Microsoft is pleased to sponsor the “Intelligent Future: Summit on A.I.,” which The Atlantic is hosting to convene thought leaders for a conversation on the future of artificial intelligence and its power to fundamentally transform government, industry, and society.

I’ve been focused lately on the potential for AI to empower employees and shape the workforce of the future. While it’s important to discuss the future of AI and its impact on society, I’m excited to share how AI is already making a difference in government organizations today, optimizing operations, and creating a seamless experience for citizens. Thomas Kuczynski, vice president of Information Technology at DC Water, is joining me to explain how this world-class water utility is using Microsoft AI for preventive maintenance. Like many public utilities, DC Water faced mounting pressure to reduce water waste and costs, while increasing business efficiencies and doing more with less. This prompted DC Water to begin its total digital transformation journey shortly after Kuczynski joined the organization in August 2013, with the goal of addressing those challenges as well as improving customer satisfaction, increasing system reliability and optimizing operations.

Becoming a digital utility

For DC Water, the path to becoming a “digital utility” started with several Microsoft Azure-powered initiatives, such as:

• Creating the first-ever Internet of Things smart water fountain, which monitors, tracks and reports water quality in real-time, ensuring safe and reliable drinking water at the point of use
• Applying analytics to the wastewater treatment process to identify and address operating anomalies with pumps
• Developing an IoT platform to monitor wastewater treatment assets, manage energy, and avoid costly maintenance.

“DC Water IT is dedicated to delivering value to customers and improving our operations,” explained Kuczynski, who leads a 60-member team and is responsible for a $20 million budget. ”DC Water has a long and rich history of innovation – applying the latest technologies to improve operations and increase reliability, and customer engagement is a natural extension of that culture.”

The beginning of AI at DC Water

With the single largest advanced wastewater treatment facility in the world, DC Water’s first foray into AI is a solution to detect and classify sewer pipe cracks, defects, root infiltration, and attachments. DC Water’s pipe anomaly detection system dramatically improves traditional manual inspection methods by fully automating the detection and classification of pipe anomalies in its 1,900-mile sanitary and combined sewer system. Using Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit, the evaluation process is reduced from hours to minutes. Defects are precisely pinpointed and output from the process will be used to create predictive models for pipe performance, allowing DC Water to make informed, data-driven decisions on replacing or rehabilitating pipes.

“The efficiencies from the AI-based image recognition and processing make it possible to increase the amount of pipe that can be scanned, increasing the ‘known knowns,’” Kuczynski said. “This allows DC Water to better target investments for repair and replacement. These more targeted investments help us improve the overall reliability of the system and avoid service interruptions.”

Continuing to innovate with AI

While the pipe anomaly detection system reflects DC Water’s first AI solution, there’s much more to come. The utility met with Microsoft Research in March to discuss multiple AI, IoT, and machine learning ideas to optimize operations and deliver improved services for the more than 700,000 District of Columbia residents and 17.8 million annual visitors. “DC Water has an incredible amount of data collected over our 160-year history,” Kuczynski added. “Our leadership and technical experts are data-oriented professionals who recognize the strategic opportunity of using technology to gain better insights that enhance decision-making, reduce our energy consumption, avoid wasting clean water, improve the reliability of the system but, most importantly, help to better serve our customers.”

Preparing for AI and the future of work

Microsoft and our partners are fortunate to collaborate with DC Water, other leading utilities, and state, local, and federal government agencies, which are leveraging our trusted cloud platform and AI solutions for smarter and more secure citizen services. At the same time, we believe business, government, and technology leaders have the opportunity and responsibility to prepare our workforce for how AI will change the future of work. Please read this recent article, where I offer four areas of focus to support the future workforce in the age of AI.

Microsoft also delivers a vast array of digital skills programs to help ensure young people are equipped for future jobs, while our AI Business School provides practical guidance to leaders on how to foster an AI-ready culture. To reinforce our commitment to empowering government to strategically apply AI, on May 28 we’re introducing a new, curated content selection within AI Business School specifically tailored for government leaders. Until then, please:

• Discover how AI could benefit your organization by saving money or creating a positive experience for citizens with this guide to the future of AI technology in government.
• Read our book, “The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society,” to understand Microsoft’s perspective on where AI technology is going and the new societal issues it has raised.
• Watch this brief video on how AI empowers transformation for us all.

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At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This includes helping to create a safe and sustainable future. No single organization can do this alone. We must come together as a global community to address our most pressing sustainability challenges. That’s why we joined the WBCSD – to not only help leverage technology for positive economic and social change, but also to learn from others on how to best achieve sustainable growth.

As technology rapidly evolves, our global society will continue to push the limits of possibility. Significant development around the world will open new doors and create new challenges, and Microsoft is committed to taking a leading role in ensuring businesses and governments achieve their goals in a sustainable way. We know that more people will be living in cities – 70% of the global population by 2050. Working with the WBCSD, I look forward to driving sustainable solutions for the growing mobility and energy needs that will come with this shift.

By joining the WBCSD’s community of businesses around the world, which represent a combined revenue of $8.5 trillion and 19 million employees, it is our intent to help others make a tangible impact on global corporate sustainability. Microsoft sees technology as a powerful tool to meet several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which lie at the heart of the WBCSD’s mission. Using our advanced cloud-based technologies and our diverse partnerships, we will work with members of the WBCSD to explore new ways that people and organizations around the world can thrive in sustainable ways.

We are living in remarkable times, where a focus on the future of our planet and its people has never been more important. Microsoft is committed to helping its partners and customers achieve more sustainable growth through innovation, collaboration, and the life-changing promise of digital transformation, and I am ready to get to work with the WBCSD and its members.

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I’m excited to take the stage with Maia at the upcoming WE Day UN in New York’s Theater at Madison Square Garden on September 20 to showcase her story and celebrate her innovation. I love so many things about it. Maia’s journey demonstrates how our workforce of the future can be empowered with digital skills to create economic opportunity for themselves and their community—through doing good. I also love that this is a story of a young woman immersing herself in the field known as STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—a field where women have been so under-represented. It’s absolutely vital to get more girls and women into STEM so they can bring more diverse ideas to the field and be equipped with earning power to help close the gender pay gap.

What is WE Day? It’s a celebration of young people who are making a positive difference in in their communities and the world through acts of service. Students earn their way to WE Day by taking one local and one global action through WE Schools, a yearlong educational program that engages and empowers young people to become compassionate leaders and active citizens. Through their engagement, students develop leadership skills needed to succeed academically, in the workplace, and as active citizens.

I’m incredibly proud that Microsoft is a partner and supporter of WE, whose work so closely aligns with Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Through programs like WE Schools, students gain the inspiration and skills they need to create a positive economic and societal impact. Whether it’s soft skills like collaboration, communication, and leadership that they gain through the service learning programs or digital skills that they learn through our WE are One action campaign, students are equipped with tools that can help them get and create jobs by developing solutions for local and global challenges. In other words, they’re empowered to create both economic growth and positive change in the world.

Our partnership with WE is one of the many ways that we’re working to empower individuals, organizations, and businesses to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In addition to our involvement with WE Schools and WE Day, we’re helping the WE organization digitally transform so it can scale its efforts and have even greater impact.

It’s vital that we take action now to skill the next-generation workforce to further SDG goal number eight, decent work and economic growth. To learn why it’s so important, what Microsoft is doing to enable people to get jobs, create new ventures, and better their communities, and how you can help, check out the eBook: Empowering a Future-Ready Workforce.

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The world is undergoing an urban renaissance as more people move to cities to build better lives. For the first time in history, more than 50 percent of the world’s population live in urban areas, and by 2050, nearly 70 percent of the global population—more than 6 billion people—will live in cities. This confluence of diverse people with diverse needs, meeting limited city resources and infrastructure, is creating new opportunities for government and business to address challenges with technology innovation and drive meaningful societal change. Digital technology can help us do both.

In my keynote, “Digital Leadership: Empowerment by Design,” I’ll talk more about our opportunity for business and government leaders to embrace the transformative power of the cloud to remove barriers and create new experiences, so everyone shares in the benefits brought by our digital economy. Through digital leadership, we have the opportunity and obligation to create empowered cities with technology solutions that are trusted, responsible, innovative and inclusive.

Inclusive by Design

There are more than 1 billion people in the world who have a disability, whether permanent or temporary, including visual, mobility, hearing, cognitive, speech and neural. We believe our focus on accessibility helps us achieve Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We’re helping cities create more inclusive digital environments by building accessibility features in Microsoft technologies such as including Windows 10, Office 365, Edge and more.

And while at the event, I’m excited to announce our involvement in cross-industry collaborative efforts such as the Smart Cities for All Initiative. These are first-of-their-kind resources developed by the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict) and World ENABLED to help cities be inclusive—and therefore smarter. The toolkit will provide city leaders with a strategic and actionable guide to align technology initiatives and smart cities programs in a way that empowers people with disabilities or people needing particular accommodations.

The Smart Cities for All Toolkit provides:

• ICT accessibility standards that city governments can readily adopt
• Model procurement policy for accessible ICT
• Communication guide on the advantages of incorporating ICT accessibility into a city’s digital services
• Database (alpha) of accessible smart city solutions

We look forward to this toolkit providing the next step in helping cities implement and develop smart technology solutions that benefit everyone and further enable diverse city workforces. The toolkit can be downloaded now at www.smartcities4all.org.

Innovative by Design

In addition to our efforts to help promote digital inclusion across cities, we’re also helping city leaders develop and implement cloud-based technology solutions to deepen their innovation and digital transformation efforts so they can deliver safer, smarter and more effective government operations and citizen services.

There are so many examples of digital transformation and city innovation being discussed and showcased here at the Smart Cities NYC event. The City of Los Angeles—the second largest city in the U.S.—is focused on becoming a fully digital and connected city. Under the technology leadership of the mayor, the City recently rolled out its new City Hall Internet Personality—or “Chip”—bot, an A.I. virtual assistant, powered by Microsoft. Always on and always ready to engage as the City’s new digital brand ambassador, Chip is set to transform and simplify the way that businesses engage with the City. For example, Chip can help the city handle the deluge of questions from 100,000 businesses during business tax season. And in the future Chip ideally will help with citizen services for tasks like reporting graffiti or potholes, which frees City personnel to focus on more complex work. Chip exemplifies the next wave of transformation—offering business services through technology, using human language as the interface.

We’re also showcasing how data and analytics can make our cities safer and more efficient with scarce resources. Microsoft and our partner DataKind are working to analyze traffic collision data to reduce traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. The New York Department of Education’s Office of Pupil Transportation has rolled out a GPS school bus monitoring system built on the cloud to help ensure greater safety of the students transported on buses and to monitor and manage daily vehicle maintenance. These examples demonstrate that global cities and governments are choosing Microsoft as their partner in their digital transformation journey.

With Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to digitally transforming cities, I now must boast just a bit and say that we’re proud that survey respondents in the IDC survey “Who are the most trusted vendors for US Smart City Transformation” identified Microsoft as the number one trusted vendor!

I hope to celebrate this accomplishment with you this week at Smart Cities NYC and work together to make our cities even more innovative, more inclusive, and more accessible!

#MSFTempowers

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At the sixth annual Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (which is the next stop on our Empowerment Tour) we’ll discuss such topics. With 14,000 delegates representing over 440 cities worldwide, Smart City Expo World Congress is the world-leading smart city event. Our answer to several of the challenges facing cities today is through our Microsoft CityNext initiative, which aims to empower more sustainable, prosperous, and economically competitive cities.

The innovation required to meet this goal will come during this fourth industrial revolution – we’ll witness how artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and biotech advances delivered through cloud solutions can change our lives and shape the lives of future generations. But we will also take the responsibility to understand that the benefits of these advanced technologies remain elusive for many citizens in the world and that the “digital divide” is rapidly spreading. Today, 60% of the world’s citizens are excluded from the benefits of a digital economy. There is an incredible opportunity for all of us to do more.

Given our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we are committed to helping citizens and governments the world over make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, as outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #11.

Consider these examples:

The city of Surat has experienced rapid population growth, leading to a shortage of staffing in its police force. To provide a safer community for its citizens, the Surat City Police Department started the “Safe City Project,” an initiative striving to reduce the city’s crime rate using modern technology. The department created a datacenter to monitor street activities by tapping into state and national surveillance grids. Crime rate has lowered by 27% in surveillance zones.

Some of the city’s other technology successes include:

• Implementing an e-application solution to improve the tracking of citizen requests
• Automating water treatment plant management to optimize water usage
• Creating a vehicle tracking system for door-to-door garbage collection
• Adding continuously updated arrival time displays at all city bus stops
• Introducing computer software training in all schools
• Generating 36 percent of the city’s energy from renewable sources

Singapore is running a large “Smart Nation” project aimed at Digital Transformation across the areas of Health, Living, Mobility, and Services; in a country that already has a strong digital footprint. Like many Governments, although most services are already digital, there are silos and barriers to inclusion for everyone (barriers such as digital literacy and access). While Singapore continues to work on education and access, they are also partnering with Microsoft on how a new “Conversation as a Platform” approach might break down even more barriers to service access. Our shared vision is to move to a day where any individual can access any service using their native language, from their phone, in as natural a way as visiting a service center. Using machine learning and data analytics, the vision includes building advanced chatbots to also answer more complex queries and requests without any manual intervention.

Glasgow, Scotland transformed itself into a smart city of the future by building an open big-data platform on Microsoft Azure. This platform enables citizens to crowdsource traffic information and find real-time updates on everything from the current population of rats in the city to the availability of open bicycle racks. Further, using Power BI, the city is better able to analyze where resources should be allocated and businesses can better spot opportunities for growth.

Microsoft partners help cities provide the end-to-end software, devices and services capabilities that meet a range of needs from consumer-related demands of citizens to the mission-critical, enterprise demands of city operations.

At Smart City Expo, Microsoft will bring delegations of customers from around the world and over 50 partners will demonstrate innovative solutions to help cities digitally transform, enabling them to:

• Engage with citizens through mobile services to better connect governments, businesses, and people.
• Empower city employees to better collaborate across departments and increase productivity and efficiency.
• Optimize city operations and infrastructure by connecting systems, data, and people across departments to make information more accessible and services more affordable.
• Transform by harnessing the cloud and data explosion for actionable analysis and deep insights to innovate and design new digital services that benefit society, provide transparency, and encourage citizen participation.

I look forward to meeting you at the 2016 Smart City Expo World Congress.

Toni Townes-Whitley

#MSFTempowers

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At FutureDecoded in London this week I’ll be discussing how leaders across the world recognize that we’re in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution that is changing our current systems of production, distribution, and consumption. Never has there been a time when technology had the potential to impact the world more than today. And with this change comes enormous opportunity and the potential to change nearly every facet of life for the better. Yet, for a substantial part of the world, the benefits of these advanced technologies are elusive. Referencing back to the WEF, even in the most advanced economies, only certain segments of the population are benefitting from this digital economy. Many are left behind because of age, limited digital literacy, lack of access, or remoteness.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and ensure that people all over the world have the tools, education, and technology to help transform their lives for the better. We are committed to helping public sector agencies remove the barriers to adoption through innovative technology and programs that have lasting impact.

FutureDecoded is part of our Empowerment Tour which has the goal of bringing our Digital Transformation through a Cloud for Global Good message and solutions to various business and public sector leaders around the world. During my Keynote and sessions, we plan to talk with leaders and showcase best practices for how technology can be a powerful enabler to solve many of the challenges facing businesses and agencies today as they focus on the future of our planet and its people. Specifically, I’ll be focusing on key UN Sustainable Development Goals that are relevant to the UK and where we believe ICT can rapidly accelerate progress, including #3 Good Health and Well-Being, #4 Education, #8 Economic Growth and #9 Industry Innovation and Infrastructure.

Good Health and Well-Being

Let me share one story with you that relates to how we want to empower countries to address critical health and well-being gaps, and harnessing technology to drive down variations in quality of care.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) offers the blood service for England and the organ donation and transplant service for the whole of the UK. Completely reliant on volunteers registering to become donors, the service found that their systems were being overwhelmed when high profile celebrities helped with their recruitment campaigns and they needed a more agile, responsive system to manage demand and interact with their donors.

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Working in conjunction with Microsoft, NHSBT has harnessed Azure to develop an online booking service, plus an app for mobile devices, that accelerates the donor registration process from around a month under the previous system to a matter of hours. These innovations have had the added bonus of appealing to a younger demographic which has increased donor numbers substantially, while significantly cutting infrastructure costs for the organization. NHSBT can often see traffic to their site increase 100-fold in a very short timeframe during recruitment campaigns and they have been thrilled at the agility that they now have with Azure to cope in this situation. They are delighted with the roll out of their new services: online donor registration and booking services, customer management system and the back end systems; all of which are enabling staff to focus on improving lives with the NHSBT services.

Technology is a powerful agent of change for solving many of the challenges facing countries today as they move toward sustainable growth and development models made possible through Digital Transformation.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter as we make more Empowerment Tour stops throughout the year and help our governments and business leaders digitally transform.

#MSFTempowers

#FutureDecoded

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This new facility is designed around four key principles: security, privacy, compliance and transparency and grounded in our belief that technology can help solve some of the most pressing global challenges and address the complexities created by the digital economy. From the displacement of jobs to the risk that big data will entrench or worsen existing inequalities, this is why we are committed to working with governments, commercial enterprises, non-profits and all stakeholders to progress against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. In this case, our Transparency Center serves Goal #16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions which will advance our worldwide commitment to empower countries and drive a trusted, responsible and inclusive cloud.

The move to cloud technologies, with a focus on deriving insights from big data, reflects a fundamental shift in how IT is managed. Given this shift, transparency becomes a critical value in the new digital economy. In fact, it is on transparency that trust can be built, corporate responsibility can be assessed, and broad inclusive efforts can be benchmarked and replicated. In talking with some of our government affairs teams, we learned that while the concept of data security is all too familiar, “transparency” is somewhat less understood. I think Wikipedia defines it best: “Transparency…implies openness, communication, and accountability. Transparency is operating in such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed.”

The Transparency Centers are an extension of our long-standing Government Security Program (GSP) and are a cornerstone of our commitment to provide greater assurance of the integrity of our products and services. The GSP provides governments reassurance that there are no “back doors” in our products, and through the Transparency Center, they can work with us on security-related issues. In addition, many sources of important cybersecurity-related information previously provided under our Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (CTIP), the Security Cooperation Program (SCP), the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, and through the Microsoft Security Response Center, are now combined under the GSP. Our commitment to transparency and security of our products and services is fundamental to our dedication to build and maintain customer trust.

While here in Brasilia, we will host a two-day workshop: “Transparency in Action: Building Trust in the Cloud” features a range of cybersecurity experts, including from Brazilian Government institutions, countries in the region, and Microsoft. “Legal Compliance in the Cloud” features local, international and Microsoft experts on safely moving enterprise data to the cloud in a way that complies with governing laws and regulations.

While Microsoft focuses on Transparency, it’s interesting to note that we also help our government customers do the same.

The Puebla State Ministry of Finance and Administration had the objective to use technology to its “maximum advantage” and become an example for other states in the area of transparency, accountability, information technology, and public works. One way to share their progress with the public is through their institutional websites, which have scaled their functionality to become portals that offer numerous services. It’s extremely important that the Ministry’s services be available at all times – so they chose Microsoft Azure cloud services. The ministry’s economic objective was not only achieved, but also surpassed. They saved around 60 percent on their investment in technological infrastructure: servers and data centers.

But making this technological leap into cloud computing meant breaking one of the biggest taboos that exists in technology today: storage of information in data centers. Moving government information to the cloud is a sensitive matter—data needs to be secure, yet accessible, to the right people.

Which brings me full circle to why we are so focused on security and transparency. When we can help customers like the Puebla State Ministry of Finance and Administration realize the advantages and the savings from effective cloud solutions, we all win.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter as we make more Empowerment Tour stops throughout the year and help our governments and business leaders digitally transform.

#MSFTempowers

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• Data and Indicators – Help assessing and benchmarking countries’ digital readiness through data and diagnostic tools;
• Digital Economy and Innovation – Drive innovation and create new markets through the development of digital platforms & solutions;
• Internet Access for All – Create new business models that include a focus on enhanced connectivity and Internet access for emerging countries – with an emphasis on access for the poor and people living in rural areas; and finally
• Digital Government – Establish digital government infrastructures and services for all.

Technology is a powerful agent of change for solving many of the challenges facing countries today as they move toward sustainable growth and inclusive development models that are made possible through Digital Transformation. Accordingly, we are looking at areas where we can accelerate economic development by harnessing the effective deployment of technology innovations. Two examples are illustrating the power of partnership and innovation.

1. To improve technology access for citizens who are currently without Internet access, Microsoft and Kenyan Internet Service Provider Indigo have partnered to help the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communications deliver high-speed internet access to areas lacking even basic electricity. The deployment is called “Mawingu,” which is Kiswahili for cloud. It is the first deployment pairing solar-power with TV white spaces, a technology partially developed by Microsoft Research, and it is bringing new opportunities for commerce, education, healthcare and delivery of government services across Kenya.
2. Establishing intelligent transportation is another key to economic development for emerging economies. Embedding the Internet of Things not only within vehicles but within a country’s infrastructure so that goods, labor and routes are all connected will make huge strides in a region’s progress and economic opportunity. The Trans Kalahari Corridor, as an example, is a high-volume network of roads spanning some 1,200 miles across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. With intelligent transport, we can find out how many trucks and goods are going through, manage the flow, and increase operational efficiency in crossing borders. It is also about knowing what citizens and businesses should expect, digitally filling forms so containers can be tracked easily, as well as shortening times on routes and at border stops.

As the World Bank works to address these digital development issues, Microsoft will continue to be a willing partner, committed to facilitating access to affordable broadband access for all, to promoting and protecting the digital infrastructure, and to mainstreaming digital innovations so that people all over the world can benefit. When we work together and embrace the power of trusted, responsible, and inclusive technology, there is so much more that we can achieve. Microsoft is proud to be a part of the Digital Development Partnership for enabling digital dividends for all. #MSFTempowers

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