other relevant details. Through personalized advisories, farmers can make informed decisions, leading to potentially better yields and increased income.

Bayer extends deep agriculture expertise through multiple innovations

Bayer announced several AI innovations, such as its new Azure-based expert generative AI system, which builds on the company’s strengths in data science and digital technology as well as deep agronomics expertise to help farmers and agronomists streamline their work. The pilot is already helping Bayer teams in the United States improve their productivity.

“AI and automation are helping farms of all sizes produce more while using fewer natural resources, and we’re starting to see how they can enhance decision-making on almost any plot of land.”

—Ranveer Chandra, Managing Director, Research for Industry and Chief Technology Officer, Agri-Food, Microsoft

Bayer also announced new AgPowered Services—a set of solutions that ingests data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, turning that data into timely insights on crop health, weather forecasts, crop growth tracking, and more. This can help a range of customers, from data input providers to retailers and consumer goods companies, drive value faster.

Additionally, Bayer is bringing a comprehensive weather dataset to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Bayer Historical Weather provides detailed, field-level weather insights across global regions over 40 years. It can be used to help forecast crop seasonality and production changes year over year and to train agronomic models.

Even more, Bayer is developing a connector for irrigation data from Lindsay Corporation, an industry-leading irrigation solution provider. This enables Azure Data Manager for Agriculture enterprise customers to connect to irrigation data seamlessly, just like they can with weather, imagery, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) data, and other data types. And it can help technology builders minimize the costs and time involved in building digital tools to help farmers monitor, measure, and control water usage in fields.

Headstorm agriculture AI solution poised to boost productivity

The technology consulting company Headstorm announced AGPILOT, an agricultural retail copilot using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. AGPILOT uses generative AI to redefine how agronomists and growers interact, drawing on vast data sources in Azure Data Manager as well as proprietary data repositories to transform raw information into actionable insights in real time. For example, users can quickly access weather data in context to make better decisions, faster.

By automating research tasks and consolidating relevant data, the app helps agronomists work more efficiently and effectively, helping to increase revenue and reduce attrition. The solutions can be applied to expansive use cases and continuously refined as machine learning models evolve and responses are optimized for efficiency.

Learn more

The AI solutions showcased in San Francisco represent just a small cross-section of the progress that’s underway. We’re excited to collaborate with our customers and partners to continue driving innovation in agriculture and to share our progress with you.

• Explore Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.
• Read the Azure Data Manager for Agriculture documentation.
• Stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Sign up for news and updates.

¹ Insight Ace Analytic, Global Smart Farming Market Research Report, March 20, 2024.

The post World Agri-Tech 2024: Pioneering agriculture resilience with AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

It was great to see industry infused throughout several sessions and news at Microsoft Inspire 2023. Our partner strategy continues to reflect the investments we’re making in our global partner ecosystem. These investments are detailed in our upcoming 2023 wave 2 release plans. 

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 2 plan

Learn about the latest updates for customers.

Read the latest updates

Optimizing for partners 

We continue to invest, build, and expand industry-specific capabilities that accelerate time-to-value for our customers and partners, including lifecycle commitments every wave. In a recent blog, Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Global Industry Marketing discussed in detail, our partner strategy, which aligns to three growth pillars: 

• Accelerate your innovation and reduce time to market.

• Quickly scale your go-to-market by helping partners drive. 

• Win new customers with industry solutions.

We believe the industry cloud solutions will provide customers with simplicity and predictability when engaging with Microsoft. Watch on-demand sessions at Microsoft Inspire 2023 to learn more about our industry-specific investments. 

The latest capabilities  

The release notes cover new features for Microsoft Cloud for Industry releasing from October 2023 through March 2024. The latest plans for Microsoft Cloud for Industry bring new innovations that provide organizations with significant capabilities to transform business. The release contains several new features across Microsoft Cloud for Industry applications, including Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 

Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted and integrated capabilities that make it easier for healthcare organizations to create personalized patient experiences, give health teams connected collaboration tools, and adopt data standards important to healthcare. Together with Nuance, users can access the broadest and deepest set of trusted AI solutions to address some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Organizations can use AI to provide full visibility into data, relieve provider administrative burden, boost clinician productivity, increase workflow automation to improve the quality of care, reduce clinician burnout, and deliver better care faster at a lower cost. 

Key investment areas for wave 2 include: 

Personalized access and outreach  

• Releasing patient journey capabilities in Patient outreach. 

Care management 

• Enabling better support for payor and insurance companies. 

Virtual health  

• Launching virtual consultations both directly from electronic health records (EHRs) and from Teladoc Solo in Microsoft Teams, enabling health systems to maximize their EHR investments while also providing access to virtual care workflows for members of the care team who may not have routine access to the EHR. 

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. 

Retail 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is a comprehensive solution developed to support retailers in using their data, enhancing customer shopping experiences, and empowering store associates to work more efficiently and knowledgeably. In the 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft Cloud for Retail will include investments in retail workforce management, address customer feedback, and improve the Store Operations Assist and Smart Store Analytics features. We will also utilize AI, machine learning, and generative AI models to provide valuable insights into customer engagement, advertising, inventory management, and supply chain management. These insights can seamlessly integrate into relevant applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and other Microsoft solutions, enabling retailers to take actionable steps based on the intelligence gained. 

Read the details on retail workforce management planned for this release wave in the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Retail. 

Sustainability 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We are investing in multiple areas to help your sustainability initiatives and reporting. We’re incorporating new features to enable and simplify the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requirements, including adding a CSRD template into Purview Compliance Manager (in preview). We’re expanding on our improved data ingestion experience, including enhancements to data approval management and more third-party connectors. Our new Project ESG Lake will help you aggregate your ESG data in one place and provide rich analysis and insights. We’re also adding features for recording and reporting on water usage and calculating waste intensity. Environmental Credit Service, which was released in preview in November 2022, continues to expand capabilities that are being validated by customers and partners. Finally, we’re bringing our AI capabilities to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to provide what-if analysis scenarios and other important insights. 

During this wave, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will invest in: 

• Value chain visibility

• Data integration and calculations

• System expansion and enhancement

• Reporting, disclosure, and automated insights

In the 2023 release wave 2, we are also adding more reporting capabilities for the European Union’s CSRD and AI capabilities to provide what-if analyses and other insights. 

Learn more about the new and planned features for Microsoft Industry Clouds, 2023 release wave 2 and watch our sustainability session on demand.

Watch Microsoft Inspire 2023 on demand 

• Microsoft Inspire Keynote 
• Winning customers with industry specific solutions and AI 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty – accelerate government transformation 

The post Empowering your business: The latest from Microsoft Cloud for Industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Updated monthly, the release wave 1 plan details features released from April 1, 2023 through September 30, 2023, and is available online or via download as a PDF file. This plan covers features for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. Read on for a summary of each industry’s release plan and learn about supporting resources

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 1 plan

Learn about the latest updates to customers as features are prepared for release.

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Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare focuses on customer feedback across various offerings. During this wave, we are expanding the support in enhancing patient experiences with patient journeys. We will also focus on planning tools to empower health teams to provide better care management. Additionally, to improve the time to value, we are releasing capabilities to support for create/read update and delete procedures and performance improvements for Dataverse Healthcare application programming interfaces (APIs). Keep an eye out for more announcements to follow in April 2023.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services will continue to focus on strengthening offerings in banking, cross-vertical experiences, and financial services data models. For the upcoming releases, we are prioritizing providing customers and partners with more flexibility in meeting their specific needs through componentization. The components offer individual deployment and configuration capabilities for customer onboarding, document processing, and in how customer financial information is represented. We will enable flexible adaptation of the UI to different scenarios, offer a wealth of tools for document processing and management using AI, and provide various end points for partner enablement in the process. We plan to improve the retail banking loan onboarding solution with the new document intelligence feature and offer additional flexibility enhancements as requested by our customers and partners.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail accelerates innovation with industry-specific solutions that help retailers maximize the value of their data by providing an engaging shopping experience for their shoppers, and empowering store associates to be productive and customer focused. With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Retail is continuing its investments in both Store Operations and Smart Store Analytics with customer requested features and additional AI and machine learning based capabilities. With Store Operations Assist, we are enabling features like tablet support, branching logic for survey responses, enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams front line worker apps. For Smart Store Analytics, we are adding additional AI and machine learning based insights around product recommendations and foot traffic analysis. Additionally, we will also enable additional scenarios with Microsoft Could for Retail prioritized partners.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We continue to empower organizations in their sustainability efforts across our solutions which streamline data ingestion, integration, calculations, reporting and more. Our offering also includes an environmental credit service, bringing efficiency, trust and transparency to voluntary ecological markets. We continue to extend our data story with the availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API which allows organization to get emissions data for extensibility and customization for solutions and reporting. This release wave also extends our scope 3 category calculations for the GHG Protocol, including providing reporting on the following scope 3 categories: Scope 3 category 3: Fuel- and energy-related activities not included in scope 1 or scope 2; Scope 3 category 12 (included in a previous release): End-of-life treatment of sold products.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit in 2023 release wave 1, continues to deliver capabilities that enable nonprofits to operate in a holistic and seamless way and empower partners to extend the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. In this release we are focusing on accelerating mission outcomes by improving evidence-based decision-making through connected organization data powered by rich data capabilities and machine learning. We also will help nonprofits extend fundraising and engagement more easily. Know your donors and supporters by inputting and processing donor gifts quickly, viewing actionable donor insights, and integrated reporting with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Key dates for the 2023 release wave 1

These release plans describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (go to Microsoft policy for more information).

Here are the key dates for the 2023 release wave 1.

What’s next

Your feedback is used to make improvements to our solutions as well as our documentation. Share your thoughts in the Microsoft Power Platform community forum.

We look forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2023 release wave 1.

The post Check out the latest release plans for Microsoft Industry Clouds appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions bring together the breadth of offerings from across Microsoft, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and uniquely tailor them for specific industries. Built on a foundation of trust, these solutions are composable and can be customized, providing a rich platform to enable our customers and partners to quickly drive time-to-value and digitally transform their organizations.

Data sovereignty and residency

Microsoft works to provide tools and resources to give businesses the ability to maintain customer data in both a designated geographic boundary (data residency) as well as customer data that is subject to national jurisdiction (sovereignty). As we continue to expand our solutions, we are proactively working with our customers and partners to help meet the unique needs of their industries by architecting our solutions with options for data residency, compliance, and language localization in each geography. In May 2022, Microsoft announced the availability of two new sovereign sites, Sweden and Belgium, that will be offering local data residency, and country sovereignty for their cloud services. These new sites also provide improved performance and faster access to the cloud. Learn more about data residency, data sovereignty, and compliance in Microsoft Cloud.

Industry compliance in mind

Compliance is a shared responsibility. While it is essential that organizations understand how Microsoft provides the foundation for compliance, ultimately all data stored in a cloud service requires each organization to secure and protect it. Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions supports regional compliance coverage by simplifying the solution adoption. Microsoft has 100 plus compliance offerings including more than 50 of which are specific to regions and countries such as Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and 26 European countries, known as the Schengen area. Microsoft engages with governments, regulators, standards bodies, and nongovernmental organizations to understand emerging requirements and ensure fast and effective enablement of critical compliance needs. In regions such as Europe, the forthcoming EU Data Boundary will expand on our data residency commitment, ensuring Microsoft not only stores but also processes customer data in the European Union.

To help address customer and partner needs to understand regulatory requirements, our industry solutions, including Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, and Microsoft Cloud for Retail, adhere to well-known globally accepted standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018. In addition, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services conforms to SOC1 and SOC2 standards. Learn more about privacy and compliance at the Microsoft Trust Center.

Native languages built-in

Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions is available in multiple languages to serve our customers and partners with ease of use in their native languages. For countries that require products sold to be localized, Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions helps adhere to local regulations. Explore the industry solutions and supported languages by geography.

Learn more

Explore the Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions global availability and languages supported.

Our next release wave promises even more opportunities for industries to do more with less. Read more about what’s upcoming on our Dynamics 365 and industry clouds documentation pages.

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