Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

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Driving change with copilots 

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

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

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

Enhance communication using AI-generated insights 

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

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

Facilitate sustainable practices with real-time data 

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

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

Deployment is simple 

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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In this blog, we show you how the ESG value chain solution in Microsoft Sustainability Manager enables you to gather data directly from your value chain partners, streamlining supplier engagement to gain a more comprehensive and accurate picture of those suppliers’ environmental impacts that contribute to your own company’s impacts. With better access, management, and integration of shared sustainability data, you can get ahead of Scope 3 data challenges and move faster toward your targets. We also share what we’re doing to drive improved data sharing globally, and we highlight recent updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 

Spotlight on Scope 3 data collection and sharing

Gathering and processing value chain data can be especially resource-intensive and time-consuming for large and global organizations with thousands of value chain partners that do business with them, are otherwise invested in their organization, or whose data they need to collect. The ESG value chain solution simplifies this process by providing a centralized and secure platform to collect, validate, and aggregate data from these partners.

Enable precision Scope 3 emissions data collection

Improving the quality and reliability of your Scope 3 emissions data from indirect upstream and downstream activities requires precise, granular data from your value chain partners. With ESG value chain surveys, you can request either the qualitative and quantitative data you need or different datasets from different groups of partners. Surveys help you gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of your Scope 3 emissions and pinpoint the areas where you can make the most impact.

Scope 3 emissions accounting also requires ongoing engagement and communication with your value chain partners. With ESG value chain solution tools, we have simplified the supplier data collection process. Organizations can invite, onboard, and collect data from partners, helping you increase confidence in Scope 3 accounting processes and data.    

Additionally, you can use suppliers’ ESG ratings provided by EcoVadis to see how critical players across your value chain are doing on multiple ESG fronts, for extra visibility into your value chain and supplier footprints. To enable EcoVadis ratings in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, you need to have an account with EcoVadis.

What’s next for the ESG value chain solution?

At Microsoft, we began using the ESG value chain solution to collect data from our own value chain partners in early 2023. Now we’re combining what we’ve learned with feedback from customers to plan for future improvements to the solution, with our next expansion planned for Fall 2024.  

How we’re driving broader improvements in sustainability data sharing

Among the biggest challenges in sharing sustainability data is the fragmented and often duplicative manual effort required to share data across value chain partners. To help streamline this process going forward, we’re enabling suppliers and their customers to automatically share and interpret the required data for their own calculations and reporting. This data ranges from the inputs required for carbon accounting, such as energy data, to more granular supply chain data that’s emerging from initiatives like WBCSD: PACT Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) and the European Union Digital Product Passport (DPP).

Microsoft is actively supporting and participating in this effort through initiatives like Carbon Call to better understand and share greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data, and the WBCSD: PACT initiative, to help develop the global standard for calculating and exchanging Scope 3 emissions data across value chains. We believe these initiatives will help create a more transparent and consistent sustainability data ecosystem. 

We’re also working to create sample reference accelerators based on these initiatives, to help our customers and partners leverage Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and expand the data-sharing ecosystem. To learn more, sign up for the WBCSD Pathfinder Accelerator private preview. 

MASSIV+: Working toward net-zero supply chains through cross-industry data sharing

Microsoft is also an active participant in the MASSIV+ consortium of industry leaders in Sweden, working to create a common platform for sharing and validating sustainability data across the consortium’s collective value chain. MASSIV+ aims to enable more accurate and transparent reporting of GHG emissions, starting with Scopes 1 and 2, to more accurately calculate Scope 3 emissions. The partnership aims to achieve net-zero supply chains by 2030 to 2050. 

MASSIV+ is defining a new framework around what data to share through its new Sustainability Data Exchange Protocol, layering an organization’s data from high-level company and location data to more granular product-level data through protocol messages. Eventually, MASSIV+ will look to expand capabilities supporting how the data is shared through data spaces that define data sharing policies and contracts.

What’s new in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability continues to add ESG capabilities to help you accelerate your sustainability progress. Read on for details—and check out our updates page to see a comprehensive summary.  

Analytical reporting extensibility

Addressing your organization’s unique sustainability analytics requires a customized approach. With the analytical reporting extensibility in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now in preview, you can create custom analytical dashboards using the built-in insight pages across emissions, water, and waste as your baseline. Customizing your Microsoft Power BI dashboards to highlight the content most important to your organization will enable faster analysis and decision-making. 

Users can select Copy on any emissions, water, or waste report page. This will create a copy of the built-in analytics report pages and will enable them to: 

• Edit and delete existing analytical page components. 
• Add new metrics or components. 
• Change chart types. 
• Personalize the page layout. 

Once the analytics pages have been tailored to your organizational requirements, simply save your changes and the new dashboard will be available by default to all users who have reporting privileges. Users can switch between the custom and standard dashboards through the custom dashboard (preview) toggle. 

CSRD reporting enhancements

Organizations can generate quantitative reports that extract emissions, water, and waste data from Microsoft Sustainability Manager to satisfy the requirements of the European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Understanding the key requirements and data to include in your CSRD preparation report is paramount to a successful disclosure. Once you understand the requirements, you can easily map metrics or data points to the requirements. 

This mapping provides you with enhanced efficiency and accuracy when disclosing through CSRD. Organizations no longer need to sift through all their sustainability data to determine what to include to meet the requirements. The quantitative data captured through Microsoft Sustainability Manager can be included in this updated assessment template. 

See the requirements and steps to generate a quantitative preparation report.

Audit of disclosure requirements in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Region-specific regulations, such as CSRD, require organizations to perform an assurance audit on the disclosures prior to report submission. Organizations need a mechanism for sharing curated disclosure data along with associated evidence documents required for substantiating the data during the audit process. Assigned auditors need the ability to review the disclosed data and evidence documents against the disclosure requirement and provide their comments.  

Auditors can visualize this data against regulatory requirements by using Compliance Manager. With Compliance Manager, you can help ensure your organization’s adherence to CSRD requirements. Auditors can then review the data and the corresponding evidence documents in Compliance Manager against the disclosure requirements and input their approval status along with comments. 

Organizations with Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) will be able to compute and disclose the required ESG metrics for the sustainability regulations like CSRD. This ESG metrics data can then be visualized in the Compliance Manager against the CSRD assessments leveraging the Purview Sustainability data solutions connector. This way that auditor would have a seamless experience to monitor the status of completion and approvals, plan subsequent actions, and more effectively manage compliance with sustainability regulations. 

Learn how to enable audit of disclosure requirements in Compliance Manager.

Enhanced country or region mapping capabilities

Some organizations are structured in such a way that regional compliance standards apply to part, but not all, of their operations. These organizations may need to pivot calculations based on specific countries or regions. Microsoft Sustainability Manager now supports the ability to specify custom country or region entries. You can associate an activity or emissions record with a country or region and then design and run relevant calculations. 

Learn how to create and use custom country or region values in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

Keep learning about Microsoft sustainability solutions

During the first week of May 2024, the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability product team hosted our first-ever Technical Summit. The goal was to help our customers and partners understand more complex capabilities and to provide tips and tricks for driving the most impact from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability features. This included four days of expert-led how-to sessions—all recorded for on-demand reference in our Learn Documentation. Check out the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Technical Summit. 

More resources: 

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.  
• Learn more about Microsoft Sustainability Manager. 
• Explore the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community, where you can find answers to questions and connect with peers and experts. 

Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates. 

The post Optimize sustainability data management across your value chain appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Accelerating innovation and partnership for people and the planet

Four years ago, Microsoft committed that, by 2030, we would become carbon negative, water positive, zero waste, and protect more land than we use. Since that announcement, we have seen major changes both in the technology sector and in our understanding of what it will take to meet our climate goals. New technologies, including generative AI, hold promise for new innovations that can help address the climate crisis. At the same time, the infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector. As we take stock as a company in 2024, we remain resolute in our commitment to meet our climate goals and to empower others with the technology needed to build a more sustainable future.

At the end of last year, the world met in Dubai at COP28 to assess global sustainability progress. The results were sobering. The world is not on track to meet critical climate goals, and we see many of the world’s challenges reflected in our own situation. During the past four years, we have overcome multiple bottlenecks and have accelerated progress in meaningful ways. As we report here, we are on track in several areas. But not in every area. We therefore are mobilizing to accelerate progress in areas where we’re not yet on track.

In four areas we are on track, and in each of these we see progress that has the potential to have global impact beyond our own sustainability work. These are:

• Reducing our direct operational emissions (Scope 1 and 2)
• Accelerating carbon removal
• Designing for circularity to minimize waste and reusing cloud hardware
• Improving biodiversity and protecting more land than we use

At the same time, there are two areas where we’re not yet on track, and in each of these we are intensively engaged in work to identify and pursue additional breakthroughs. These are:

• Reducing our Scope 3, or indirect, emissions
• Reducing water use and replenishing more water than we consume in our datacenter operations

Even amid the challenges, we remain optimistic. We’re encouraged by ongoing progress across our campuses and datacenters, and throughout our value chain. Even more, we’re inspired by the scores of executives and employees across Microsoft who are rolling up their sleeves and identifying new and innovative steps that are helping us to close critical gaps. We all recognize the same thing: There is no issue today that connects everyone on the planet more than the issues around climate change. We all need to succeed together.

Carbon negative

Our carbon negative commitment includes three primary areas: reducing carbon emissions; increasing use of carbon-free electricity; and carbon removal. We made meaningful progress on carbon-free electricity and carbon removal in FY23. Microsoft has taken a first-mover approach to supporting carbon-free electricity infrastructure, making long-term investments to bring more carbon-free electricity onto the grids where we operate.

In 2023, we increased our contracted portfolio of renewable energy assets to more than 19.8 gigawatts (GW), including projects in 21 countries. In FY23, we also contracted 5,015,019 metric tons of carbon removal to be retired over the next 15 years. We are continuing to build a portfolio of projects, balanced across low, medium, and high durability solutions.

Carbon reduction continues to be an area of focus, especially as we work to address Scope 3 emissions. In 2023, we saw our Scope 1 and 2 emissions decrease by 6.3% from our 2020 baseline. This area remains on track to meet our goals. But our indirect emissions (Scope 3) increased by 30.9%. In aggregate, across all Scopes 1–3, Microsoft’s emissions are up 29.1% from the 2020 baseline.

The rise in our Scope 3 emissions primarily comes from the construction of more datacenters and the associated embodied carbon in building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. Our challenges are in part unique to our position as a leading cloud supplier that is expanding its datacenters. But, even more, we reflect the challenges the world must overcome to develop and use greener concrete, steel, fuels, and chips. These are the biggest drivers of our Scope 3 challenges.

We have launched a company-wide initiative to identify and develop the added measures we’ll need to reduce our Scope 3 emissions.

Leaders in every area of the company have stepped up to sponsor and drive this work. This led to the development of more than 80 discrete and significant measures that will help us reduce these emissions – including a new requirement for select scale, high-volume suppliers to use 100% carbon-free electricity for Microsoft delivered goods and services by 2030. As a whole, this work builds on our multi-prong strategy, this year focusing on the following:

1. Improving measurement by harnessing the power of digital technology to garner better insight and action
2. Increasing efficiency by applying datacenter innovations that improve efficiency as quickly as possible
3. Forging partnerships to accelerate technology breakthroughs through our investments and AI capabilities, including for greener steel, concrete, and fuels
4. Building markets by using our purchasing power to accelerate market demand for these types of breakthroughs
5. Advocating for public policy changes that will accelerate climate advances

Water positive

We take a holistic approach to becoming water positive, which includes water access, replenishment, innovation, reduction, and policy. In 2023, we achieved our water access target by providing more than 1.5 million people with access to clean water and sanitation solutions. We contracted water replenishment projects estimated to provide more than 25 million m³ in volumetric water benefit over the lifetime of these projects – enough water to fill about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Finally, we continue to drive innovation in water, through first-of-their kind replenishment projects like FIDO, which leverages AI-enabled acoustic analysis to reduce water loss from leakage.

Looking ahead, as our datacenter business continues to grow, so does the need to minimize our water consumption and replenish more than we consume in these operations. In FY23, our progress on water accelerated, and we know we need to implement an even stronger plan to accelerate it further. We therefore are investing in our water positive commitment in four ways:

1. We are taking action to reduce the intensity with which we withdraw resources by continuing to design and innovate in order to minimize water use and achieve our intensity target
2. Our new datacenters are designed and optimized to support AI workloads and will consume zero water for cooling. This initiative aims to further reduce our global reliance on freshwater resources as AI compute demands increase
3. We are partnering to advance water policy. In 2023, we joined the Coalition for Water Recycling. Over the coming year we will finalize a position and strategy for water policy
4. We are developing innovative scalable replenishment projects in high water stress locations where we operate datacenters. We recently announced Water United, a new initiative to unite public and private sectors in reducing water loss from leakage across the Colorado River Basin

Zero waste

Our journey to zero waste includes reducing waste at our campuses and datacenters, advancing circular cloud hardware and packaging, and improving device and packaging circularity. In FY23, we achieved a reuse and recycle rate of 89.4% for servers and components across all cloud hardware, a target that is increasingly important as needs for cloud services continue to grow. In 2023, we also diverted more than 18,537 metric tons of waste from landfills or incinerators across our owned datacenters and campuses, and we reduced single-use plastics in our Microsoft product packaging to 2.7%.

From expanding our Circular Centers to piloting programs that give a second life to used fiber optic cables through partnerships with local technical schools, we are working to keep materials in use longer and approach our work at every stage with circularity in mind. We are accelerating our work to reuse and recycle cloud hardware wherever possible, and launched two new Circular Centers in Quincy, Washington, and Chicago, Illinois in 2023.

Protecting ecosystems

We have committed to protecting more land than we use by 2025, while preserving and restoring ecosystems in the areas where we live and work. As of FY23, we exceeded our land protection target by more than 40%. At this point, 15,849 acres of land have been legally designated as permanently protected compared to our goal of 11,000 acres.

We are incorporating green business practices that support the surrounding ecosystems near our campuses and datacenters. This includes regenerative design solutions around our datacenters that enhance local biodiversity, improved stormwater management, and contributing to climate resilience. We are also piloting AI-driven Microsoft technology to provide insights into the overall health of the ecosystem and inform future actions.

Customer and global sustainability

In last year’s Environmental Sustainability Report, we announced that we were expanding our ambition to help advance sustainability for our customers and the world. In 2023, we continued this work to empower our customers and partners on their own sustainability journey by creating the technology needed to better manage resources and optimize systems. On a global scale, we focused on accelerating innovation, research, and policy, not only for ourselves but also to support a more sustainable world for all.

The shift from pledges to progress requires action, transparency, and accountability. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is helping customers unify data and garner richer insights into the sustainability of their business. In 2023, we expanded Microsoft Sustainability Manager to include Scopes 1, 2, and all 15 categories of Scope 3 carbon emissions to help track progress and inform action across an organization’s operations and value chains.

As the world experiences worsening impacts of climate change, we are also helping to put planetary data into the hands of researchers, governments, companies, and individuals through the Planetary Computer. We are providing open access to petabytes of environmental monitoring data to help empower people with actionable information to protect their communities.

Microsoft’s sustainability progress requires global engagement. We are investing in innovative solutions, advancing research, and advocating for policies that we believe can drive progress at scale. A hallmark of this effort has been our Climate Innovation Fund (CIF) – our $1 billion commitment set in 2020 to advance innovation beyond Microsoft’s four walls. To date, the CIF has allocated $761 million toward innovative climate technologies including commercial direct air-capture technologies, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), industrial decarbonization, and more.

Our science, research, and AI for Good teams are also working to accelerate solutions and develop climate resilience with AI. In November 2023, we published a whitepaper and playbook that expands on the incredible potential of AI for sustainability. Through our AI for Good team, we are collaborating with the United Nations to research the use of AI to advance the Early Warning for All Initiative, with a goal of better understanding the populations that may be at risk of extreme weather events and other threats.

Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” To meet this generational challenge, we are putting sustainability at the center of our work. With each emerging technology, with each new opportunity, we ask ourselves an important question: How can we advance sustainability?

As we strive to answer that question, we are developing new approaches, experimenting with new partnerships, and learning as we go. We are optimistic about the role technology can continue to play in accelerating climate progress, and we look forward to working with others on this critical journey for all of us.

The post Our 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

During this wave, we’ve invested heavily in the development of copilot templates to enhance capabilities and integration across various industries. These customizable templates offer improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and seamless integration with existing technology, all while supporting a diverse, global customer base. Copilots are valuable assets for Microsoft Industry Clouds customers, helping to drive customer and partner success. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends our offerings, with systems integrators and independent software vendors enabling factory data ingestion from different systems and building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Microsoft Azure AI.

Here’s a look at what’s been delivered since the release plans announcement in January 2024.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is introducing new solutions in preview to optimize factory operations. These include manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and a copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions enable manufacturers to ingest and unify data from diverse sources, standardize and enrich data for seamless interoperability, and utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization by unifying information and operation technology data into an open and secure data platform. The copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI enhances responsiveness and streamlines communication across teams and roles.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

This release of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture includes new copilot templates that can empower organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. These templates provide a powerful tool for organizations to use generative AI and data to optimize their operations and engage better with their customers. Customers are bringing generative AI to life for farmers. ITC, a multi-industry enterprise, has created, Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot, developed using Microsoft copilot templates. With this application, ITC seeks to empower farmers by providing them with timely and relevant information that can boost productivity, increase profitability, and enhance climate resilience.

Copilot templates can support use cases based on tillage, planting, crop protection, harvesting, and other types of farm operations. Users can submit queries such as “show me active fields” or “what is the average yield for my field?”. These use cases can help input providers to plan equipment, seeds, applications, and related services and engage better with the farmer.

Using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and other sources, copilots can provide insights on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts, and harvest windows. Enabling seamless retrieval of data and allowing for plugins, embedded data structures, and subprocesses to be selected as part of the query flow allows organizations to extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a solution that helps public sector organizations use the public cloud and advanced technologies while helping meet security, sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty introduces updates and new features to streamline the configuration and deployment of sovereign environments. Guardrails and codified architectures reduce complexity and make the process of building sovereign environments more predictable and repeatable. New preview tools include assessment, policy compiler, and drift detection analysis tools, as well as a new Azure service that allow users to create and deploy Sovereign Landing Zones (SLZs) within the Microsoft Azure Portal. Guidance includes sample reference architectures for using large language models (LLMs) and Azure OpenAI Service with SLZ, as well as guidance on workload migrations and Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse configurations.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

In February 2024, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability announced new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Fabric, providing new levels of speed and efficiency in processing data to help drive faster progress toward sustainability goals. These new features include sustainability data solutions in Fabric and natural language queries with Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, among other AI-powered features now available in preview.

In March 2024, new features were added to Sustainability Manager, including the ability to create calculation models with Copilot using natural language input, a dedicated energy data model to help track energy usage, activity to emissions traceability to link underlying source activity data to emissions records, and the ability to create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import.

Additional release updates to Cloud for Sustainability include enhancements to environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights with what-if analysis to help organizations build the relationship between forecasting and reduction goal planning. Users can link forecasts to existing goals to track actual progress alongside the projected ones. In addition, forecasts with the same historical data can be layered onto a single view, allowing for faster analysis of optimal reduction opportunities.

Another new feature is the ability to import and calculate with product carbon footprint data. This feature allows you to use product carbon footprint data to calculate and understand value chain emissions in Sustainability Manager more easily. Organizations can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a product family and more easily import and manage this data within Sustainability Manager.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is expanding geo availability, adding the Australia east region. This additional region is enabled for both the standard and developer tiers of Azure Data Manager for Energy. Users can now select “Australia east” as a preferred region when creating an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource using the Azure portal.

External data sources (EDS) (preview) allow data from external data sources aligned with the OSDU® Technical Standard to be shared with an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource. EDS is designed to pull specified data (metadata) from OSDU-compliant data sources through scheduled jobs while leaving associated dataset files (such as LAS and SEG-Y) stored at the external source for retrieval on demand.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail now includes new features in its retail data solutions architecture, an industry-specific workload for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be easily configured. Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized partners are available. These capabilities enable the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can’t be achieved in isolation.

One of the new features is the copilot capabilities in Fabric, which bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Fabric and Microsoft Power BI. Another new feature is the Sitecore OrderCloud data connector, which can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Fabric in real time. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to the retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort and accelerating time to insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The 2024 release wave 1 also brings new features and innovations to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. One of the new features is the ability to improve clinical and operational insights by ensuring health data is accessible across provider, payor, and pharma; and facilitating clinical, operational, and performance analytics using healthcare data solutions in Fabric (preview).

Some other new features in the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include support for additional data storage needs, support for availability zones for Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, FHIRLink Power Platform connector, and the ability to use the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) service with Azure Data Lake integration.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is proud to announce the April 2024 release for Fundraising and Engagement. This release brings significant enhancements, mainly to nonprofit gift processors, including valuable enhancements to Fundraising and Engagement Azure services and new Stripe API (payment intents) integration. Customers who rely on Stripe for their payment processing can now benefit from the latest Stripe APIs, addressing the requests of current customers and the requirements of future customers. It is highly recommended that customers upgrade and use the new Stripe API when creating a payment processor associated to a configuration profile. For more details, read more here.   

Learn more about Microsoft Industry Clouds

• Official Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing documentation
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability documentation
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Retail documentation
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit documentation

Microsoft Industry Clouds

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The post 2024 release wave 1: New copilot features to enhance Microsoft Industry Clouds capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

One of our newest AI-powered features, what-if analysis (preview), is designed to help you forecast the impact of business practice changes on your organization’s carbon emissions. Read about this and other exciting new features now available in preview within Sustainability Manager.

Microsoft Sustainability Manager

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Accelerate carbon reduction planning with what-if analysis

Now in preview, the new AI-powered what-if analysis feature in Sustainability Manager enables you to forecast the impact of business practice changes on your overall emissions footprint so you can implement more informed carbon reduction strategies. Using your historical data and corresponding calculation models, the what-if analysis tool intelligently forecasts forward for both your existing strategy and a new strategy that you’re considering.

For example, Susan is a sustainability manager working with her team to plan their organization’s sustainability initiatives for the following fiscal year. She uses what-if analysis to compare the impacts of several business practice changes her team is considering. Using the information provided, Susan and her team plan the top three initiatives predicted to enable the biggest advances toward the company’s carbon reduction goals.

What-if analysis will help you determine the most effective ways to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint and achieve your sustainability goals.

Using the what-if analysis tool, you can:

• Customize AI modeling using your organization’s carbon activity data and return forecasts in MTCO2e.
• Apply predefined scenarios that allow users to tailor analysis to your organization’s needs.

With customizable scenarios spanning across all three scopes of emissions, the what-if analysis tool is designed to accommodate the unique needs of every organization. Whether you’re considering transitioning to renewable energy for one of your facilities or comparing potential suppliers, what-if analysis can help you quickly and easily understand the potential impact of those changes on your carbon emissions.  

At our This is AI … for Sustainability event in February 2024, Södra, a forestry company based out of Sweden, spoke at length about the value of knowing what to invest in when it comes to an organization’s sustainability journey. They highlighted the immense value add of what-if analysis in Sustainability Manager, detailing how the customizable and data-driven results can help immensely when it comes to making the best possible investment for their organization.

What-if analysis can help your organization transition from simply ingesting, calculating, and reporting on your environmental data to driving impactful decisions and change. Learn more about what-if analysis.

Use Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager to analyze complex ESG documents

Also now in preview, document analysis, powered by Microsoft Copilot in Sustainability Manager, enables organizations to seamlessly upload and query environmental, social, and governance (ESG) documents in natural language for the information they need. This new feature is designed to help you save time and effort in finding and extracting relevant information from your ESG documents.

After uploading your documents, select up to five that you’d like to query. Copilot will then quickly parse the contents of each document and return the information you need, along with any necessary citations leading to the source of that answer. 

Let’s use Lisa, a procurement officer at Contoso Coffee Company, as an example. Lisa is conducting a lateral comparison of sustainability reports from three suppliers. She asks Copilot for each company’s carbon reduction goals for the next five years, along with how they’re planning to increase transparency and collaboration with their customers. With this information, Lisa can effectively compare the data-driven goals and commitments made by these suppliers and make an informed decision when choosing a supplier that aligns most closely with her company’s own strategy. 

Document analysis can help at any stage of your sustainability journey, from learning about calculations through Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Scope 3 Calculation Guidance to comparing supplier reports and understanding complex reporting requirements. Whether you’re at the record, report, or reduce stage in your journey, document analysis can help you find the information you need to create timelier and more data-driven decisions for your organization. Learn more about document analysis.

Identify patterns and visualize water and waste with key influencers

Detailed insights are paramount to effective decision-making and achieving sustainability goals. In November 2023 we announced key influencers, an analytics enhancement that helps organizations increase the level of intelligence delivered through Sustainability Manager related to carbon emissions. This enhancement now includes support for water and waste. 

Key influencers (preview) provides visibility into patterns driving increases or decreases in key water and waste scenarios. Specifically, the water scenarios supported are water withdrawn, water discharged, and water consumed. Waste scenarios include waste generated, waste disposed, and waste recovered. As the patterns are established, you can quickly identify the most significant contributing factors driving increases and decreases.

ADEME emission factors now available in Sustainability Manager

Emission factors are a fundamental tool for accurately calculating emissions and developing emissions control strategies. They exist for every emission source or category applied to activity data. By leveraging these factors, organizations can quantify the environmental impact of their operations.

ADEME (Agence de la transition écologique) plays a pivotal role in supporting France’s transition to a more sustainable future. ADEME emission factors aid in measuring and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Now available in Sustainability Manager, these factors provide essential data for estimating emissions associated with various activities, such as energy consumption, transportation, and industrial processes.

The benefits of ADEME emission factors integration to you include:

• Precise calculations for accurate emissions assessment. ADEME emission factors provide granular data specific to French contexts. Whether you’re assessing energy consumption, transportation, or other activities, these factors enhance the accuracy of your emission calculations. Imagine a manufacturing facility in Lyon. By using ADEME emission factors tailored to the region’s energy mix, the facility can precisely estimate its carbon footprint. This precision allows targeted reduction strategies.
• Localized insights and regional context. Organizations operating in France can now align their sustainability efforts with local standards. ADEME emission factors ensure that emission assessments reflect the unique environmental context of the region. For instance, a vineyard in Bordeaux can use ADEME emission factors to evaluate emissions related to vine cultivation, winemaking, and distribution. These localized insights empower informed decisions, such as optimizing transportation routes or adopting renewable energy sources.
• A holistic approach to sustainability. Incorporating ADEME emission factors contributes to a comprehensive understanding of your carbon footprint. It’s not just about direct emissions; it’s about the entire lifecycle. Consider a Parisian hotel. By factoring in emissions from guest transportation, food sourcing, and waste management, the hotel gains a holistic view. This informs choices like sourcing local produce or implementing energy-efficient lighting.

To load the ADEME emission factors, select the ADEME factor set in Solution Center and install them to your Sustainability Manager environment. Once integrated, these factors become part of your toolkit for informed decision-making, reporting, and continuous improvement.

See the Carbon Base® public database of emission factors.

Calculate waste-generated values to better understand usage and environmental impact

Organizations don’t always have the instrumentation in place to measure and track waste quantities at a facility, potentially impacting their waste sustainability progress. Sustainability Manager now includes a new capability to help you estimate your organization’s waste quantities through intensity-based factors, which play a crucial role in understanding usage and impact on the environment. The waste estimation (preview) feature allows you to estimate waste disposed and waste diverted values that together constitute the total waste generated.

With waste-generated calculations, you can define intensity factors to estimate the waste disposed or waste recovered. For example, estimating the waste disposed as a percentage of the total square foot area of the facility can help you calculate the total waste-generated values. You can customize and configure these intensity factors based on any parameter that is defined. You can also configure the time interval for which you want to define the estimated waste-quantity values and use these estimated values to accelerate your organization’s waste sustainability journey. Learn more about waste estimation.

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities we’re introducing across Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Explore the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community portal, a vibrant hub for learning, connecting, and contributing.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.

The post Advance your carbon reduction strategy with intelligent forecasting and data analysis appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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

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

Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

Create a more sustainable future by innovating with agriculture data

Explore now

Powering agriculture with new copilot templates and generative AI

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

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

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

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

ITC empowering farmers with fast, hyper-localized answers

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

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

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

Bayer extends deep agriculture expertise through multiple innovations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headstorm agriculture AI solution poised to boost productivity

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

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

Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Streamline and expedite several processes with the sustainability lifecycle

Read the overview

Save time and effort creating calculation models with Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager

In the dynamic landscape of sustainability, accurate calculations are the bedrock of informed decision-making. Whether measuring carbon emissions, water usage, or waste reduction, sustainability practitioners rely on robust calculation models. However, creating these models can be complex and time-consuming. That’s where the new create calculation models with Copilot feature, now in preview, comes in. 

The driving force behind creating calculation models with Copilot is accessibility. We recognize that sustainability practitioners come from diverse backgrounds, and not all are experts in mathematical modeling. Our goal is to democratize the process by allowing you to express your calculation requirements in natural language. By bridging the gap between technical jargon and practical needs, we’re empowering you to focus on sustainability outcomes rather than wrestling with formulas. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Natural language input. To generate a calculation model, simply describe the calculation you need. For example, you can input “Determine emissions from mobile combustion based on distance.” 

2. Automated model generation. Behind the scenes, intelligent algorithms parse the input, identify relevant variables, and construct a calculation model.

Once generated, the calculation model is ready for immediate use. You can now integrate it into your sustainability reports, dashboards, and compliance assessments. 

By automating the model creation process, Microsoft Sustainability Manager reduces the time and effort required for you to build the calculations you need, freeing you up to allocate your time toward strategic initiatives rather than number-crunching. Create calculation models with Copilot provides a user-friendly experience. It isn’t just about formulas, it’s about empowering sustainability practitioners to drive positive change. By simplifying the complex, together we can move closer to a greener, more sustainable future.

Demonstrate compliance with the energy data model in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Energy is often a priority area for organizations when kickstarting their sustainability journey, largely due to availability of data and the ability for organizations to quantify both financial and carbon-related benefits. Customers, investors, employees, and the public increasingly expect organizations to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and responsible energy management. Providing accurate and transparent energy-related data can enhance your organization’s reputation and potentially generate support from stakeholders.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability provides a dedicated energy data model (preview) to help you track generated, purchased, and used energy for your portfolio, independent of the carbon tracking available within Sustainability Manager. This data model will enable you to unify, standardize, and streamline energy data collection and storage from utility bills, smart meters, utility solutions, and on-site energy generation systems, along with associated consumption patterns across multiple sites and geographic components, within the unified data model. You can utilize the energy lifecycle components to consolidate, standardize, and integrate energy to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and compliance with regulatory requirements, thereby enhancing trust, transparency, and accountability in internal and external sustainability disclosures. By leveraging a centralized and structured energy model framework, you can demonstrate compliance with renewable energy targets and regulatory requirements. 

Improve carbon emissions reporting with activity to emissions traceability

In today’s sustainability-driven landscape, organizations turn to advanced solutions such as Sustainability Manager to monitor and mitigate their environmental footprint, with a primary focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. However, ensuring the accuracy and credibility of emissions data poses a significant challenge, given the intricacies of global supply chains, diverse data collection methods, and the potential for errors or discrepancies. This underscores the critical need to meticulously trace underlying activity data within Sustainability Manager to bolster transparency, accountability, and precision in tracking and reporting emissions data.  

Activity to emissions traceability (preview) is a new feature in Sustainability Manager that enables you to trace and link underlying source activity data to emissions records, provided those calculations occur within the system. This capability addresses the pressing need for accurate, transparent, and reliable emissions reporting by providing a comprehensive traceability mechanism for all activity records tied to carbon emissions quantification. Not only does this feature empower you to gain deeper insights into your organization’s environmental impact, but it also streamlines the verification process for external auditors, regulators, and stakeholders. Activity to emissions traceability also enhances the credibility of sustainability reports and minimizes the risk of misrepresentation or greenwashing.  

Create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import

The new Power Query guided experience is a comprehensive ingestion approach available within Sustainability Manager. It allows you to import data for multiple entities through multiple sources, all through a single import. Power Query templates in Sustainability Manager are available to help you with Power Query data imports. The templates automatically provide the right structure for all data attributes required to successfully import your data.

When designing a Power Query template, you can save and reapply a pattern for different activity details or sources. Power Query templates also support transfer of usage between users. An advanced user can set up a Power Query template for other sustainability practitioners to use on known input data shapes, as well as reuse a repeatable pattern to accelerate setup consistently.  

Let’s say a user wants to create a template for mapping electricity, but the patterns need to be repeated from different sources. The source could be a parameter, or the “evidence” is different but everything else is the same. Previously, you would have to re-create the Power Query ingestion, mapping, and more. Using a Power Query template, you can create once and enter only the parameters that need to change for a new connection. The advanced user can create the template but can’t run it if they don’t know the connection details. The sustainability practitioner can use the template to create the connection.

Further, with a new feature coming soon that will allow our growing list of partners to develop ingestion connections, you can package Power Query templates as a standalone package that can be distributed publicly and applied by customers. 

New Sustainability Manager features coming soon

Starting April 2024, a new what-if analysis (preview) feature will allow you to forecast the impact of business practice changes on your overall emissions. Look for this and other changes coming to Sustainability Manager that will help you make informed decisions on how to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint and achieve your sustainability goals.  

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities we’re introducing across Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 
• Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Learn about new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
• Learn how to improve your circularity data with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Learn about the new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community portal, a vibrant hub for learning, connecting, and contributing.

The post Use natural language and generative AI to create calculation models, streamline data collection, and improve reporting appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

That’s why we’re excited to announce two new capabilities to optimize your Microsoft Azure emissions:  

• Azure Carbon Optimization (preview) is a free, cutting-edge capability that empowers Azure developers and IT professionals to understand and optimize emissions stemming from Azure usage. By providing insights into carbon emissions and offering recommendations for enhancing cloud efficiency, this tool aligns with the Microsoft commitment to environmental responsibility and supports you in achieving your cloud sustainability goals. 
• Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) in sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables you to unify and analyze emissions data for Azure usage. By having access to your Azure emissions data in Microsoft Fabric, you can query and drill down into Azure resource level emissions for advanced reporting and analysis.   

Companies worldwide are committed to reducing their IT carbon footprint, championing a more sustainable future through initiatives focused on efficiency and cost optimization. Cloud sustainability is not only about reducing the environmental impact of cloud usage, but also about making smart business decisions that align to corporate values, adhere to regulatory requirements, and enable the pursuit of long-term business goals. To understand the impact of cloud computing on carbon emissions, precise measurement, trustworthy data, and robust tools are essential. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce two new capabilities to optimize your Microsoft Azure emissions:  

• Azure Carbon Optimization (preview) is a free, cutting-edge capability that empowers Azure developers and IT professionals to understand and optimize emissions stemming from Azure usage. By providing insights into carbon emissions and offering recommendations for enhancing cloud efficiency, this tool aligns with the Microsoft commitment to environmental responsibility and supports you in achieving your cloud sustainability goals. 
• Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) in sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables you to unify and analyze emissions data for Azure usage. By having access to your Azure emissions data in Microsoft Fabric, you can query and drill down into Azure resource level emissions for advanced reporting and analysis.   

Both tools offer a holistic solution for organizations aiming to reduce their carbon footprint by optimizing specific resources or workloads within Azure.  

With Azure Carbon Optimization (preview), engineering and IT teams can use ready-to-consume insights and recommendations for optimizing their carbon emissions, all within the Azure portal. Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) enable data analysts and engineers to dive deeper into emissions data, allowing them to slice and dice the data and perform deeper analytics using Microsoft Fabric. 

Once your organization can access insights into the carbon emissions generated at the resource or workload level, reduction efforts can begin. This involves optimizing cloud systems for efficiency to benefit the environment and enhance overall performance. Azure administrators can already see a company-wide view of cloud emissions in the Emissions Impact Dashboard. To optimize your carbon footprint, you can take advantage of more granular insights into carbon emissions originating from specific resources or workloads. 

Like any major organizational shift, reducing carbon emissions requires contributions from every corner of your company. In this blog, we will not only explore the benefits of Azure Carbon Optimization and Microsoft Azure emissions insights, but also how the FinOps framework can guide your business through the complexities of carbon emission reduction to help achieve both your environmental and financial goals.  

Align IT sustainability with ESG regulations   

Organizations around the world are setting carbon neutrality goals for themselves, which are furthered by new environmental regulations and standards introduced by global government and regulatory bodies, with a significant driver being environmental, social, and governance (ESG) regulations. These governmental standards dictate ESG-related actions, reporting, and disclosures.

Microsoft provides offerings to help customers with their ESG reporting needs with tools and products available with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to help your organization collect and manage more ESG data and get fuller visibility into your environmental impact. Our goal is to help prepare you for any new reporting requirements by compiling a comprehensive ESG data estate. 

IT sustainability plays a pivotal role in a company’s ESG management strategy because it serves as a cornerstone for mitigating environmental impact, ensuring responsible cloud usage, and reinforcing the overall commitment to sustainable development practices. There are also direct economic benefits for reducing carbon emissions, such as long-term operational cost savings.  

Above all, organizations that proactively address environmental issues and reduce their carbon footprint will be better positioned for long-term success, especially in a business landscape where sustainability is increasingly important. 

Measure and reduce your emissions with Azure Carbon Optimization

Our free Azure Carbon Optimization tool, now in public preview and accessible through your Azure portal, is a window into your cloud resources emissions, ultimately leading to recommendations on how to cut back. It empowers Azure users to closely monitor and optimize their carbon footprint.  

Azure Carbon Optimization is designed to provide everyone in your organization, from developers, to architects, to IT professionals, with a resource-level view of emissions data. This empowers your engineers to take proactive measures to mitigate emissions and track progress right from the Azure portal.  

Azure Carbon Optimization uses the same carbon accounting methodology as the Emissions Impact Dashboard. Developers can work towards maximizing resource utilization while minimizing carbon emissions from the cloud, helping ensure that every deployed resource serves a purpose, eliminates waste, and reduces environmental impact. The tool also presents carbon emission reduction in equivalent terms that are easy for anyone to understand. 

Subsequently, it provides developers with carbon savings recommendations that are based on analyzing resource utilization. Suggestions include deleting or resizing underutilized resources. With these ready-to-consume recommendations, you can optimize your Azure usage, avoid carbon emissions, and promote sustainable development practices. This way, you not only enhance your environmental performance, but also achieve cost savings and efficiency.

Perform even deeper Azure emissions analysis with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Azure emissions insights, now in public preview, is a part of the sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. It helps unify, process, query, and perform deeper analysis of Azure emissions data. In addition to emissions data and related pipelines, Power BI dashboards are provided with Microsoft Azure emissions insights to drill-down and compare emissions data across subscriptions and resources. This helps IT administrators identify patterns in Azure emissions that evolve with time and change with Azure resource usage. 

Unified Azure emissions data empowers data analysts to enrich the emissions data with custom information such as department using subscriptions and resources. They can then query the data and build analytic models for interesting insights such as Azure emissions by departments and seasonality of emissions by usage.  

Leverage FinOps best practices to help optimize carbon emissions

Fostering a culture of accountability, efficiency, and governance across an organization stands as a key objective within the FinOps framework, which aims to help organizations optimize their cloud to maximize business value.  

Efficiency has a positive impact on innovation by freeing up resources and allowing organizations to invest more in modernization, research, and development. FinOps supports the customer journey by establishing a cross-functional team that includes finance, IT, engineers, and business leaders to create a culture of accountability where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage.  

As ESG regulations compel adherence to complex emissions reporting requirements, integrating FinOps best practices can help teams to better manage and optimize carbon emissions. When viewed through the lens of environmental awareness, FinOps can assist with best practices that foster accountability, efficiency, and governance to enable data-driven decisions.  

Leveraging these best practices in tandem with Azure Carbon Optimization and Microsoft Azure emissions insights empowers your organization to be a catalyst for change, transforming cloud practices into a force for sustainability by helping track, analyze, and optimize emissions towards a greener, more responsible cloud ecosystem.  

Reach your sustainability goals with data-driven Azure insights

By employing these capabilities and adhering to FinOps practices, your organization can actively track, assess, and mitigate your carbon emissions. You’ll not only gain a detailed understanding of the emissions impact associated with your Azure resources, but also valuable insight into your compliance posture for any coming ESG regulations.  

Next steps

Visit the Azure Carbon Optimization documentation and our new learning collection to discover more about how to start leveraging the data-driven insights provided by Azure Carbon Optimization for a more environmentally responsible and efficient operation.  

Continue your sustainability journey with the Azure Well-Architected Framework sustainability guidance and explore Sustainability outcomes and benefits for business through the Cloud Adoption Framework. This guidance provides insights into end-to-end sustainability considerations in your cloud estate.   

Visit the documentation for Microsoft Azure emissions insights and this new blog to learn more about deploying it in your Fabric environment and get started with centralizing and analyzing your Azure emissions data. This capability can be leveraged to analyze the trends of your Azure emissions over time by subscriptions and resources. 

For more on how FinOps best practices can help you maximize your cloud business value while addressing the complexities of carbon emission reduction, explore Microsoft’s resources for FinOps:  

• Assess your organization’s gaps using the Microsoft FinOps Review Assessment.   
• Gain hands-on experience with Microsoft solutions that empower FinOps through the Microsoft FinOps Interactive Guides.  
• Explore a range of related Microsoft products and services on the FinOps on Azure homepage.  

The post Achieving sustainable growth with Azure and FinOps best practices appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Gather and analyze all your ESG data in one place with Microsoft Fabric

With sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview), you can analyze your organization’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data together with your other enterprise data to inform more holistic decisions and better-targeted outcomes. Gather, harmonize, and transform sustainability data into meaningful, actionable insights, and use advanced analytics and powerful AI to help you prepare data for analysis, regulatory reporting, and AI-driven innovation.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Empowering organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth

Discover solutions

You can also use sustainability data solutions in Fabric to validate your data and track progress against publicly available data and industry benchmarks. All this comes with a shared governance model across various capabilities and a unified space for your data stewards and sustainability practitioners to interact through Microsoft Fabric.  

Four solution capabilities help you holistically meet your sustainability requirements:  

1. ESG data estate (preview) helps you centralize and standardize ESG data from your disparate data sources to compute, analyze, and disclose ESG metrics for various regulatory reporting and analytics requirements.  
2. Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) enable you to report and analyze your Microsoft Azure usage–related emissions data at subscription and resource levels. 
3. Environmental metrics and analytics (preview) help you generate custom reports, metrics, and analytics insights across carbon, water, and waste by connecting to your data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.  
4. Social and governance metrics and reports (preview) provide insights, dashboards, and metrics to support your needs across various sustainability directives.   

Build your ESG data estate (preview) 

Sustainability disclosures, analytics, and reduction initiatives require rich ESG data sets that originate from disparate sources, and this data needs to be unified and standardized to improve its efficiency and value. sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) provides pre-built data pipelines and lakehouses to combine social and governance data from different enterprise systems with environmental data from Microsoft Sustainability Manager and other systems. 

With your ESG data estate in place, you can process unified sustainability data to compute ESG metrics for sustainability disclosure requirements such as Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Global Reporting Innitiative (GRI), and many others using provided prebuilt data processing artifacts. You can run this process on demand or on a schedule.

Built-in dashboards let you view data and insights from a variety of perspectives—such as by facility or operating unit—and use workflows to help prepare reports. You can mark the metrics required for CSRD and other disclosures and prepare the reports to share with auditors. 

Gain detailed Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) 

The typical IT efficiency journey for many organizations starts with migrating and then optimizing workloads in the cloud, which involves factoring potential emissions reduction strategies. Microsoft Fabric facilitates this process by enabling you to unify and analyze your Azure emissions data against your cloud usage.  

With all your Azure emissions data in Microsoft Fabric, you can query and drill down into Azure resource-level emissions for advanced reporting and analysis. Use pre-built data pipelines that ingest and store resource-level Azure emissions data in tabular data. And use Power BI dashboards to drill down and compare emissions data across subscriptions and resources, helping to identify patterns that evolve with time and usage.  

Note that all Azure customers can now easily access data and insights related to their cloud usage-based emissions by simply signing into the Azure portal and navigating to Azure carbon optimization (preview). This feature provides an overview of your subscription’s emissions data for the past 12 months and by service type—such as virtual machines or storage. 

On the Emissions Details page, you’ll see a monthly breakdown of the top Azure resources that contribute to your organization’s total emissions. By comparing this data to the previous month, you can see the percentage change and identify resources to turn off or utilize more efficiently. On the Emissions Reductions page, you’ll find recommendations to improve your organization’s cloud efficiency and sustainability. 

Enrich your understanding of environmental metrics and analytics (preview) 

To better understand your progress on reduction and other initiatives across carbon, water, and waste, you may need to define and compute custom metrics. Microsoft Fabric lets you connect to your relevant data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager and provides tables to query, compute custom metrics, and analyze the data further. You can enrich your sustainability data with the other corporate and business data for advanced machine learning–based analytics and leverage prebuilt Power BI dashboards for detailed insights and visualizations. 

Analyze your social and governance metrics and reports (preview) 

Increasingly, organizations are required to disclose their sustainability performance in social and governance areas—for example, for CSRD. To address this need, Microsoft Fabric enables you to unify and prepare disparate data from corporate systems handling human resources, health and safety, and corporate governance data in a single ESG data estate. From there, you can compute and report social and governance metrics required for disclosures and use Power BI dashboards to visualize and drill down into selected areas. 

Introducing Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager: Quickly turn your sustainability data questions into insights 

When you’re working with disparate ESG data from across your operations and value chains, getting answers to critical questions quickly can be challenging, potentially slowing down progress toward sustainability goals. Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now in preview, immediately delivers insights from your data based on natural language queries.  

Ask Copilot a question and it will work across Microsoft Sustainability Manager to quickly understand environmental data and provide an answer. For example, you can ask Copilot the right global warming potential (GWP) value for a given gas and assessment report (AR) version. With Copilot’s assistance, you can more confidently work through tasks like drafting reports on your organization’s emissions or CSRD environmental metrics for a quarterly update. Copilot helps you generate the draft reports, reducing your preparation time. 

Copilot can also help simplify and accelerate complex processes within Microsoft Sustainability Manager, such as creating a calculation model for your mobile combustion data. Within seconds, a calculation model is created using natural language, and within minutes these emissions are calculated, providing a more complete picture of reduction opportunities. 

Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager is trained on Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data schemas, making it an effective and knowledgeable tool for improving efficiency across various tasks.  

Magnify your visibility into your ESG data with AI-powered insights 

It’s important to trust the accuracy of your organization’s ESG data, which can be large and complex. The faster you can identify errors or missing data, the faster you can resolve or fill in the data. Intelligent insights in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now available in preview, provides the visibility into your ESG data needed to help identify outliers, trends, and correlations.

See where data needs cleaning or where you need more complete data. This feature scans your organization’s data within Microsoft Sustainability Manager and identifies opportunities—both short-term and long-term—for reductions that align to your sustainability initiatives. Insights are based on historical trends, seasonality, and data anomalies. Looking deeper into the results, you can identify opportunities for reduction in your organization’s Scope 3 emissions.  

Learn more about how intelligent insights can help you make sense of an increasingly complex data landscape. 

Now generally available in Microsoft Sustainability Manager 

Track, manage, and report your water and waste sustainability data 

In addition to expanding AI capabilities, we’re continuing to evolve Microsoft Sustainability Manager to meet broader environmental sustainability objectives. Along with carbon emissions data capabilities, water and waste sustainability data capabilities are now generally available.  

Organizations can track and report their water accounting, water usage efficiency, and compliant water discharges across multiple facilities, safe water discharge regulations, and water usage disclosure standards. Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps you understand the sources and quantities of waste generation at your facilities and how the waste gets disposed of. This can further help you discover avenues to increase waste recycling for specific waste sources and reduce off-site waste disposal through landfills and incineration.

Simplify supplier data collection with ESG value chain solution  

We’re excited to announce the general availability of ESG value chain solution in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, enabling you to gather data more directly and securely from your suppliers. You can use the data to calculate suppliers’ emissions and gather partner-specific emission factors to calculate your Scope 3 emissions based on your consumption with those partners.

Experience the new capabilities in action with This is AI…for Sustainability  

Hear from Melanie Nakagawa, Chief Sustainability Officer, Shelly Blackburn, Global Vice President for Sustainability Go to Market, and Satish Thomas, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Industry Clouds during this free digital event. Get guidance on your sustainability journey and learn how to drive business transformation with Microsoft data and AI solutions. Watch the webcast on demand.

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft

• Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

The post Drive sustainability transformation faster with new data and AI capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Building on the existing data approval management (DAM) capabilities in Sustainability Manager, the new data approval management for circularity feature enables organizations to improve control over their incoming data to help ensure data continuity and quality. Read about how it works, along with other new features, enhancements, and resources designed to help your organization achieve its sustainability goals. 

Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Now available in two versions to meet your needs

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Authorize access and better manage your organization’s circularity data 

DAM for circularity allows you to configure Sustainability Manager so that records are staged in a pending state until approved by an authorized user. The pending data doesn’t affect calculations, analysis, and reporting. Authorized users can access the data for ingestion and manage the approval lifecycle of the data in entities.   

After authorized users review and approve, the data becomes available for all corresponding functions, such as calculations and reporting. You can enable DAM for all or only selected data type entities. Records in data type categories that aren’t enabled for DAM are auto-approved, including all records that were created in previous versions.  

DAM is disabled by default. When activated, all DAM-enabled records are created in a pending state. Pending records are still visible in record registers.

With the release of DAM for circularity, sustainability managers can now turn on the DAM flag for the following circularity data definition entities:  

• Circularity design principle  
• Sustainability item category SKU  
• Sustainability item packaging  
• Sustainability item SKU  
• Facility item production  

Collect and utilize data with the enhanced ESG value chain solution 

As they mature in their sustainability journeys, organizations need access to more value chain data to accurately and thoroughly account for their scope 3 carbon emissions. To report on the environmental impact of their entire operations, products, and value chain—including that of their partners—they need better visibility into their environmental footprint. But collecting data, especially from suppliers or other partners outside the organization, can be challenging.  

Digital technologies enable organizations to achieve greater transparency and accountability throughout their value chain, from raw materials to product creation to distribution. By adopting a data-first approach, you can drive efficiency, reduce emissions, and design out waste. 

The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) value chain solution already enabled you to collect emissions and product carbon footprint (PCF) data from your value chain partners and use that data to calculate your scope 3 emissions. With the latest enhancements to the solution, you can now also collect activity data from your value chain partners and use it to calculate their emissions, and you can gather partner-specific emission factors, enabling you to calculate your scope 3 emissions based on your consumption with those partners. Value chain partners can provide data directly in the survey or they can ingest bulk data through templates provided in the portal.   

Additionally, we’ve streamlined the process of requesting data from your partners. You can now ingest all your contacts and accounts together and create groups of partners. Through the new survey assignment process you can choose which data types to request, send out surveys to groups of partners, and auto-populate the necessary information for your partners using email templates.   

The ESG value chain solution is easier to use as a result of these enhancements. You can still configure the survey through Microsoft Power Platform to gather the data you need, and now you can also choose from new data types to collect—including partner activity data and partner-specific emission factors. Use the activity data to calculate and view your partners’ emissions in calculations, or calculate your scope 3 emissions directly using the partner-specific emission factors.  

Assess your organization’s emissions leveraging the 2023 National Greenhouse Accounts Factors 

Updated annually, the Australian National Greenhouse Accounts (NGA) Factors¹ is recognized globally as a crucial benchmark for assessing greenhouse gas emissions across various sectors, providing a standardized framework to measure and manage environmental impacts. Now available in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, the factors provide you with a powerful tool to better comprehend your carbon footprint in alignment with Australia’s specific metrics. 

Check out our Cloud for Industry Tech Talks

Let’s Talk Sustainbility: Tech Talks, is our expert-led discussion series designed to help organizations speed up their learning about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability technologies. You’ll come away with valuable perspectives from the people behind the technologies, as well as product information, live demos, and recommended actions. 

Here are some of the new Tech Talks available for you to view on-demand:

• Getting to value quickly:
  Alejandro Gutierrez, Principal Product Manager, and Gina Kirby, Global Black Belt, discuss the different strategies for speeding up time to value with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. Designed to be deployed incrementally on an agile basis, you’ll learn about best practices based on successful deployments and get guidance on implementation.  
• Water sustainability:
  Sourav Chakraborty, Principal Product Manager, and Gina Kirby, Global Black Belt, discuss the increasing importance of water conservation in organizations to protect local ecosystems and help support compliance with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure standards and regulations. This show features a demo of the water sustainability modules in Microsoft Sustainability Manager and explains how to use the solution to achieve water sustainability goals. 
• Introduction to Microsoft Sustainability Manager:
  Robin Smith, Principal Group Manager, and Alejandro Gutierrez, Principal Product Manager, take you on a journey through the main capabilities of Microsoft Sustainability Manager. This show features a series of quick demos that highlight what’s new and demonstrate how Sustainability Manager can help you achieve your sustainability goals. 
• Connecting to your data sources:
  In the rapidly evolving landscape of sustainability technology, effective data connectivity stands as a linchpin for success. Host Shopen Patel, Senior Program Manager, guides you on an exploration of the intricacies of solution connectivity with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. Discover the various ways Sustainability Manager connects data sources and systems; its prowess in handling errors during data import; and the robust security measures in place to safeguard your data.  
• Sustainability solution extensibility:
  Shopen Patel, Senior Program Manager, and Vanya Kashperuk, Principal Group Engineering Manager, discuss the extension capabilities available in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, including examples of how to extend system behavior through configuration, customization, and integration. You’ll get a deep dive into features including custom dimensions, view personalization options, Synapse Link for Dataverse, and third-party connectors, as well as integrations with Microsoft Teams, Power Automate, and other technologies.   

Next steps 

• Join us on February 13, 2024 for a free digital event, This is AI…for Sustainability, with Melanie Nakagawa, Chief Sustainability Officer, Shelly Blackburn, Global Vice President for Sustainability Go to Market, and Satish Thomas, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Industry Clouds. Join the event for guidance on your sustainability journey and to learn how to drive business transformation with Microsoft data and AI solutions. Register here.  
• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities we’re introducing across Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability in February. 
• Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.   

¹ Australian Government, Australian National Greenhouse Accounts Factors, August 2023.

The post New ways to improve your circularity data with Microsoft Sustainability Manager appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.