The proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs)—small-scale units of power generation and storage that operate locally and are connected to larger grids at the distribution level—is also leading power providers to rethink how they operate. DERs could dramatically reduce the need for centralized power generation, but they could also push traditional operational technology (OT) environments to their limits and create heightened need for security.  

A modern, flexible, and secure grid with unified information technology (IT) and OT will become increasingly important for grid operators as consumers add solar panels, electric vehicles, or battery storage and seek to connect to the grid. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Guidehouse shows that 61% of utilities executives believe that utility infrastructure investments should prioritize increased flexibility to improve energy system resilience². AI has the potential to boost resilience by helping providers forecast and manage load demand, maintain power balance, enhance security, support predictive analytics and maintenance, and optimize workforce management and dispatch, among many other use cases. 

Power and utilities companies aren’t alone in recognizing the benefits of AI. A recent study on AI adoption shows that over the next three years, 92% of companies will increase their AI investments, particularly in generative AI; yet only 1% consider their AI deployment to be “mature,”³ indicating there’s still tremendous opportunity to drive continued AI transformation for improved business outcomes. Critically, employees are ready for this change. In fact, three times more employees are using generative AI for 30% or more of their work than their leaders imagine.⁴ It’s a sign that for many companies, the AI transformation is already underway, and teams are eager to unlock new levels of creative potential and productivity.  

An adaptive cloud approach helps streamline operations and provide critical power service 

Through comprehensive cloud, data, and AI offerings, Microsoft and its global partner ecosystem support power and utility providers as they digitally transform and drive sustainable business growth while meeting customer demand. The adaptive cloud approach seamlessly integrates IT and OT, bringing together on-premises control systems and edge intelligence with cloud-scale analytics. This lays the foundation for unlocking the power of their data, further allowing them to utilize AI to meet increasing energy demand and solve their most complex challenges.  

Take Uniper, for example. As the world’s largest power generation company, Uniper needed a solution to help standardize IT and OT so it could manage all applications in a uniform manner. An adaptive cloud strategy helped standardize IT and OT environments, launch new services faster, and optimize performance.  

Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA) has another adaptive cloud success story. EGA’s on-premises environment couldn’t deliver the level of flexibility needed to manage data-intensive operations with scalable computing infrastructure. A hybrid approach allowed them to move part of their server base to the Microsoft Azure public cloud and another part to run hybrid at the edge with Azure Local. This helped optimize latency, support advanced AI and automation solutions, and offer sustaining commercial savings by applying intelligence at the edge.  

By embracing adaptive cloud, power and utilities providers can future-proof their operations and build the resilient energy systems of tomorrow—without compromising compliance, security, or operational continuity.   

Sharing success stories and insights at DISTRIBUTECH  

In an era where the imperative for clean, reliable, and accessible energy has never been greater, Microsoft relies on the knowledge and innovative potential of its partners and customers to help spearhead progress. The success stories mentioned above are made possible through the collective efforts of a complete partner and customer energy ecosystem. The company looks forward to connecting with this ecosystem at important energy industry events like the upcoming DISTRIBUTECH International 2025 conference, where it’ll share the latest in AI-powered insights at the annual energy transmission and distribution event. Held in Dallas, Texas from March 24 to 27, 2025, this year’s event promises engaging speaking sessions, exhibitions, and demos across trending topics like energy storage, transportation electrification, distributed energy resource management, and, of course, the latest on AI.  

Microsoft will join its energy partners and customers on stage and at the Microsoft booth as it highlights its work to accelerate the energy transition and address some of the biggest challenges across the power and utilities sector. It’ll speak to some of these challenges at its thought leadership sessions throughout the week, as well as highlight the opportunities to utilize cloud and AI capabilities to tackle them. These conversations couldn’t be timelier, as issues like cybersecurity and threat recovery impact power and utilities providers around the world every day. To that end, Microsoft Energy and Resources leaders will participate in keynote sessions on topics like cybersecurity in the power and utilities sector. They’ll dive into the evolving threat landscape, the intersection of regulation and innovation, and the key measures utilities can take to safeguard critical infrastructure. Microsoft will also take part in a keynote session on transforming power and utilities with AI, where the conversation will revolve around the ways in which AI-powered solutions are revolutionizing utility operations.  

Highlighting Microsoft’s partner ecosystem 

Microsoft will join several energy and technology partners at DISTRIBUTECH to further the discussion on global collaboration and partnership as critical aspects of the energy transition. It will serve as a guest speaker for Schneider Electric’s Knowledge Hub session on grid technologies, diving into the ways that AI and digital transformation are revolutionizing grid operations and management. The occasion marks another milestone in the deep Microsoft partnership with Schneider Electric as we collaborate with the company on the release of its new digital grid solution. Powered by Azure and AI, the new solution is designed to equip utilities with the digital tools to navigate modern energy challenges and support more resilient energy infrastructure. 

Microsoft is also working with longtime partner Itron to empower utility companies with data and intelligent analytics. Itron is integrating Microsoft Copilot technology into its Intelligent Edge Operating System (IEOS), a global data platform running on Azure, to help utilities to use natural language queries to more easily access essential data and insights to accelerate decision making, support innovation, and streamline repetitive tasks. By utilizing Microsoft AI solutions, Itron helps its customers transform complex data interactions into simple, intuitive processes, significantly boosting operational efficiency. 

In addition, Microsoft is collaborating with Siemens Energy’s Industrial Cyber and Digital Trust teams within Digital Solutions to enhance cybersecurity in the energy sector. By integrating Microsoft’s leading cybersecurity capabilities with Siemens Energy’s advanced solutions in the gas turbine business, we are strengthening resilience against evolving threats. This partnership underscores our shared commitment to securing critical infrastructure and driving digital trust across the industry. 

Microsoft also recently announced a collaboration with EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) through the Open Power AI Consortium to advance AI innovation in the electric sector. This partnership focuses on developing industry-specific AI and generative AI use cases, creating responsible deployment frameworks, and establishing an AI sandbox on Azure for testing and refinement. By fostering collaboration among utilities and key stakeholders, we aim to drive continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and real-world impact across critical infrastructure. 

Microsoft will co-host a breakfast roundtable with Accenture along with our other energy ecosystem partners AVEVA, IFS, Itron, and Schneider Electric to discuss the keys to unlocking return on investment (ROI) and overcoming barriers to scale AI and digital technologies. Together with utility customers, they will discuss data challenges, regulatory issues, and organizational barriers that utilities face in their data transformation journeys.

Microsoft hopes to see many of you at DISTRIBUTECH 2025 as they share energy success stories and learn how others are driving positive change for a new energy future.  

Explore more energy solutions and resources  

• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources to learn about themes and actions critical for energy transition.  
• Learn how to achieve more in the energy and resources industry with trusted data and AI solutions from Microsoft.  
• Watch this webinar about AI-powered forecasting in power and utilities with Microsoft Energy and Resources leader Hanna Grene and Amperon Chief Revenue Officer Alex Robart 
• Check out this webinar on how AI solves real utility challenges, featuring Microsoft’s Laurent Boinot 

Sources:

¹ 2025 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook, Deloitte, December 2024. 

² Public Utilities Fortnightly®, Special Issue, State and Future of Power, Guidehouse, June 2024. 

^3,4 Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential, McKinsey & Company, January 2025. 

The post Transformation in power and utilities with the Microsoft Cloud and AI  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

While cloud adoption is accelerating, many OT systems, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), and Outage Management Systems (OMS), require hybrid architectures to ensure operational continuity, compliance, and secure integration with real-time grid control.

The challenge is clear: how do energy providers unlock the full potential of the cloud while helping to ensure mission-critical operations remain secure, resilient, and interoperable with legacy infrastructure?

Microsoft for energy and resources

Drive innovation to achieve net zero and deliver safe, reliable, equitable energy for a sustainable future.

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Adaptive cloud: The bridge between IT, OT, and AI-powered intelligence

The Microsoft adaptive cloud approach provides a seamless, scalable, and secure framework for unifying on-premises, edge, and cloud environments. Rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all migration to the cloud, the Microsoft adaptive cloud integrates IT and OT seamlessly, bringing together on-premises control systems and edge intelligence with cloud-scale analytics. Instead of forcing a binary choice between on-premises versus cloud, adaptive cloud supports energy providers to:

• Integrate on-premises systems with cloud-driven intelligence while meeting global compliance and sovereignty requirements.
• Utilize complex AI algorithms and real-time data streaming to unlock operational efficiencies, increase resilience, and enhance reliability.
• Strengthen cybersecurity with built-in Zero Trust protections and industry-aligned security frameworks.
• Support edge computing for localized grid control while harnessing the cloud’s computational power.

At Microsoft, we’re working with energy leaders around the world to implement this adaptive cloud approach that unites and integrates siloed teams, distributed sites, and operational systems into a unified model for operations, security, applications, and data. With a foundation built on Microsoft Azure and spanning more than 60 public cloud regions, our approach supports energy providers to utilize cloud-native and AI capabilities across the enterprise while bringing together IT and OT systems to accelerate energy production and help teams manage increasingly complex environments more efficiently.

Meeting growing demand while driving critical efficiencies

As population growth and rapidly changing markets continue driving demand for energy, industry leaders are faced with immense pressure to not only provide secure, equitable, and sustainable energy, but to optimize every aspect of business for continued growth. The Microsoft adaptive cloud environment sets the stage for critical improvements that help energy companies keep up with demand without overextending their own resources. These improvements include:

• Secure integration of cloud AI with critical OT systems. Many grid control systems such as SCADA, EMS, and DERMS must interact with real-time operational data while helping to ensure security and compliance. The Microsoft adaptive cloud supports these systems to securely connect to cloud-based AI and analytics without disrupting mission-critical workflows.
• Enhanced security. The increasing sophistication of cyber threats makes security a non-negotiable priority. Supporting an adaptive cloud-based environment is a critical step in improving security measures and allowing quick responses, helping to ensure that energy systems are protected against evolving cyber threats. Real-time OT and IT threat detection is an imperative going forward.
• Faster data analytics. Energy operators require high-speed decision-making, but traditional OT systems often rely on static models that struggle to adapt to real-time fluctuations. Running enterprise systems in Azure facilitates faster, more informed decision-making based on real-time data and supports cloud-based, high-speed analytics that ingest, process, and visualize terabytes of operational data from the grid. These data-driven insights can be applied to predictive maintenance, which helps reduce unplanned downtime and mitigates related operational expenses. Applying AI capabilities on top of analytics can supercharge the value of enterprise data, saving time and empowering decision-makers with actionable information.
• Compliance with global regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. Energy companies navigate a complex web of regional regulations, including:
  • NERC CIP (North America)—critical infrastructure protection for utilities
  • GDPR (European Union)—data privacy and protection regulations
  • Schrems II Ruling (European Union)—restrictions on data transfers from the EU to third countries
  • ISO 27001 & IEC 62443—international cybersecurity frameworks for industrial control systems

• Edge computing for low-latency control and decision-making. Certain grid operations require millisecond response times, making local processing at the substation or field level critical. Adaptive cloud allows real-time decision-making at the grid edge while still syncing with cloud-based AI for broader optimization.
• Increased scalability and flexibility. An adaptive cloud also supports energy providers to remain agile with changing demands and adopt new technologies that can easily integrate with current infrastructure investments.

Global energy leaders unlock new value with Azure

Microsoft collaborates with energy customers to unearth insights that help them make better, faster decisions and optimize efficiencies across the enterprise. For many, that starts with introducing cloud solutions that make it easier to collect and organize data. But data regulations, legacy on-premises systems, and a growing number of applications to manage are just a few challenges that pop up along the way. Below are two recent examples of how Microsoft has worked with energy leaders to address these and other challenges.

Uniper: Standardizing IT and OT with a hybrid cloud strategy

Uniper, the world’s largest power generation company, wanted to introduce cloud solutions but faced strict regulations around where certain applications could operate depending on the type of data involved, making it difficult for the IT team to manage all applications in a uniform, secure way. Their solution:

• Microsoft Azure Arc and Microsoft Azure Monitor created a single dashboard for managing applications across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Microsoft Azure Stack HCI allowed hybrid use of cloud services while helping to ensure compliance with European data regulations.

With this adaptive cloud strategy, Uniper can now manage IT and OT environments in a standardized way, launch new services faster, and optimize performance without disrupting critical infrastructure. This translates to launching orders more quickly, bringing new services to market faster, and building new systems with just a few clicks.

Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA): AI-powered edge intelligence for industrial operations

EGA is another energy leader that turned to Azure to pave a path for sustainable, scalable infrastructure. EGA’s on-premises environment couldn’t deliver the level of flexibility needed to manage increasingly complex and data-intensive operations with scalable computing infrastructure. EGA needed a hybrid cloud approach to support real-time AI and analytics across its energy-intensive operations. To address this challenge, the company deployed a hybrid environment managed by Azure Arc. The new environment allowed EGA to connect private cloud services through on-premises datacenters—which host operational data, quality control data, environmental and energy data, and supply chain and market data—with the public cloud. This helped optimize latency, support advanced AI and automation solutions, and offer sustaining commercial savings by applying intelligence at the edge. It also streamlined processing for massive amounts of real-time readings from sensors, machinery, and production lines.

Using an adaptive cloud approach went a long way in helping EGA accelerate industrial AI use cases and improve production processes. The company experienced 10 to 13 times faster AI response time, lower latency, and 86% cost savings associated with AI image and video use cases. They also developed and trained a model on 100,000 images to define and differentiate between what makes a good anode and what makes a bad one, ultimately helping to improve the overall quality of their aluminum production.

An adaptive cloud approach to power a sustainable energy future

As enterprises from across all industries aim to reduce their carbon footprint through more efficient, sustainable practices, there’s little doubt that all eyes are on the energy industry to lead the way. Microsoft is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure (DHI), placing Microsoft Furthest and Highest in Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Microsoft offers an adaptive cloud approach and can help energy companies make real progress toward a resilient and sustainable future by setting the stage for significant value-adds like improved data management and generative AI capabilities. Collectively, these improvements help strengthen security posture, simplify management of applications, improve operational performance, and, critically, reduce carbon footprint.

By partnering with Microsoft, global energy providers can:

• Unify IT and OT systems across on-premises, edge, and cloud for seamless integration.
• Meet global regulatory and compliance requirements while maximizing cloud capabilities.
• Enhance cybersecurity with real-time threat detection and Zero Trust protections.
• Scale AI and analytics to energy infrastructure, reduce downtime, and improve efficiency, reliability, and resilience.

By embracing adaptive cloud, energy providers can future-proof their operations, strengthen cybersecurity, and build the resilient energy systems of tomorrow—without compromising compliance, security, or operational continuity.

We’re here to support customers and partners along the way, as we all look to accelerate the energy transition and build a sustainable energy future for the next generation.

Explore more energy solutions and resources

• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources to learn about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
• Learn how to achieve more in the energy and resources industry with trusted data and AI solutions from Microsoft.
• Check out the on-demand recording of our recent webinar, AI Transformation in Energy, to learn how data and AI are driving change across the industry.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

The post Unifying on-premises, edge, and cloud data with Microsoft appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

AI innovation is a critical component of delivering more energy with less emissions—and combined with strategic partnerships and collective action, it’s a way to supercharge change. The World Energy Council elevates the idea of “Humanizing Energy” as its visionary foundation for transitioning the world away from fossil fuels. But change of this magnitude will be complex. According to the World Energy Council, humanizing energy involves “more people and diverse communities in understanding their roles and choices and remaining realistically hopeful about making progress by enabling hundreds and thousands of smaller steps along multiple, diverse pathways.”²

Microsoft for energy and resources

Drive innovation to achieve a sustainable future

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At Microsoft, we believe that change happens through collective progress that brings people and technology together. Even as enterprise data management and AI solutions become key enablers for successful digital transformation, we can’t lose sight of the importance of keeping people and communities engaged. When people are actively involved in modernizing the processes, workflows, and tools they use every day, they’re empowered to not only work more efficiently but to recognize all the new opportunities and roles they play in supporting a more sustainable energy future.  

There are countless applications of AI in energy operations and workforce transformation, all of which can add up to big change. This blog explores just some of the industry-leading AI innovations and steps we can take to advance the global energy transition together.  

Protecting and strengthening critical infrastructure and energy operations 

Many energy systems today, especially power and utilities infrastructure, are prone to persistent cyberattacks. Left unresolved, security risks can quickly spiral and complicate already-existing issues like technical debt, tool fatigue, and employee burnout. It’s a prime example of how technology can enhance human capabilities to create a secure energy supply. Several of the industry leaders we work with are leveraging generative AI to streamline security processes and improve security posture, allowing their security personnel to focus on the highest-priority work. For example, international power company Uniper relies on Microsoft Security Copilot to help their IT security personnel work smarter and faster. Microsoft Security Copilot immediately flags potential incidents, allowing them to identify and address risks up to twice as fast. It also helps them manage access and quickly compile new emergency plans based on current drafts. It can even create a list of inactive devices that pose potential security risks.  

Uniper is just one of the many energy companies that keep critical services secure with a platform powered by the Microsoft Cloud. We continue working with industry leaders to secure the global energy supply, leveraging the enormous potential of data and AI to optimize systems and reduce emissions for a more resilient and secure digital energy ecosystem.   

Improving frontline worker productivity and safety with real-time insights 

The world runs on the products and services provided by millions of energy and resources workers. As the industry grapples with changing customer demands and pressures to reduce emissions, the workforce is undergoing a transformational shift to better accommodate these needs. But they also face gaps in areas like skilling and productivity that require strategy and innovation to overcome.  

AI-powered tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot empower workers with the right information at the right time. Industry leaders like TotalEnergies are using Microsoft 365 Copilot to help workers be more efficient and productive, with every employee receiving AI training throughout the past year. Another energy leader, Petrobras, uses AI technology from Azure OpenAI Service to power its custom text generation tool used by more than 110,000 employees. The tool helps democratize AI in a secure, compliant way and enables employees to perform their work in less time and with less manual labor. In yet another example, Repsol, a global multi-energy provider, is reaping the benefits of AI capabilities with a study showing that its adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot has helped employees with productivity gains of up to 121 minutes per week, with nearly 62% of employees reporting reluctance to return to work without access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. What’s more, the company reduced procurement costs by 15% while observing a 16% increase in deliverable quality.³ 

It’s clear from these examples that AI is a game changer when it comes to empowering the energy workforce. By connecting workers with purpose-built tools and experiences, energy companies can set the stage for maximizing productivity and working in new, flexible ways.  

Enhancing energy supply with real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance  

When it comes to the energy business, even a fraction of a percentage in efficiency can make a significant difference in providing a reliable, high-quality supply. Advanced data and AI solutions can pull together and organize vast amounts of disparate enterprise data, enabling energy suppliers to more effectively monitor operations, forecast production, and predict maintenance requirements.  

Enerjisa Üretim, for example, built a remote operations center that leverages advanced analytics powered by Microsoft Azure. The powerful data processing allows the company to monitor its 20 hydropower, wind, and solar plants every day and provide timely response to any operational or production issues. Enerjisa Üretim has also developed a tool that uses Azure OpenAI Service to access and analyze its Internet of Things (IoT) data from more than 40,000 datapoints and combine it with operational data to increase efficiency and streamline processes across power plants—ultimately reducing the data collection and analysis time from hours to seconds. The company also uses generative AI capabilities to forecast daily power generation for turbines by analyzing factors like asset condition, weather, and wind speed. The AI capabilities provide immediate answers and offer more flexibility when it comes to staffing multiple experts for every project. 

Accelerating research and modeling with insights and intelligent search  

High-quality data and advanced analysis capabilities are essential for the energy and resources industry. In mining, for instance, these are needed to create the 3D models necessary for accurate and efficient mineral recovery. The process of preparing the data, however, can be extremely time-consuming, as geologists must sift through massive volumes of documents that have often been accumulated over the course of several decades. Now, mining leaders are leveraging Microsoft AI technology to accelerate intelligent search velocity and accuracy across the large geological data sets they use.  

We recently worked with a mining industry leader to implement a solution built with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Document Intelligence. The solution automates data extraction and storage, elevates the most relevant information, and produces critical insights quickly through a generative AI bot, ultimately enhancing accessibility and interpretation of geological, geophysical, and other data for users of all experience levels. Streamlining this process helps them create 3D models faster by significantly reducing the time spent searching and preparing data—from weeks down to just minutes. These overall productivity gains free up time to increase recovery, reduce waste, and improve safety and cost-efficiency.         

Streamlining permitting and automating complex utility rate case workflows  

In the energy and resources industry, permitting and rate case processing are common and necessary to adhere to important legal, financial, and environmental compliance and regulatory requirements. They can also be extremely costly and time-consuming, especially for nuclear energy permitting, which requires unique expertise and can often take many years and tens of millions of dollars to complete, and for complex utility rate cases, which require detailed data sources and documentation.

Generative AI can significantly reduce the time and costs associated with permitting and rate case processing. In a recent example of AI design innovation, Microsoft’s energy and resources industry team worked with Neudesic, an IBM Company, to develop a rate case assistance accelerator to streamline processes for leading utilities worldwide. The AI-powered solution significantly reduces the time and costs associated with internal processes, resulting in up to 22% productivity gains and saving up to USD45,000 in operational costs per document. With time and monetary savings, energy companies can focus on higher-value business goals, reliability, and customer service.    

Finding information faster with AI agents 

As AI becomes more prevalent across global industry operations, we’re increasingly seeing the benefits and vast potential for supercharging productivity. AI agents, for example, can help users find the right information faster, and they can execute a specific set of tasks, allowing workers to spend more time on innovative and creative work. This will be a gamechanger.

In December 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced a new AI agent, currently in beta testing, that helps users explore the 2024 edition of the World Energy Outlook. The GPT tool, built on Microsoft Azure using Microsoft Copilot Studio, answers questions using natural language and helps readers quickly locate data and information of interest. AI agents like this one don’t just save time—they also make information more accessible to more people. That means you don’t need to be a data scientist or energy expert to interact with and understand reports and other scientific documentation. Instead, a reader can simply type a question using conversational language, and the AI models—trained on the industry terminology and relevant documentation—can provide user-friendly and fast responses.    

Explore more AI innovation in energy 

At Microsoft, we’re committed to working with the global energy industry to accelerate the energy transition and enable a more secure, reliable, equitable, and sustainable future. Through our cloud-based data and AI solutions, energy leaders can accelerate their digital transformation to maximize value across their entire enterprise—and we’re here to support along the way. You can check out our additional resources to learn more about working with the Microsoft energy and resources industry team. 

• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources to learn about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
• Learn how to achieve more in the energy and resources industry with trusted data and AI solutions from Microsoft.
• Explore innovation in sustainability through our publication, For Life on Earth.
• Learn about Microsoft security solutions. 

¹ Peak energy emissions: A historic moment overshadowed by the endurance of fossil fuels, World Economic Forum, November 2024.

² World Energy Trilemma 2024: Evolving with Resilience and Justice, used by permission of the World Energy Council, 2024.

³ MIT Technology Review, Impact of generative AI adoption on efficiency, quality and employee experience in a global energy company.

The post Charting a new energy future with AI innovation and collective action appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

This critical minerals deficit presents an opportunity for today’s mining leaders to harness innovative technology solutions to not only accelerate and improve accuracy of exploration, but also to create more efficient, resilient processes across areas like labor and skills, regulations, and health and safety. One of the first and most promising steps toward solving some of mining’s biggest challenges is embracing a digital mindset and a unified approach to digital and AI transformation. 

Adopting a digital mindset and a unified approach

As the global energy marketplace faces new demands, mining companies and their partners face the need to increase digital fluency, skills, and effectiveness by integrating new tools, technology solutions, and learning methods, particularly as AI shows huge promise for improving operational efficiency.

For mining companies today, that means adopting a “digital mindset,” or a set of attitudes and behaviors that enable people and organizations to see how data, algorithms, and AI open up new possibilities and chart a path for success in a business landscape increasingly dominated by data-intensive and intelligent technologies.² A digital mindset encourages curiosity, continuous growth, and, critically, the opportunity to learn from mistakes—essential as rapid technology changes shorten typical skilling cycles and time to market. But successful adoption of a digital mindset also depends on how well employees internalize new digital values, attitudes, and behaviors.

Learning new skills and tools alone isn’t enough, though; employees must apply their new knowledge to accelerate business outcomes and create additional opportunities. This is where leaders can support by adopting a unified approach, grounded in both strategic collaboration and AI design wins, that prioritizes collective action and empowers employees. A unified approach ensures that all parts of the business work collaboratively towards common goals, breaking down silos and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. This holistic strategy not only boosts operational efficiency but also helps companies meet stringent environmental and social governance standards. Ultimately, a digital mindset combined with a unified approach enables mining companies to sustainably and safely navigate the complexities of modern industry.

Prioritizing partnerships and AI innovation

Elevating human performance with advanced AI-powered technology is a critical aspect of driving a digital mindset and a unified approach. Another fundamental piece is global partnership. The scale and complexity of today’s mining challenges make partnership essential; no single organization can drive this transformation alone. This point is illustrated by the reality of a chronic labor shortage, with 86% of mining executives finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain talent.³ More than ever, mining companies need to work together to pool knowledge, share resources, and establish a new baseline on digital and AI transformation across the industry.

Microsoft and our partners are here to help, offering the applications and other solutions from leading independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) that can help mining companies achieve improved business outcomes, ultimately resulting in better customer relationships and more sustainable practices.

Now with AI, mining companies can leverage platforms like Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Document Intelligence to accelerate intelligent search velocity and accuracy on large exploration data sets they use. Streamlining this process with help from generative AI and automation allows them to create 3D models faster by significantly reducing the time spent searching and preparing data—potentially from weeks down to just minutes. There’s also potential for enormous overall productivity gains and empowerment to spend more time on high-value exploration projects, enhancing their efforts to increase production yields, reduce waste, and improve cost-efficiency and safety of extraction projects.

Across the mining workforce, employees are further seeing increased productivity with generative AI technology as they use tools like Microsoft Copilot to streamline tasks such as drafting emails, summarizing meetings, conducting research, analyzing data, generating manuals, and preparing presentations. Mining companies can take AI design wins even further with assistance from agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Agents in Copilot are AI assistants with expertise in a defined set of tasks, such as updating records or drafting support tickets. They can help boost productivity and save time, allowing for more focus on high-value work. Critically, we’re making it easy for energy companies to develop their own line-of-business agents with the user-friendly interface of Microsoft Copilot Studio, and agents developed by our ISV and SI partner ecosystem are also becoming available within the Azure Marketplace.

Fueling efficient, sustainable mining practices through Microsoft data and AI solutions

As mining companies progress on their digital transformation journeys, we’re quickly seeing the impact of high-performing AI and data management solutions. The stories below are just a few examples of how mining leaders have embraced a digital mindset, unified approach, and collaborative workflows while leveraging Microsoft data and AI solutions to improve efficiency and sustainability across their work.

Epiroc

Epiroc’s AI-powered approach to manufacturing offers valuable insights into AI’s role in the mining industry. As a leading rock excavation equipment manufacturer, Epiroc relies heavily on steel, which often consists of components like iron, metallurgical coal, manganese, cobalt, and other metals. Epiroc faced challenges with siloed data and data sharing practices across its global facilities, impacting the consistency of steel and efficiency of production. By utilizing Azure Machine Learning and Azure Data Factory, Epiroc integrated and analyzed data more effectively, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency.

AI and machine learning models enabled Epiroc to automate complex processes, ensuring consistent steel quality and reducing inefficiencies, product returns, and waste. Impressively, Epiroc deployed a scalable AI solution within 60 hours, showcasing AI’s rapid implementation potential in the mining sector.

The success of Epiroc’s AI implementation highlights the importance of cross-functional collaboration, demonstrating AI’s transformative impact on data utilization, process automation, scalability, sustainability, innovation, and collaboration in mining operations.

Sandvik

Sandvik, an engineering company specializing in mining, rock excavation, rock drilling, rock processing, and metal cutting equipment, leverages AI to enhance sustainability in the mining industry. By utilizing Azure AI Services, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Synapse Analytics, Sandvik optimizes operations through data analysis, predicting equipment failures, and improving maintenance schedules to make informed decisions, forecast demand, and optimize resource allocation, leading to more efficient rock processing and mining operations.

Microsoft’s AI and analytics solutions are pivotal in reducing energy consumption, minimizing waste, and lowering carbon emissions, aligning with the industry’s net-zero goals. Safety is also enhanced as AI predicts and prevents potential hazards by analyzing sensor data and alerting workers to anomalies. Sandvik’s innovative adoption of AI technologies not only boosts operational efficiency and sustainability but also positions the company as a leader in the mining sector, setting a benchmark for others to follow.

Emirates Global Aluminum

Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA) is the world’s largest premium aluminum producer and runs mining, refining, smelting, and recycling facilities. The company is a long-time user of transformative technology, including AI, to drive business growth. The company already used Microsoft Copilot, and to get even more value from AI capabilities, EGA moved a portion of its server base to the Azure platform for easier management of data-intensive operations. The company can now also leverage the power and flexibility of Azure to support safety-critical applications that use AI for tasks like detecting rod latch failures in real time. When this happens, they can respond faster and make sure production continues.  

After integrating Azure into its core operations, EGA saw AI response times that were 10 to 13 times faster, plus lower latency and 86% cost savings associated with AI image and video use cases. Now they can explore additional AI use cases such as visual AI for inspection of carbon anodes that are essential to production. They’ve even developed and trained an AI model that helps define and differentiate what makes a good anode from an undesirable one, which has helped improve the quality of aluminum. Moving forward, EGA is eager to continue embracing technology and AI innovation to enhance productivity, develop new types of alloys, and embrace sustainable practices.  

Boliden

Boliden, a Swedish multinational mining leader that produces high-quality metals, including zinc and copper, is pioneering the use of AI to foster a sustainable future in mining. By integrating Azure AI Services, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Synapse Analytics, Boliden has revolutionized its data collection and analysis, automated processes, and enhanced visibility.

Azure’s cloud infrastructure has provided Boliden with the scalability and flexibility needed to operate efficiently, even in remote mining sites. This blend of cloud computing and mobile device usage has streamlined the deployment of systems and tools, while AI and automation have significantly reduced manual tasks, such as monitoring video streams, saving about two hours daily. AI has also bolstered Boliden’s sustainability and productivity by enabling continuous trend tracking, integrating additional data sources, and monitoring various parameters.

Explore more digital mining solutions

At Microsoft, we’re committed to doing our part in the global effort to accelerate the energy transition and believe that partnership and knowledge-sharing is what makes it all possible. With cloud and AI, mining leaders can accelerate their digital transformation to help optimize value across their entire enterprise, enabling faster progress toward business goals and a more sustainable future—and we’re here to support along the way. You can check out our additional resources to learn more about working with the Microsoft for energy and resources team.

Learn more

Microsoft for energy and resources

• Microsoft for energy and resources home page
• Energy and resources blog

Microsoft and the mining industry

• Microsoft for the mining industry
• eBook: Building the mine of the future in the industrial metaverse
• Podcast: Digital Transformation and AI in Mining – a discussion with Joseph Starwood from Microsoft
• Webcast: Mining’s Future: The Role of AI, Cloud, and Renewable Energy

Microsoft capabilities and solutions

• Sustainable by design: Advancing low carbon materials
• Microsoft Copilot—Talk to your AI assistant: Ask AI questions, generate images, and more
• Microsoft 365 Copilot—Learn how to use Microsoft 365 Copilot
• SAP on the Microsoft Cloud
• SAP on Azure migration

¹The mining industry must be ambitious in its support of the net zero transition, World Economic Forum, February 2024.

²Developing a Digital Mindset, Harvard Business Review, May to June 2022.

³Has mining lost its luster? Why talent is moving elsewhere and how to bring them back, McKinsey & Company, February 2023.

The post From mindset to market: Driving AI innovation and sustainability in mining appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Through numerous discussions with senior global leaders at recent industry events, I have observed a growing shift towards collaborative partnerships across industries. These partnerships help drive adoption of digital technology, AI, and high-performance computing (HPC) technologies at scale, enabling organizations to transform their workforce, reduce emissions through decarbonization such as carbon capture and storage, and accelerate new energy projects. At the foundation of this work is the goal to ensure economic growth is fueled by equitable energy that mitigates global warming and lays the building blocks for a new energy landscape of the future.

In this time of rapid transformation, collaboration fuels progress—but it’s only part of the big picture. There’s also an opportunity to harness the capabilities of advanced data and AI solutions to drive operational efficiency and sustainability. That’s why Microsoft works with customers and partners around the world, exploring new ways to put data and AI to work with solutions like Microsoft Copilot and Azure Data Manager for Energy, helping energy companies accelerate their transition toward a more sustainable future.  

Microsoft for energy and resources

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Driving progress by learning from others

One of the ways we can accelerate collaboration and knowledge-sharing is through global energy industry events where we actively connect with and learn from a diverse pool of expertise and experience. In November 2024, I was part of the Microsoft team that participated in ADIPEC, one of the largest global energy conferences and exhibitions dedicated to driving industry action toward affordable, secure, and sustainable energy for all. Throughout the course of the event, we hosted technical sessions, attended leadership roundtables, facilitated networking, and showcased numerous ways our energy customers and partners are revolutionizing the industry through digital technology and innovation.   

Another notable aspect of my trip to Abu Dhabi was attending the 2024 Biodiversity Forum. The forum emphasized leveraging AI technology for biodiversity conservation, showcasing the region’s progressive work in wildlife conservation, coral reef restoration, and mangrove initiatives. There were numerous discussions on utilizing AI and innovative technologies to drive conservation efforts, reverse biodiversity loss, and enhance ecosystem resilience.

It’s truly inspiring to witness all the ways energy and sustainability companies are using AI to drive progress and facilitate change in ways that once seemed impossible and now inspire hope—like Project Guacamaya that uses satellite images and AI models in the battle against deforestation. Microsoft partners such as Context Labs are also building innovative solutions on Microsoft Azure and delivering trusted climate data through AI-enabled platforms that empower industries with accountable carbon management solutions. Other partners like Kongsberg are leveraging Microsoft AI and cloud capabilities to create industrial AI solutions that support the growing demand for more secure, equitable, and sustainable energy.

We also continue to build and nurture strategic partnerships with joint thought leadership and strategic collaboration agreements. In the days leading up to ADIPEC, Microsoft jointly authored a report in conjunction with the ENACT Majlis event titled “Powering Possible: AI and Energy for a Sustainable Future” with our partners ADNOC and Masdar. Following the paper’s release, we announced a Strategic Collaboration Agreement outlining Microsoft’s joint efforts with ADNOC and Masdar to drive AI deployment that enhance efficiencies, decarbonizes the energy value chain, drives methane reduction initiatives, strengthens biodiversity monitoring, and accelerates the energy transition with development of renewable projects globally.

In another example of long-term, strategic partnership pursuits, Microsoft is deepening its relationship with Accenture and Avanade to develop Microsoft 365 Copilot solutions that help clients effectively implement, adopt, and scale AI technology. Repsol, a global multi-energy provider, is reaping the benefits of the partnership with a study showing that its adoption of Copilot has helped employees save significant amounts of time and enhance productivity and quality of work.

These partnerships—and the many strategic alliances we pursue—are critical to the work of accelerating the journey to a carbon-free future. At Microsoft, we believe that by closely working with the energy industry and policymakers, we can help shape the evolving energy landscape and empower individuals, support secure and equitable energy access globally, and simultaneously reduce climate impact.

Preparing for the next revolution in AI advancements

Throughout our learnings this year, we’ve seen how the AI revolution has progressed from simple automation to generative AI, and now to agentic AI. This newest evolution in AI has more advanced understanding and problem-solving capabilities, allowing it to augment human ingenuity in new and more complex ways. During the opening ceremony of ADIPEC, ADNOC unveiled ENERGYai, a sophisticated agentic AI that will be developed by AIQ in collaboration with G42 and Microsoft. These new AI agents will be designed to act autonomously and make more precise decisions for critical tasks—including seismic analysis, energy efficiency, and real-time process monitoring. AI agents are also designed to seamlessly integrate with existing workflows to unlock predictive analytics, improve decision-making processes, and increase operational efficiencies.

As we continue working with energy providers to explore new use cases for AI, we’re eager to help them achieve even greater business value with the introduction of agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’re already seeing compelling examples of how an ecosystem of AI agents can supercharge productivity across all industries, and we believe the energy and resources industry has tremendous potential to benefit from the increased time savings and ability to focus on time-sensitive, high-value work. Critically, we’re also making it easy for energy companies to develop their own line-of-business agents with the user-friendly interface of Microsoft Copilot Studio, and agents developed by our ISV and SI partner ecosystem are also becoming available within the Azure Marketplace. This is just one step in our commitment to building a robust offering of AI-enabled solutions that help energy companies unlock critical insights faster, optimize value and unlock critical insights faster performance, and meet business goals.

Building a secure and connected net-zero energy landscape

As the energy industry digitally transforms and fully integrates AI into business processes, security remains Microsoft’s top priority. Our customers and partners depend on secure Microsoft solutions that help advance sustainability goals and mitigate cybersecurity attacks. In November 2023, we launched the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) to prepare for greater and more sophisticated cyberattacks. We also introduced our adaptive cloud initiative, enabling organizations to enhance their overall security posture by using cloud-native and AI technologies across various environments. This process unifies siloed teams, distributed sites, and systems within a secure AI platform for seamless operation to meet future workforce needs. Additionally, we’re using opportunities like the ADIPEC conference to showcase technology innovations like Microsoft Security Copilot and connect with customers and partners to help improve their energy security operations.

We’re also working closely with global companies like Uniper, who is using Microsoft Security Copilot to increase effectiveness and efficiency in IT security, as well as Galp Energia, who is keeping their critical energy services secure with a platform powered by the Microsoft Cloud. These are just a few examples of our collaboration with energy leaders as they look to secure the future energy supply. It’s a crucial time for the industry as AI creates enormous potential to optimize systems and reduce emissions, to build a more secure and resilient digital energy ecosystem.   

Leave no one, and no region behind in the AI revolution

Energy and sustainability challenges impact people around the world. As someone who grew up in rural parts of Malaysia, I feel immense pride witnessing Microsoft’s commitments to enhancing digital infrastructure and supporting economic growth in Southeast Asia and beyond. These efforts include building new datacenters, providing AI training, empowering underrepresented women in the tech sector, and partnering with local organizations to ultimately boost the region’s GDP by 2030. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more. This commitment to empowerment is not merely a slogan but is reflected in many initiatives supported by employees and the company.

I encourage you to learn more about the benefits of Microsoft’s AI training programs through these inspiring stories:

• Jidapa Nitiwirakun (Thailand): Overcame muscular dystrophy to work in human resources (HR) at Toyota Tsusho, using AI tools like Microsoft Power BI and Dall-E.
• Dr. Hasyiya Karimah Adli (Malaysia): Transitioned from solar energy research to founding a data science faculty, inspired by Microsoft’s Code; Without Barriers initiative.
• Shelin Puspa Arum (Indonesia): Used digital skills training to secure a quality control job and support her family.
• Hidayah Ibrahim (Malaysia): Moved from kindergarten teaching to an administrative role in construction, leveraging AI skills.
• Saran Hansakul (Thailand): Applied cybersecurity and AI knowledge to digitize her workplace and improve business operations.

An industry level call to action for a sustainable future, together

As we confront one of our generation’s most significant challenges—meeting growing energy demand while maintaining the planet’s average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius—I am inspired by the opportunities before us which far exceed these challenges if we collaborate effectively. Effectiveness and trust are essential competencies for the adoption of any new technologies across industries. Together with our customers and partners, we recognize the positive impact of AI, HPC, and quantum computing technologies in addressing real-world problems, especially those concerning complex industrial challenges, workforce productivity, sustainable new business ventures, and the protection of biodiversity. We believe the AI revolution can support energy growth that is fair and equitable while reducing climate impact and protecting biodiversity. We are already seeing organizations that are integrating AI as a core element of their digital transformation journey and aligning it with their corporate vision and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals to emerge as leaders within this dynamic energy landscape.

Explore more energy solutions and resources

• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources to learn about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
• Learn how to achieve more in the energy and resources industry with trusted data and AI solutions from Microsoft.
• Learn how Azure Data Manager for Energy can accelerate your journey to data modernization.

The post Driving energy transformation through innovative partnerships: Converging AI, sustainability, and policy appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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Transforming the global energy industry is not a small feat, nor one that happens without the collective work of dedicated partnerships and innovative technology. The standardized data model and secure data sharing in Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy along with operations data management powered by Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot can accelerate innovation across the end-to-end CCS value chain. Copilot and Azure Data Manager for Energy put data and AI to work, integrating industry datasets, applications, and other cloud services—managing intensive workloads at global scale, and quickly ingesting data for analytics and decision-making. These are high-impact capabilities that ultimately help energy companies accelerate their transition to more sustainable practices by reducing time, costs, and risks associated with their complex operational requirements.     

Enhancing energy operations with modern data management  

Data modernization is a critical component in advancing sustainability and CCS efforts within the energy sector. By leveraging Azure Data Manager for Energy, energy companies can efficiently manage and analyze vast amounts of data—enabling more accurate and comprehensive simulations of subsurface reservoirs. This capability is essential for identifying optimal CO₂ storage locations and ensuring the safe and efficient injection and storage of carbon dioxide.  

The platform’s robust, scalable, and secure data management solutions allow for real-time data integration and continuous model refinement, which are crucial for making informed decisions and mitigating risks. Additionally, Azure Data Manager for Energy’s high-performance computing capabilities enable rapid simulations, which significantly reduce the time required for planning studies and optimizing reservoir performance. These high-impact capabilities ultimately help energy companies accelerate their transition to more sustainable practices by reducing time, costs, and risks associated with their complex operational requirements. 

Harnessing the power of AI with Copilot 

Along with data modernization and robust data analytics, Azure Data Manager for Energy users will have the option to take advantage of Copilot to interact with well data. Azure Data Manager for Energy helps ingest and organize domain-specific data from across the enterprise data landscape to enhance data access, analysis, and application interoperability. Developed in alignment with OSDU® standards, Azure Data Manager for Energy helps get the right data organized within the right domain workflow while providing trustworthy data delivery that sets the stage for improved and timely analysis.  

However, the enterprise data landscape for any analysis may extend beyond domain-specific data types and require reports with different file types, as well as images, data and records stored in other databases, spreadsheets, and shared folders. Further, the entire value chain extends into data from operations, supply chain, health, safety and environment (HSE), enterprise resource planning (ERP), legal and compliance, and even social media—some of which may be hosted on external platforms.  

In these scenarios, generative AI capabilities can help users optimize data for enhanced insights—faster. One example of how to approach this is with Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end analytics and data platform. Fabric can help integrate the data in Azure Data Manager for Energy with other adjacent data sources, ultimately preparing it for analysis and other interactions through AI and Copilot. This means users can potentially run traditional AI-powered workflows such as automated interpretation of data or event prediction through machine learning-driven algorithms. They can also leverage Copilot to chat with the data or implement intelligent search, domain-based intelligent assistants, or cross-domain intelligent advisors.  

In doing so, end users—people in roles across geoscience or petrophysics—have an easier and faster way to interact with and query their data, both within and outside Azure Data Manager for Energy. Plus, data engineers and data scientists have a foundation from which to build similar solutions for their end users. The Copilot capabilities also mean simplified research processes and the generation of valuable data insights, enabling enterprise and business unit leaders, as well as data scientists and geophysicists, to make more informed decisions and take advantage of greater efficiencies in reservoir management.  

Optimize carbon capture and storage and enhance reservoir management 

Building on the capabilities of Copilot and Azure Data Manager for Energy, we can further optimize CCS to work towards a more sustainable future. Reservoir modeling is a critical aspect of modern energy management, playing a vital role in the underground storage of CO₂. This multidisciplinary field involves the integration of geological, geophysical, thermal, and engineering data to create detailed models of subsurface reservoirs. Reservoir engineers create models that simulate the behavior of fluids within the reservoir to predict future performance and optimize injection and production strategies. With global energy demand projected to increase 47% by 2050,² the need for sustainable energy solutions and CCS is paramount.  

Microsoft is working with partners to provide the efficiency, predictive power, and speed of reservoir simulations and optimizations. Built on top of Azure Data Manager for Energy, customers can now leverage Azure’s robust enterprise capabilities in security, scalability, and reliability, while accessing its domain-specific solutions and maintaining full control over their data.   

Traditionally, identifying optimal CO₂ storage locations requires lengthy studies, sometimes spanning months or even years. The work Microsoft is doing with partners transforms this process by enabling scalable and efficient simulations. This will enable engineers to run numerous models in parallel, leveraging high-performance computing to quickly analyze vast datasets and identify the best storage locations. The ability to perform rapid simulations at scale significantly reduces the time required for planning studies.

Explore more energy solutions and resources 

At Microsoft, our dedication and commitment to accelerating the energy transition to carbon-free resources is matched only by the power of our partner ecosystem and the knowledge-sharing that makes it all possible. With Azure Data Manager for Energy, industry leaders can connect to an open ecosystem of interoperable applications from independent software vendors (ISVs) and the Microsoft ecosystem of productivity tools. By harnessing capabilities and features from across Microsoft and partner solutions, energy leaders can optimize value across their entire enterprise while working towards sustainability goals.  

Ready to dive deeper? Check out additional resources to learn more. 

• Learn how Azure Data Manager for Energy can accelerate your journey to data modernization.
• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources  to learn about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
• Learn how to achieve more in the energy and resources industry with trusted data and AI solutions from Microsoft.

¹ McKinsey & Company, Global Energy Perspective 2024, September 2024.

² S&P Global, Global energy demand to grow 47% by 2050, with oil still top source: US EIA, October 2021.

The post Driving operational efficiency and sustainability with AI and data modernization appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

To address these growing challenges, energy and resources leaders are increasingly turning to digital technology solutions. By leveraging AI-driven insights and cloud-based operational technology (OT) systems, energy operators can optimize grid management, strengthen cybersecurity, and respond faster to operational inefficiencies. 

In the area of predictive maintenance, AI can analyze historical equipment performance and environmental data to forecast potential equipment failures, helping utilities avoid costly downtime while enabling uninterrupted service. For example, JERA developed an AI-based predictive detection application that provides everyday remote monitoring of power plants, enabling early detection of equipment issues and reducing unplanned outages.

“By enabling a 24-hours-a-day remote monitoring service, we will be able to provide value by preventing potential problems and by improving power plant availability through quick identification of problem causes. DPP’s primary role is to contribute to the stable supply of energy and sustainable power plant operations through transformations that utilize digital technology and data.”

Hiroaki Kamei, Executive Officer of the Digital Power Plant Promotion Group, O&M Engineering Strategy Division

This scenario provides a glimpse into the many ways AI is quickly becoming one of the most impactful tools for energy organizations and workers. Across the utility workforce—from engineering and grid operations to customer service and finance—employees are also seeing increased productivity with generative AI technology as they use tools like Microsoft Copilot to streamline tasks such as drafting emails, summarizing meetings, conducting research, analyzing data, generating manuals, and preparing presentations. This enables them to focus more on high-value work that fuels industry-wide growth and collaboration, accelerating the energy transition. 

Beyond task productivity, generative AI is transforming how utilities manage operations at scale. For example, National Grid is leveraging Microsoft Copilot and Azure to assist with automation, document management, and report generation across regulatory, finance, and legal operations, helping the company drive efficiencies in its mission to achieve net-zero goals. According to Shannon Soland, Chief Technology Officer at National Grid, “Microsoft Copilot is really going to be a difference maker for National Grid,” allowing the company to innovate rapidly with AI-powered solutions.  

Microsoft for energy and resources

Drive innovation to achieve net zero and deliver safe, reliable, equitable energy for a sustainable future

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Enhancing cloud security with AI

AI is not just a tool for optimization—it’s becoming essential for energy security and operational resilience. As energy organizations modernize their systems and integrate new technologies to streamline workflows and improve operations, there’s a growing emphasis around overall security posture. That is why Microsoft is working closely with energy customers and partners to provide intelligent and scalable cybersecurity solutions that help set the stage for successful AI adoption and continued innovation—so they can focus on what matters most: meeting the world’s growing energy needs while ensuring a secure, sustainable, and affordable supply.

Solutions like Microsoft Copilot for Security are enabling energy organizations to identify threats faster, strengthen risk mitigation strategies, and respond to incidents more efficiently. For example, Uniper, a leader in the energy transition, has integrated Copilot for Security to manage the growing number of phishing attempts and hacker attacks they face as an operator of critical infrastructure.

“Copilot for Security immediately flags incidents, allowing us to identify risks up to twice as fast, assess them right away, and take the appropriate action.”

Damian Bunyan, Chief Information Officer of Uniper 

Routine security tasks, which used to take hours or days, are now handled in minutes through AI and automation, improving security response times and helping Uniper focus on their broader goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2040. 

We’ve embedded Copilot directly into the Microsoft Security stack, allowing energy customers to tap into built-in AI capabilities and industry-leading threat intelligence—regardless of the solutions they use. It’s all part of our effort to empower human defenders with AI tools and capabilities that provide an advantage against some of the energy industry’s greatest challenges.  

Microsoft partnerships help the energy industry embrace the future of work

Supercharging human ingenuity with advanced technology is just one way to drive a more sustainable, reliable, affordable, and secure energy supply. Another critical piece is global collaboration and partnership.

Microsoft’s collaboration with leading global systems integrators (GSIs) is driving significant innovation in the energy sector. Partners like Accenture, Avanade, EY, and PwC helping utilities globally leverage AI and Azure-powered technologies to modernize and enhance productivity. Accenture and Avanade, early adopters of Microsoft Copilot, are accelerating value by delivering intelligent, industry-specific solutions that empower workforce. Similarly, EY and PwC are working closely with Microsoft to provide cutting-edge tools that enable energy providers to streamline operations and strengthen their digital transformation strategies. 

Among Microsoft’s key collaborators is IFS, which plays a crucial role in transforming asset management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for energy companies. Exelon, the largest energy delivery company in North America, is leveraging IFS technology to improve operational visibility and streamline the management of its extensive asset base across six utility businesses. According to Rob Biagiotti, Vice President of Assets and Core System Projects at Exelon, the company chose IFS for its cloud-based, agile platform that could meet the evolving needs of their business. By enabling Exelon to efficiently manage the full lifecycle of assets and integrate with their existing technology, IFS is helping them achieve their strategic goals of delivering reliable, affordable energy to over 10 million customers.  

GE Vernova has developed a solution underpinned with advanced AI models to improve wildfire risk mitigation, with their solution available on Azure to provide sophisticated analysis and better decision-making for environmental planning and response. Meanwhile, Schneider Electric’s DERMS EcoStruxure platform, deployed on Azure, is advancing distributed energy resource management, increasing grid flexibility and efficiency. This platform has been successfully implemented at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), where it’s driving significant value by optimizing distributed energy resources and improving grid management across their network.

These are just a few of the many partners Microsoft collaborates with across the energy sector. The scale and complexity of today’s energy challenges make partnership essential; no single organization can drive this transformation alone. By working together, we can accelerate innovation and ensure a secure, sustainable, and resilient energy future. 

Sharing industry insights at Enlit Europe 2024 

We are excited to discuss the transformational power of technology and share new AI innovations with our partners as the AI sponsor of Enlit Europe 2024 at Fiera Milano di Rho in Milan, Italy. This opportunity enables us to deepen our existing partnerships and forge new ones with energy organizations from around the world. The event will run from October 22 to 24, 2024 and will be attended by 15,000 guests, including over 700 international exhibitors and 500 speakers from energy industry leaders.  

The Microsoft Energy and Resources Industry team will attend Enlit Europe 2024 to exchange insights on new technologies, discuss solutions to industry challenges, and highlight key achievements with our industry partners. On day two of the conference, we will feature Microsoft Copilot demos at the Digitalization Hub, offering a firsthand look at how AI can transform the way you work. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of Copilot, our team will be featured on several panel discussions and presentations on critical topics for the global power and utilities community.

Continuing to innovate across the energy sector with transformative technologies 

As technology advancements open doors for energy solutions, we’re eager to continue partnering with industry leaders to challenge the status quo with innovative approaches to some of the world’s toughest energy dilemmas. For many organizations, this begins by shifting internal conversations and establishing a data-driven culture that empowers people to solve problems using data. That’s why we work with leaders across the industry to build digital transformation strategies and modernize data management approaches so they can get the most value from their data through advanced AI and automation capabilities.

Explore this ever-evolving world with us at Enlit Europe 2024 and engage with the leading minds at the forefront of industrial change. Don’t miss out on the critical discourses, thought-provoking panels, and our Microsoft Copilot Hub demo station, where you can learn more about making the most of this everyday AI assistant in your organization. Join the Microsoft Energy and Resources Industry team as we bring new solutions to light and exchange ideas with energy pioneers from the world over. We hope to see you in Milan.  

Learn more about Microsoft for energy and resources 

• Visit the Microsoft for energy and resources page.
• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources to learn about critical actions for energy transition.
• Listen to the podcast AI for power and energy with Laurent Boinot where a Microsoft power and utilities leader discusses the intersection of AI and energy infrastructure.
• Read a Microsoft leader’s interview and gain perspective on how AI is a driving force in accelerating the energy transition.
• Read this new article on Power Change: Applying GenAI for Strategic Transformation in Utility Analytics.
• Watch our on-demand webinar, Rethinking cybersecurity in a renewable-powered energy system.
• Learn about Microsoft Security solutions and sign up for news and insights from Microsoft Security.

¹ European Commission, Future EU power systems: renewables’ integration to require up to 7 times larger flexibility, June 26, 2023.

2 Enisa, Cyber Europe tests the EU Cyber Prepardness in the Energy Sector, June 20, 2024.

The post Enlit Europe 2024: Rewiring the energy industry’s operational core with cloud and AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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A growing need to transform security

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) at power companies know this reality well. They’re tasked with managing a complicated portfolio while protecting against cyber risks from both insiders and nation-state actors. Left unresolved, these challenges create a ripple effect across the enterprise and lead to issues like:   

• Increasingly complex environments: Widespread digital adoption combined with evolving customer preferences, decentralized energy generation, and a changing workforce are driving utility providers to rethink their services and business models to help increase flexibility and maintain a resilient grid. In a recent survey conducted by Guidehouse and Public Utilities Fortnightly, 61% of respondents agreed that increasing flexibility to improve energy system resilience is the highest priority outcome for utility investments today.²
• Tool fatigue: Many power companies work with hundreds of disparate management tools that are costly to manage and limited in cross-visibility. These tools must be integrated and maintained by teams with the right skillsets. As tools are added or replaced and personnel come and go, companies face the inevitable costs of re-skilling and new integrations.
• Technical debt: While many utilities are designing new solutions in support of energy transition and the grid of the future, they still rely heavily on legacy infrastructures that carry significant tech debt. These legacy systems increase cybersecurity and operational risks as well as operational expenses through extended support costs, timelines, and integration complexities. Research shows companies pay an additional 10 to 20% to address tech debt on top of project base costs.³  

Modernizing infrastructure is costly and not easily adaptable as the risk landscape evolves. In fact, 59% of cybersecurity teams identify integration of legacy operational technology (OT) and modern information technology (IT) systems as their biggest challenge to securing OT.⁴ If you’re a CISO, how do you solve the challenge of securing both IT and OT against modern and fast-changing threats? 

The answer is to work with technology partners who not only understand threat actors around the world, but who also recognize the business risks and operational concerns across the industry. 

Increasing security and efficiency without sacrificing value 

With a unified security stack running on the Microsoft Cloud, utilities can significantly reduce the number of tools they manage every day for lower costs, time-savings, and better insight into IT and OT environments.  

For example, Turkish energy provider Enerjisa Üretim partnered with Senkron.Energy Digital Services to build Senkron ROC, a remote operations center that represents a critical piece of becoming cloud-native. Knowing that a single cyberthreat could shut down operations, Enerjisa Üretim also established its Operational Technology-Specific Security Operation Center (OT SOC), which relies on Microsoft Defender for IoT and Microsoft Sentinel to operate around the clock and process 3.3 million security events daily.   

The IBM Maximo Application Suite on Azure for asset operations and maintenance is another example. High performance and ultra-low latency combined with the multi-layered security capabilities of the Microsoft Azure stack provide a foundation for secure analytics that boost operational resiliency and reliability. With those advanced security features, utility providers can scale their operations to handle varying workloads without compromising operational security.  

Security solutions to meet your needs 

With Microsoft Security services, customers can leverage the latest technologies and deep industry understanding to enhance their security posture today. Microsoft Defender for IoT offers a complete inventory and continuous monitoring of connected assets across vendors and protocols; Microsoft Purview can secure and govern data across your entire estate while helping to reduce risk and meet compliance requirements; and Microsoft Sentinel provides enterprise-grade intelligent security analytics that help detect previously undetected threats and minimize false positives.  

Microsoft security solutions can also offer improvements across key use cases, including: 

• Augmentation of security operations centers (SOCs): Microsoft security solutions empower SOCs with cloud-native capabilities that enable faster detection and response times—even automating entire responses to security events. Machine learning, AI, and advanced analytics perform the heavy lifting so SOC workers can clarify what’s happening in the SOC environment and focus on the highest-priority events. Our unified security platform eases tool fatigue in SOCs with solutions that work together seamlessly for optimal visibility and efficiency. Solutions such as Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR and Microsoft Incident Response allow for expanded capabilities to support the SOC analysts in their mission.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery: Microsoft security solutions provide automated backup processes that are both scalable and cost-effective, and they can be integrated with on-premise data protection solutions. Our solutions include features like encryption and multi-factor authentication, which protect data during the backup and recovery process and help keep sensitive information secure. This holistic approach helps utility organizations quickly recover from data loss incidents, minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity. 

Supporting the energy customer and partner ecosystem for a secure future 

To support continued innovation in data security and cloud adoption, we collaborated with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office on an initiative for seamless integration of cloud technology into the grid of the future. Now in its pilot phase, the Cirrus cloud feasibility assessment tool (Cirrus) offers strategic guidance on how to prepare for, or deploy, a cloud solution responsibly, with the ultimate objective to strengthen the resilience and future adaptability of a decarbonized electric grid.  

Built on the security and reliability of Azure, the online version of Cirrus is also accessible through independent platforms with a license. The tool provides valuable insights to integrators, stakeholders, and operators by clarifying goals, future plans, and risk tolerance.  

With visual outputs like key performance indicator (KPI) graphs and consequence diagrams, Cirrus offers contextualized understanding, helping users prioritize critical systems and data based on potential benefits and risks associated with cloud disruptions. Additionally, Cirrus incorporates threat detection and alerts, leveraging Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) principles to empower organizations to make risk-informed decisions and address high-consequence events. 

Opportunities on the horizon with AI 

It’s an exciting time for the industry as AI creates tremendous potential for energy companies to increase their security posture.  

Imagine equipping workers with Microsoft Copilot for Security to help them identify threats earlier, build their risk mitigation skills, and respond to incidents faster. What took hours or days to complete can now be finished in minutes with AI. The efficiency is about more than labor costs. Every minute that goes by gives attackers more opportunity to wreak havoc across the board.  

With AI advancements analyzing trillions of security signals daily, together we can build a safer, more resilient digital energy ecosystem.  

Learn more with Microsoft for energy and resources 

Ready to dive deeper? Don’t miss our webinar, Rethinking cybersecurity in a renewable-powered energy system on October 10, 2024, where we will be sharing how leading energy companies are using the power of technology to safeguard their businesses. Read more about the webinar and sign up to attend.  

• Visit the Microsoft for energy and resources page.
• Read the Microsoft Industry Blogs: Energy and resources blog to learn about themes and actions critical for energy transition.
• Learn about Microsoft security solutions.
• Read more from the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2023.
• Check out the Microsoft Defender family of products.
• Visit our Microsoft Copilot for Security Blog.
• Sign up for news and insights from Microsoft Security.

¹ Microsoft Digital Defense Report, October 2023.

² The Power Industry: Presently and Projected, Guidehouse, July 2024.

³ Breaking technical debt’s vicious cycle to modernize your business, McKinsey & Company, April 2023.

⁴ How is cyber innovation disrupting the energy sector and critical infrastructure?, World Economic Forum, October 2023.

The post How energy firms power the world with secure Microsoft technologies appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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Enabling energy industry innovation through modern technology

The process of finding suitable CCS sites is costly and time consuming, and not without its own unique information security risks. Traditional energy industry technologies used during this process both increase in cost over time and contribute to the data silos that exist between the site selection process and operational concerns like site-specific safe liquid CO2 injection speeds and storage capacities. These factors have led to challenging commercial margins of CCS as a process, presenting a barrier to entry for many interested businesses.

The process is not unfamiliar to Microsoft, which has already invested in multiple large-scale CCS projects around the world, including Northern Lights, a partnership between the Norwegian government and energy companies Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Northern Lights was created to help accelerate the decarbonization of European industry and mitigate its otherwise unavoidable emissions. The project facilitates the capture and transport of industrial CO2 emissions, which it then liquifies and stores safely in the pores of saline aquifers 2,600 meters below the seafloor.

By 2030, Microsoft plans to have an established system that removes five million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. With Azure Data Manager for Energy and operations data management powered by Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft aims to help increase the return on investment (ROI) of CCS projects, helping customers optimize their costs with AI, automation, and the discovery of new best practices. Additionally, organizations can employ Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability—a growing set of powerful data and AI capabilities designed to help businesses create more accurate and reliable data intelligence to drive impact reduction efforts and business transformation. These solutions help users gain actionable insights to drive sustainable practices, providing visibility into sustainability performance with advanced analytics and reporting. The global Microsoft partner network, with its industry specific expertise and highly targeted CCS solutions, further strengthens these capabilities, providing customers with valuable resources and support

The path forward for carbon capture storage

There are two divergent paths ahead for the emerging CCS industry, both recursive in nature. On the first and more positive path, companies will see a clear value in negating and offsetting their carbon emissions efficiently and effectively. On the other path, companies could lack the tools that efficiently connect the dots between carbon emissions and offsets, and hence be left with a less clear value proposition. By underpinning the positive path with technology, Microsoft hopes to help industry and humanity at large meet their shared sustainability goals.

Azure Data Manager for Energy is aligned with the highly secure OSDU® and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) data standards, which will ease the development of new services and workflows that transcend today’s data silos. This standardization also paves the way for the adoption of co-pilots and other time-saving AI solutions. Combining Azure Data Manager for Energy with other services, such as Microsoft Fabric, Environmental Credit Service, and Microsoft Sustainability Manager, helps organizations in the energy industry validate and demonstrate their CCS efforts and carbon credit purchases to regulators in the rapidly emerging and expanding ICM business.

Sustainability data solutions in Fabric offer unique capabilities that provide prebuilt and preconfigured Fabric resources. These resources include data stores in the form of data lakes, prebuilt notebooks, and dashboards to ingest, process, aggregate, and display data for various ESG scenarios. By combining and transforming disparate social and governance data into a standardized data lake, organizations can compute, analyze, and disclose social and governance metrics effectively. 

How scalability, standardization, and security contribute to sustainability

Data standardization and AI readiness are the first steps toward innovative capabilities, especially when paired with the hyper-scalability of Azure. During the process of identifying ideal sites for carbon storage, energy companies run multiple site-specific simulations that traditionally include the manual numerical simulation of seismic data. These simulations are time consuming, complex, and data intensive. They’re also critical to the site selection process, so when companies are given the opportunity to infuse them with AI and run them at scale, there’s massive potential for time savings and efficiency gains.

The ability to scale up the computing power required to run thousands of simulations against hundreds of potential sites when required could help shorten the CCS site selection process substantially. It could also help refine the simulations and their related data models and lead to further efficiency gains. Scaling compute back down after the simulations have been run can help energy companies not only reduce their costs, but also reduce the same carbon footprint the CCS process is helping to address. By running the simulations on Azure, energy companies are taking advantage of hyper-scalability on a cloud that has itself been carbon neutral since 2012.

After months of work going into the selection and analysis of a proper CCS site, energy companies want to make sure their data is not just secure but fully under their own control. If that information were to leak to either the public or their competitors, all that effort and investment could be lost. For this reason, Microsoft is working toward enabling Azure Data Manager for Energy on customer cloud tenants, which will grant them the control they require as well as the layered security of Microsoft managed services in the cloud. For real-time CCS operations data, Microsoft is also developing a reference architecture and toolkit to enable partners to build ICM solutions to deliver value to our customers. 

Clearer skies ahead

With Azure Data Manager for Energy and the power of Azure AI, Microsoft Copilot, and capabilities from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft hopes to give the energy industry the standardization and systemization that its past technologies may not have provided. To keep global warming within 1.5 degrees, the United States Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reports that the world needs to start removing 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2050.¹ To reach that important milestone in time, the energy industry needs a technological foundation to build its next wave of advancements upon.

If, as the Clean Air Task Force states, Europe alone has the storage capacity for 1,520 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions, helping energy companies rapidly, cost-effectively identify and provision CCS sites is a big step in the right direction, and one which Microsoft hopes to help the energy industry take.²

Explore more on carbon management

• Discover how Microsoft is powering the future of energy with Azure Data Manager for Energy.
• Learn more and connect with us at upcoming energy events:
  • Image: August 24–25, 2024, in Houston, Texas
  • ONS: August 26–29, 2024, in Stavanger, Norway
  • SLB Digital Forum: September 16–19, 2024, in Monte Carlo, Monaco
• Find out more about Industrial Carbon Management.

¹Diverse Approach Key to Carbon Removal, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 2023.

2Unlocking Europe’s CO2 Storage Potential, Clean Air Task Force, 2023.

The post Enabling carbon reduction in the energy industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 requires tremendous investment and rapid innovation. From solutions that optimize grid management and carbon capture and storage to more sustainable, resilient mines, AI technologies can help address the biggest challenges in the complex, multidimensional global energy transition.  

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Achieve more in the energy and resources industry with trusted solutions from Microsoft.

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Accelerate the clean energy roadmap with new AI innovation 

We’re proud to share some highlights from the past year, starting with the announcement that Cognite is Microsoft Partner of the Year 2024. Cognite and finalists Scheider Electric, Accenture-Avanade, and Kongsberg exemplify the new wave of innovation currently transforming the energy sector.  

Cognite is integrating new AI advances shared at last year’s Ignite event, including Microsoft Fabric and expanded Microsoft Copilot experiences. In January 2024, Microsoft and Cognite announced a collaboration that integrates flagship product Cognite Data Fusion with Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service. Cognite AI is a prebuilt, comprehensive AI architecture specifically designed for energy and resource companies to deliver a faster path to implementing AI. Cognite Data Fusion incorporates AI across the data stack from generative AI-powered contextualization to an intuitive natural language Copilot interface embedded in day-to-day tools. Most recently, Cognite announced a new solution, Cognite Atlas AI which brings context augmentation generation to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, pushing the boundaries of what language models can do for industrial organizations

Schneider Electric continues making an impact with solutions that accelerate digital transformation and sustainability. Built on Azure, the Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Grid solution portfolio shows the company’s commitment to a more digital and electric world, and together with its Grid Operations Platform as a Service, supports the growth of distributed energy resources, microgrids, energy communities, and other flexible resources across digitally planned, designed and operated lifecycles. AVEVA, part of Schneider Electric, also uses Microsoft technology to help accelerate the energy transition and support long-term decarbonization with a cloud-native industrial data and application platform to give energy companies a digital backbone to unlock, contextualize, and share data for better decision making and more profitable and efficient operations. 

Driving more sustainable, efficient operations in asset-heavy industries, Kongsberg leverages the Microsoft Cloud and AI for its Industrial Work Surface, an industrial metaverse that includes mixed reality and digital twins. The solution is designed to help energy companies improve decision-making, maximize business performance, and drive value across the organization—in support of the world’s growing demand for more secure, equitable, and sustainable energy.

Microsoft partners SLB, Halliburton, and Accenture are also innovating with Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy, a secure, reliable, hyperscale and fully managed cloud-based data platform service. Customers can speed toward goals by taking advantage of easy interoperability across an extensible application ecosystem. They can integrate virtually any dataset, application, or cloud service while leveraging the applications they already use from SLB, Halliburton, Accenture, and many others. The platform is expanding to new regions and offers a new developer tier pricing to increase accessibility for more partners and customers. 

We are also pleased to announce EY as the Sustainability Changemaker for the second year in a row. Creating customer tools built on Microsoft technology has positioned EY as a leader in sustainability consulting within the energy sector. With EY’s tailored solutions, decision-makers in the energy industry can now oversee transformations across their enterprises, leveraging technology and data to modernize governance structures, tackle industry-specific risks, meet environmental, social, and governance (ESG) obligations, and deliver value for both their organizations and their stakeholders. These solutions provide a comprehensive view into energy demand, verifiable and assured value chain data, and sustainability performance management, enabling energy companies to achieve their sustainability goals and enhance operational efficiency.

Sharing thought leadership at industry events 

You can learn more about Microsoft and partner innovations at Microsoft Ignite either online or in person in Chicago on November 18 to 22, 2024. This is the first Ignite event to include both customers and partners, and we hope you’ll join us to celebrate our partners and learn more about how the latest advances in AI are delivering business value to our energy customers. 

The Microsoft Energy and Resources Industry team is also excited to connect with customers and partners at upcoming events including the ONS conference in Stavanger on August 26 to 29, 2024 and the SLB Digital Forum 2024 in Monaco on September 16 to 19, 2024. These events will feature how new developments in AI and other digital technologies are transforming energy systems for a more secure, equitable, and sustainable energy future. You can always anticipate exciting news at the SLB Digital forum, where two years ago SLB announced the availability of the SLB Enterprise Data Solution, a comprehensive data management toolkit built on Azure Data Manager for Energy. The innovation is a result of the expanded strategic partnership between SLB and Microsoft, includes enhancements to Azure Data Manager for Energy, and a carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiative with Northern Lights joint venture to support global climate goals by accelerating development of scalable, cost-effective solutions for the CCS value-chain. 

Energizing the energy transition with new startups 

The climate crisis affects people globally, and an inclusive startup ecosystem is critical for helping ensure that solutions have far-reaching benefits. We are proud to support underrepresented startup founders at events like CERAWeek and through programs such as Advancing Climatetech and Clean Energy Leaders Program (ACCEL) from Greentown Labs, Browning the Green Space, and the Energy Transition Studio for Startups which we launched this year in cooperation with high-growth climate tech companies FlexDAO, Line Vision, and Utilidata. The program is designed to empower energy transition startups worldwide, and we are pleased to welcome six more companies to the first cohort, including Carbon Guardian, GridBeyond, Hygenox, IEMS, Noda Intelligent Systems, and Norwegian Hydrogen.

Investing in sustainable AI 

In addition to supporting startups, we are also engaging in strategic regional partnerships to help ensure a sustainable future and equitable access to energy and digital technologies for everyone. Microsoft is investing $1.5 billion in G42, a leading AI company based in Abu Dhabi, to co-innovate and deliver advanced AI solutions with Azure across the Middle East, central Asia, and Africa. Microsoft and G42 are partnering to invest $1 billion in a data center and Kenya, which will be powered by geothermal energy and give east Africa access to Microsoft Azure. Other global investments include a $2.2 billion investment in Malaysia’s cloud and AI transformation, and a significant commitment to enable a cloud and AI-powered future for Thailand. 

Unlocking the transformative potential of AI for sustainability also requires best practices for investment, digital and data infrastructure, resource usage—such as Microsoft’s deal with Brookfield Asset Management to invest more than $10 billion on renewable energy capacity to power data centers—policy and governance, and workforce development. To learn more about AI enablement, read the Microsoft AI and Sustainability Playbook. We are also investing in the sustainability of AI itself, with projects to optimize datacenter energy and water efficiency. 

Partnerships to advance our energy future 

This blog reflects the power of partnership and the growing importance and potential for AI in the energy industry and beyond. This has been a year of exciting change, with groundbreaking advances like the launch of Copilot+ PCs—from both Microsoft and our OEM ecosystem—partnership with OpenAI, and a rethinking of our cloud infrastructure to optimize performance and energy efficiency. 

Microsoft Copilot continues to evolve, with innovations that include the world’s first Copilot in both CRM and ERP with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot. Chevron is already using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides to transform frontline operations and optimize its operations, empower workers, and infuse informed decisions throughout its value chain. 

Success stories like these remind us once again that people working together are at the heart of every broad-sweeping, foundational transformation. The world’s complex energy challenges demand global collaboration as we advance toward a more secure, equitable, and sustainable future in an ever-evolving ecosystem of innovation.  

Learn more about Microsoft Energy and Resources solutions 

• Energy and resources – Microsoft Industry Blogs 
• Microsoft energy partner webinar series 
• Microsoft AI solutions  
• Microsoft Azure AI services  
• Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform   

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