Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

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Microsoft partners at Money20/20 USA 

Microsoft was proud to showcase powerful partnerships at Money20/20 USA, featuring many partner solutions driving AI transformation in the financial services industry.  

This included a suite of compelling demos from Microsoft partners including Temenos, Accenture-Avanade, Infosys, Backbase, Symphony AI, and Zafin. Accenture-Avanade demonstrated their Relationship Manager agent, which can improve relationship management across sales and services by freeing up capacity and enhancing client interaction quality. Additionally, Infosys’s Smart Agent and Smart Bank Assist showcased improvements to banking experiences for both employees and customers.  

Microsoft partners, including Cognizant, EY, Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), Personetics, D-iD, Integrate AI, and others, participated in theater sessions at the Microsoft booth. They presented their thought leadership around the most compelling AI-enabled use cases and deployment methods within banking and financial services. Additionally, Microsoft-sponsored panels with NVIDIA and BNY uncovered practical tips and considerations for scaling and deploying the latest AI technologies, further positioning Microsoft partners as thought leaders in the AI space. 

These collaborations reflect the Microsoft commitment to empowering partners to drive impactful, AI-powered solutions that help customers achieve their business goals and transform the future of financial services. 

Partners leading the way in delivering real-world AI value for financial services  

Taking a page from our Money20/20 USA presence, we’d like to share compelling examples where our partners are using AI to transform the banking experience, empower employees, help manage risk and compliance, and modernize core banking. These partnerships are not just exploring the possibilities of AI—they’re delivering concrete, measurable outcomes in the financial services space today.  

Transforming the banking experience 

Partners are transforming the banking experience by unlocking opportunities to enhance customer engagement. Backbase is delivering more compelling customer experiences around omni-channel for banking and wealth management based on their Engagement Banking Platform powered by Microsoft Azure AI. Capgemini, the Microsoft Global Financial Services Partner of the Year, has also driven AI innovation on the Microsoft platform, improving productivity and elevating the customer experience at financial services organizations worldwide.

“Capgemini and Microsoft have collaborated on enhancing business processes with Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI Service, helping banks and insurers better serve their customers. For instance, Capgemini recently helped a major Global bank streamline and accelerate its customer onboarding process with Microsoft Intelligent Document Processing, using AI Builder for structured documents and Azure OpenAI Service for unstructured documents. These technologies have saved an enormous amount of time developing impactful solutions for our customers.”

Vivek Desai, VP and Global Head, Microsoft CoE for Financial Services.

Additionally, global financial services solutions provider, VeriPark, is advancing custom agents that span 40 use cases across corporate and retail banking. 

 “[Collaboration] allows us to deliver cutting-edge AI solutions that not only enhance operational efficiency but also empower banks to provide personalized, real-time services to their clients.”

Özkan Erener, CEO, Veripark 

Empowering employees 

There are also meaningful opportunities for AI to empower banking employees to be more effective trusted advisors to their customers. Using Microsoft Fabric and Copilot, Finastra’s Assist.AI, powered by Azure OpenAI, is boosting trade finance employee productivity with intelligent features that enable users to better prioritize and more efficiently complete everyday lending tasks. In addition, Tata Consulting Services (TCS) is modernizing how they engage with customers via an agent designed to optimize communication between banks and their users across all customer engagement channels. 

Managing risk and compliance 

When it comes to mitigating risk and crime, partners are delivering new intelligent approaches. ASC is providing institutions with more decision-making power around managing fraud and risk, while SymphonyAI is consolidating enterprise-wide risk and compliance across their Sensa Investigation hub solution, powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure Open AI. Additionally, partners like Holistic AI are helping customers such as Mapfre identify and mitigate risks associated with AI, while harnessing their data to ensure transparency, fairness, and compliance.  

Modernizing core systems 

Microsoft partners are also using AI in the mission-critical task of modernizing payments and core banking for greater efficiency, transparency, and high-value outcomes such as unlocking new revenue streams, reducing operational costs, and enhancing customer satisfaction. Temenos is delivering banking-specific solutions to provide agility, security, and innovation—to help banking customers reduce operational costs and uphold responsible AI standards via their commitment to explainability, secure operations, and safe deployment practices. Zafin advanced their leading software-as-a-service transformation and modernization platform for banks with Azure AI; this includes their de-risked implementation process that generates a 50% reduction in time to market¹. 

“The introduction of generative AI and Microsoft Fabric from a data standpoint are crucial…”

Chris Dickin, Executive Vice President, Zafin 

Additionally, the collaboration among Microsoft, our partner Quantexa, and European bank Novo Banco has delivered advanced banking data estate modernization in the era of AI. 

Learn more about financial services solutions from Microsoft 

Whether you joined us in person at Money20/20 to see the latest AI innovations from Microsoft and our partners, or are just now discovering the difference our technologies and partners are making in the industry, we invite you to collaborate with us on your own transformative AI experiences. 

• Learn more about Microsoft solutions in the financial services industry and our work with key partners by visiting Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.  
• Learn how our partners are delivering industry-specific solutions faster with Microsoft Industry Clouds. 
• Visit our Solutions Partner learning path (which includes Microsoft Learn documentation, a playbook, and FAQs), and explore related financial services stories in our financial services industry blog.

¹Zafin launches Zafin IO and Zafin Data Fabric, a new offering to accelerate banking transformationThis offering will simplify integration processes, cut core modernization risks to support uninterrupted banking transformation, all while breaking down data silos and unlocking the power of banks’ first-party data – Zafin

The post Beyond Money20/20 USA: Microsoft partners redefining financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Consider, for example, that Americans who live past the age of 70 can expect on average to spend $172,000 for long-term care over their lifetimes.¹ But most families (as many as 83%²) say it would be impossible or very difficult to afford $60,000 for annual in-home or assisted living care expenses.

Life and health insurance companies are working to help bridge this ever-widening gap with long-term care insurance (LTCI). And thanks to a broad range of new innovations enabled by AI, Microsoft and our partners are helping to improve LTCI for policyholders and insurers alike. This is part of our vision for intelligent insurance and our work with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. 

In this case, helping to make long-term care more accessible and affordable is good not just for enhancing societal well-being and reducing the strain on public resources, but also for the viability of a critical insurance product.

The unique challenges of long-term care insurance

LTCI insures people for a very costly circumstance that is very likely to occur.

About 70% of seniors will require long-term care at some point in their lives,³ and Americans spend more than $471 billion annually for long-term care.⁴ Yet Medicaid covers only 42% of long-term costs. LTCI aims to address a significant portion of long-term care costs by covering a range of services for people who need assistance with daily living activities—for example, bathing, dressing, and eating—over an extended period, often provided at home.

Despite the prevalence and urgency of the need, however, LTCI has proven challenging for insurers. Rising healthcare costs and higher-than-expected claims have created unforeseen financial pressures. People are living longer, increasing the likelihood of needing to use LTCI, and fewer customers than expected are letting their policies lapse. For insurers, this results in profitability challenges and uncertainty, while customers face higher premiums, and thus reduced access.

How AI can help improve LTCI profitability and growth

The success of insurance companies in addressing the growing need for LTCI will depend on a variety of factors, including education, awareness, and the efficiency and effectiveness of regulation. Above all, technology holds the key for transformation in profitability and growth.

We are seeing tangible results in AI innovation with our insurance customers worldwide that have direct relevance for LTCI providers. These potential benefits are prompting many insurers to accelerate their cloud migration and data management investments—a transition that is key to the LTCI sector, which lags other insurance segments. With the scale, security, and resilience of the Microsoft Cloud combined with the advanced data and analytics capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and the AI development opportunities enabled by Azure AI Studio, insurance companies can innovate rapidly and confidently to meet their specific needs.

The future of insurance in the era of AI

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Here are some of the important benefits that insurers can apply to their LTCI offerings.

Enhance underwriting and claims management

AI can streamline underwriting and claims processing in ways that improve both accuracy and efficiency. One important area of focus is straight-through processing (STP)—the automation of an entire workflow, from the initial data entry to the final decision, without the need for human intervention. STP helps to reduce delays, minimize errors, and free up valuable human resources.

In the underwriting process, AI helps enable STP for tasks such as analyzing historical data, assessing risk factors, and predicting the likelihood of claims, which helps underwriters make more informed decisions and reduces the time required for manual reviews. It can also handle a larger volume of applications without a corresponding increase in resources.

In claims processing, STP can automate the assessment and triage of claims—for example, by quickly extracting and analyzing information from a wide range of documents, including medical records, policy applications, and claims forms. Many insurers have long used optical character recognition (OCR) technology to digitize these types of documents. But the addition of generative AI supercharges how they can be understood, evaluated, and acted upon.

Automate contact center experiences

With generative AI’s natural language processing and content creation capabilities, insurers can optimize contact center operations in ways that help both the customer and the company.

AI-enabled copilots and virtual assistants can handle larger volumes of routine inquiries, helping agents and customer service representatives provide faster, more accurate responses to policyholders’ questions about coverage, claims status, and more. For example, John Hancock implemented a new AI solution to provide support for common customer issues and questions, which helps call center representatives focus their efforts and expertise on the most complex cases, with better customer experiences and reduced wait times.

Automated systems can understand and respond to customer inquiries in a conversational way, and even authenticate caller identities with voice biometrics, streamlining the identification process and enhancing security. For LTCI, AI can enable corresponding benefits through more efficient operations, better resource allocation, and enhanced customer experiences.

Prevent fraud, waste, and abuse

In the realm of fraud detection, advanced analytics and AI-powered tools can analyze vast amounts of data from healthcare vendor invoices to identify patterns and anomalies indicative of fraudulent activities in a timely manner. With better insights, insurers can proactively detect and prevent fraud, helping ensure that legitimate claims are processed swiftly while minimizing financial losses.

AI can also help insurers identify unusual patterns or anomalies that could indicate fraudulent or wasteful activities, such as flagging a particular facility if it consistently submits higher-than-average claims for certain treatments. Analyzing historical data can also help inform insurers to create more robust, data-driven processes to determine which facilities to audit or to benchmark best-in-class operators.

Expedite regulatory, contracting, and auditing activities

LTCI is inundated with regulatory, contracting, and auditing activities, many of which rely on cumbersome manual processes. AI can improve the efficiency of many of these workflows while also improving accuracy, turn-around times, and regulatory compliance. Data validation, risk assessment, and regulatory monitoring can all benefit. Moreover, AI’s predictive analytics can spot potential compliance issues, and its enhanced reporting capabilities can aid strategic decision-making.

Advancing LTCI with AI and Microsoft

We believe that with focused, creative innovation with AI, LTCI providers and their customers can look forward to a bright future in which more people can live with dignity and financial security in their senior years, thanks to high-quality, robust insurance products and services. We are excited to work with industry and our global partner ecosystem to strengthen LTCI, in line with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles and our Secure Future Initiative. 

To learn more about all our solutions, visit our Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services website.

¹AARP, “Long-Term Care Costs May Double to $5.6 Trillion by 2047,” March 2018.

²KFF, “The Affordability of Long-Term Care and Support Services: Findings from a KFF Survey,” November 2023.

³Morningstar, “100 Must-Know Statistics About Long-Term Care: 2023 Edition,” March 2023.

⁴A Place for Mom, “Long-Term Care Statistics,” September 2023.

The post How AI is improving long-term care insurance for insurers and customers alike appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft for energy and resources

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

Enhancing energy operations with modern data management  

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

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

Harnessing the power of AI with Copilot 

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

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

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

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

Optimize carbon capture and storage and enhance reservoir management 

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

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

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

Explore more energy solutions and resources 

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what if your organization is currently still in pilot mode? The challenge with pilots is that they don’t drive consequential change in the bottom line, and it’s a struggle to democratize learnings. With three in five chief marketing officers (CMOs) driving funding behind investment for generative AI,² there’s pressure to prove return on investment (ROI) and value from AI investment amidst numerous pilots.

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As we transition from hype to reality, brands are shifting from basic generative AI applications like content and tagline generation and to evaluating comprehensive business processes that leverage generative AI to accelerate timelines, unlock more value, and drive increased growth. Marketers are leading the way in leveraging AI as a powerful co-creator at scale.

Let’s evaluate age-old challenges and lengthy processes for marketers.

First, identify key areas where AI creates significant impact in a 6 to 18 month period:

• Increased investment in a multitude of omnichannel marketing solutions and partners has led to fragmented customer profiles and data. Siloed analytics, reports, and data make it difficult to create a unified view of the customers, hindering segmentation efforts to personalize each interaction with customers
• Isolated business analysis tools and cross-media performance and recommendation data across partners and platforms make it difficult to develop real-time or predictive media planning strategies. Marketers struggle optimizing spending and maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS).
• Convoluted naming conventions, metadata tagging, and static reporting from disconnected create “tech debt.” This debt makes it difficult to spot patterns in data such as best keywords, segments, content, and channels.

Powerful personalization at scale with AI

How can AI create more personalized touchpoints across a shopper journey?

Common “personalization” mishaps that decrease loyalty: A customer browses running shoes online but buys a pair in-store, later they receive a generic email offering discounts on the shoes they just purchased and unrelated accessories.

The future process of personalization accelerated with AI: The customers’ needs are anticipated before they even ask. A customer now browses for running shoes online, purchases them in-store, and receives a personalized upsell promotion to “complete the look” with complimentary products. The brand then sends a promotion the following year to upgrade the shoes to a new pair.

Making AI-powered personalization “real”

1. Collaboration is the heartbeat of innovation: Personalization at scale should be a joint priority for business and technical stakeholders. Together, executives collaborate over a single “source of truth” for data and ensure a dynamic flywheel of data is in place, updating customer signals and operational data (supply chain, promotions, product, point of sale [POS]) in real time. Consistent updating and scrubbing of the data sources ensure conversational agents used by marketers, like Microsoft Copilot, are reasoning over accurate, quality data and keeps data secure.
2. Simultaneously, marketers apply “AI as a co-creator strategy” to the end to end (E2E) process of creating, planning, executing, and analyzing campaigns adopting, training, and utilizing conversational agents.

But, how?

Collaboration between IT and the CMO: Preparing the data estate to accelerate personalization at scale, stakeholders can leverage Microsoft Fabric, a unified data platform with compatibility across multiple cloud platforms, allows marketers to access and analyze up-to-date data directly within the governance boundary. Fabric offers intelligent data analytics as a service, allowing brands to build custom reports in Power BI without having to export data, ensuring greater security.  Marketers can spend less time consolidating reports from multiple groups, partners, and internal resources and instead simply ask questions of their data.

Create a comprehensive view of the customer and their journey with a customer data platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, connected to Fabric, offering better segmentation, insight generation, and campaign activation tools for data-driven optimization driving ROAS, growth, and elevated customer experiences. With both Fabric and Dynamics 365 Customer insights, marketers leverage advanced analytics and AI capabilities to gain deeper insights.

Marketers can then leverage Microsoft 365 Copilot as an AI “co-creator” to enhance productivity and collaboration across marketing and agencies, reimagining the entire content creation and activation process, from creative brief development to real-time brainstorming with agencies.

Embrace the future of marketing with AI

As brands struggle to make the promise of generative AI and its benefits “real,” cross-collaboration across both data and marketing stakeholders becomes more critical than ever before. By overcoming the challenges of disparate data, marketers create more effective campaigns that drive better ROI. The future of marketing about more than leveraging generative AI as a content creator, but a co-creator grounded quality, accurate, and up to date in company data and supercharged by large language models (LLMs). These E2E strategies will turn marketing strategies from reactive to predictive. Ready to begin the journey to personalization at scale?  Learn more about how Microsoft can help.

Get in touch with a Microsoft representative at any time for more information on the ways Microsoft can help your retail business achieve more with insightful, intuitive AI tools. We are eager to help you innovate and achieve your goals.

Learn more

• Microsoft’s responsible AI principles
• Generative AI will revolutionize Revenue Growth Management
• “What’s my generative AI strategy?” Microsoft is helping consumer goods brand marketers embrace the era of AI
• Generative AI transforms business processes

¹Sitecore Launches Sitecore Stream, Delivering on Vision for Industry’s First Intelligent Digital Experience Platform.

²How CMOs are shaping their GenAI Future, BCG 2024.

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This powerful advantage is now available with Meeting Prep for Financial Services (preview), the newest addition to Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and an innovation from Microsoft’s long-term strategic partnership with LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group). The new app, built and optimized for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, offers deep links and interoperability with LSEG’s next-generation data and analytics workflow solution, LSEG Workspace, to augment the workflow experience. 

Meeting Prep for Financial Services empowers investment bankers and other professionals in client-facing roles by helping to save time preparing for client meetings, improve client engagement and decision-making, and streamline client communications. For professionals in firms with a Microsoft Teams license and LSEG Workspace license, the app fosters collaborative workflows and boosts productivity. Generally available in December 2024 and now in public preview, Meeting Prep for Financial Services is an important milestone in the LSEG and Microsoft partnership launched in 2022 to jointly develop new products and services for data and analytics.  

“We are thrilled with the positive reaction from our customers, who have highlighted the significant time savings and efficiency benefits they are experiencing with Meeting Prep for Financial Services. By integrating market-leading data and analytics from LSEG Workspace with Microsoft’s generative AI capabilities, we are empowering financial professionals to prepare for client meetings more effectively and make more informed decisions.”

Nej D’Jelal, Group Head, LSEG Workspace Platform 

How our financial services customers and partners are advancing with AI 

Innovation is happening in every corner of financial services as organizations engage with Microsoft and our global partners. According to the Gartner 2025 CIO Agenda: Top Priorities and Technology Plans for Banking, “the biggest expected changes in technology investments are generative AI (39%), cyber security/information security (34%), and AI (33%).”¹ Such innovation requires a strong foundation of security, privacy, and trust, which is why we place special emphasis on safeguarding data, taking robust privacy measures, and committing to responsible AI principles. Security is a top company-wide priority for Microsoft, and our Secure Future Initiative reflects our commitment to continually advancing the built-in security of our products and services. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services offers this foundation with services and solutions tailored to the industry, empowering firms to achieve impactful business outcomes quickly—whether transforming the customer experience, empowering employees, managing risk and compliance, or modernizing core systems. Organizations can drive innovation and improve resilience by taking advantage of fit-for-purpose platform services. And with Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered analytics platform, firms can unite their data, improve collaboration, and reduce the cost and effort of AI development, while simplifying governance and enhancing security. 

Transforming the customer experience 

The importance of data in customer experiences is magnified when viewed through the lens of the customer journey—in every place, time, and channel that a customer interacts with their financial institution. To deliver better service and more meaningful interactions, firms need to create seamless, consistent experiences and provide a complete view of the relationship.  

A great example is how Microsoft and BlackRock are partnering to build next-generation solutions for the company’s Aladdin investment management platform, which runs entirely on Microsoft Azure. BlackRock last year launched a new generative AI tool for its private markets platform, and is now launching the new Aladdin Copilot, which surfaces answers instantly to support key business decisions and enable better decision-making.  

Many other firms are reshaping how they deliver experiences, products, and services through generative AI. ERGO Insurance has revolutionized its customer service in just four months using an AI Virtual Agent powered by Azure, developed by EBO. Virgin Money has developed an award-winning virtual assistant using Microsoft Copilot Studio, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to enhance the omnichannel customer experience. First National Bank has improved customer communications with Microsoft Copilot for Sales, ensuring client responses reflect understanding of their requests. And CommBank is using generative AI to deliver personalized customer experiences and help protect against fraud, scams, and financial abuse.

Empowering employees

With the right communications and collaboration tools, employees can be dramatically more effective in addressing business needs and servicing customers. The first and often most powerful way to benefit from generative AI is to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, which recently launched a new wave of features as well as enhancements to Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps. A recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester, commissioned by Microsoft, projects 112 to 457% projected ROI using Copilot for three years, and 30% reduction in new-hire onboarding time.²  

Beyond Copilot, customers are using Azure OpenAI Service to build custom agents and generative AI applications. These also offer significant ROI. Another recent Forrester TEI study in the financial services and insurance sector, also commissioned by Microsoft, suggests that organizations deploying solutions on Azure OpenAI Service can expect increased average revenue per client of 3 to 7% by year 3, and a time savings in content generation efficiency of 30 to 60%.³  

Across the industry, our customers are realizing important productivity benefits in AI innovation. For example, Moody’s launched a custom enterprise copilot that is enhancing productivity and innovation for its 14,000 employees, which they launched in less than 30 days. 

“Financial institutions are confronting the demand for immediate insights amidst an overwhelming surge of data. Microsoft’s Azure and generative AI solutions are pivotal in navigating this challenge by simplifying and democratizing access through copilots, enabling our customers to process an unprecedented volume of data with unparalleled speed.”

Nick Reed, Chief Product Officer, Moody’s Analytics 

Elsewhere, financial advisors at Hargreaves Lansdown are saving two to three hours per week on average, using new AI-powered tools to complete client documentation four times faster than before. Using Azure OpenAI Service, AXA developed its AXA Secure GPT platform in three months, applying generative AI responsibly and with high data safety. And staff at Akbank are saving three minutes per customer support interaction with a new chatbot that can search 10,000 records in seconds. 

Managing risk and compliance  

As financial services firms rely more on technology to operate and innovate, it is increasingly critical to ensure that systems meet regulatory requirements and operate with the reliability, resilience, and security the industry demands.  

The growing reliance on technology has prompted regulatory action around the world, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the European Union, a regulation designed to improve the stability and security of the industry. With DORA and other key efforts, Microsoft is actively engaged with regulators and is focused on helping customers achieve smooth and comprehensive compliance. This includes participation in consortia such as the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), where we are joining other industry leaders in the development of a groundbreaking AI governance framework for financial institutions. 

Helping meet compliance needs

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Technology also plays a key role in regulatory compliance. Based on the Azure landing zone—a secure, scalable cloud foundation tailored for compliance needs—we are introducing a new FSI landing zone. Available in November 2024, this infrastructure-as-code provides the baseline governance, resilience, security, automation, and prescriptive guidance needed to help financial services organizations and our industry partners meet the strict, non-negotiable compliance requirements of the industry.   

The move to the cloud can likewise accelerate more effective risk management. Bank of Montreal, for example, has migrated its market risk management platform to Azure and realized a sixfold reduction in analysis time, a doubling of speed in job time, and a 30% cost savings. And Belgian bank Belfius has deployed the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform to assess risks, meet regulatory standards, and more quickly identify unusual behaviors.  

Enhancing security

On the security front, financial services organizations are among the most targeted in the world. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the escalating cost of cybercrime will reach USD10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from USD3 trillion a decade ago.⁴ The increasingly dangerous threat landscape compels firms to better safeguard critical systems, enhance data protection, and maintain compliance with a host of regulations.  

To help cyber defense teams work more effectively amid chronic talent shortages, Microsoft Copilot for Security empowers analysts to rapidly assess an organization’s security posture and create actionable insights and solutions at much greater speed than current approaches. At Intesa Sanpaolo Group, Copilot for Security is speeding the work of threat hunters and empowering junior staff to ramp up dramatically faster. And at Barclays, Microsoft’s security solutions are helping to better detect, investigate, respond to, and protect against security threats.  

Modernizing core systems 

The promise of AI is motivating many institutions to rethink their reliance on legacy systems and migrate mission-critical workloads to the cloud, while also adopting a modern data and analytics platform like Microsoft Fabric. With the significant AI and agent investments we’re seeing across our customer base, the need for a robust data estate strategy is even more critical.  

The collaboration among Microsoft, our partner Quantexa, and European bank Novo Banco is a great example of data estate modernization in the era of AI—combining the power of the Quantexa Decision Intelligence Platform with Microsoft Fabric’s advanced analytics capabilities. 

Modernization also delivers important benefits in agility, resilience, compliance, and costs. In Singapore, CapitaLand Investment has moved to a unified data platform that streamlined data operations across all business units, saving over SGD1 million in operational costs and more than 10,000 worker-days per year. Likewise, Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) has upgraded its application infrastructure to Azure, which has been key to quadrupling their client base, and has reduced the time to deploy new services from three months to as little as one day. And Zavarovalnica Triglav is reimagining insurance workflows in Slovenia with automated responses and smart rerouting of customer inquiries, reducing the need for manual intervention by around half for certain requests. 

Looking ahead 

As these and so many other examples demonstrate, AI makes it possible to innovate across the business while maintaining trust with customers, clients, regulators, and within the organization. Microsoft and our partners are poised with both solutions and services on which the industry can depend, and we look forward to continuing the journey with every customer. 

• See Microsoft Learn for more information on Meeting Prep for Financial Services, including guidance on how to participate in the public preview.
• Explore refreshed documentation for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, the scalable, industry-tailored platform that helps financial services organizations unlock business value and deepen customer relationships.
• Read our blog, 3 ways Microsoft is helping the financial industry prepare for new DORA regulations, to learn more about how Microsoft is helping the financial services industry prepare for DORA.

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¹Gartner, 2025 CIO Agenda: Top Priorities and Technology Plans for Banking, by Pete Redshaw, September 16, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

² Forrester, “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Copilot For Microsoft 365,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, April 2024.

³ Forrester, “Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service Driving Productivity Gains To Enable New Ways To Engage Clients In Financial Services And Insurance,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, July 2024.

⁴ Cybercrime Magazine, “Cybercrime To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025,” November 2020.

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Powering healthcare AI with unified and protected data

We are excited to announce the general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, along with the public preview of healthcare application templates for Microsoft Purview. These advancements represent a leap forward for data-centric healthcare, enabling organizations to streamline, secure, and analyze diverse biomedical data—the foundation to build powerful and responsible healthcare AI.

In the latest public preview release, Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions now integrate DAX Copilot data, offering a comprehensive platform for ingesting, storing, and analyzing a wide range of healthcare data. This includes clinical, imaging, claims, conversational, and social determinants of health (SDOH) data, all handled within a multi-modal biomedical lakehouse. The platform adheres to healthcare standards, such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), and provides tools for data transformation, enrichment, discovery, and visualization.

With the new addition of DAX, the Dragon Ambient Experience, a draft medical note is generated at the point of care, combining healthcare and conversational data to generate unique insights. The platform has controls in place to support an organization’s compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), offering role-based access control and robust data governance. An AI-powered data discovery and grouping experience enables customers to discover their data and supports healthcare providers build patient cohorts for AI development, enhancing the capabilities of data discovery and building cohorts in this public preview.

In tandem, the healthcare application templates for Microsoft Purview are designed to help healthcare organizations govern their data with confidence. These templates allow healthcare organizations to discover and govern sensitive data in compliance with industry standards.

AI advances in healthcare

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offers both healthcare data solutions and healthcare AI models well suited for managing multimodal healthcare data.

We are excited to unveil the public preview of Microsoft healthcare AI models in Azure AI Studio and GitHub, a collection of cutting-edge multimodal generative AI models for healthcare and life sciences available in the Azure AI model catalog. This platform empowers developers and researchers to create sophisticated multimodal health and life sciences solutions more efficiently, using fewer data and compute resources, thus reducing development time and costs.

We have collaborated with our partner ecosystem to bring forth a suite of advanced AI models that can work with different types of medical data. These models are engineered to operate both in conjunction with advanced general reasoning models like GPT-4o and Microsoft’s Phi-3 family, paving the way for potent multimodal solutions that meet the needs of the healthcare and life sciences community.

Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions are the multimodal data estate that powers our AI, integrating diverse data types into a unified environment. This integration facilitates enhanced decision-making and propels patient outcomes by providing comprehensive insights, particularly by combining specialized multimodal AI models with Fabric’s robust data integration tools.

We are also pleased to announce the public preview of healthcare agent service integrated in Microsoft Copilot Studio. This innovative platform is tailored for the rapid, secure, and compliant development of healthcare copilots, incorporating generative AI based on a healthcare-specialized stack.

With healthcare agent service, our customers can create their own copilots, featuring pre-built healthcare specific safeguards and intelligence. Healthcare agent service is specifically designed for the healthcare sector, incorporating a range of responsible AI safeguards, including chat, clinical, and compliance measures ensuring that the development of healthcare copilot agents adheres to the highest standards of safety and regulatory compliance.

This announcement underscores our commitment to empower health and life science organizations with advanced tools that are not only innovative but also responsible and compliant with industry standards.

Furthermore, the Azure Health Data Services de-identification service is set to reach general availability in November. The cloud API service uses natural language processing techniques to find, redact, or surrogate protected health information (PHI) in unstructured text, including clinical notes, doctor/patient text messages, clinical trial data, discharge summaries, and more. By leveraging the Azure Health Data Services de-identification service, healthcare organizations can confidently utilize or share their data for research, analytics, and AI-powered insights without compromising data privacy.

The future of AI in healthcare

As we stand on the brink of a new era in healthcare, the integration of AI and data solutions is not just a possibility but a necessity. The advancements we’ve discussed, from Microsoft’s responsible AI initiatives to the groundbreaking capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and healthcare AI models, are transforming the way we approach patient care, data management, and overall healthcare delivery. These innovations are not only enhancing patient outcomes but also bringing joy back to the practice of medicine by alleviating the burdens on healthcare providers. The time to lead the charge in revolutionizing healthcare is now.

We invite you to join us on this journey. Explore the possibilities with Microsoft’s AI and data solutions and see how they can empower your organization to achieve new heights in patient care and operational efficiency.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is helping your organization shape a healthier future with data and AI

We are excited to strengthen our data and AI investments through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we are making it easier for our partners and customers to create connected experiences at every point of care, empower their healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from their data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry.

• Explore more about Azure Health Data Services.
• Learn more about healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.
• Later this month, visit the Healthcare and Life Sciences Blog to explore the innovative de-identification service that’s transforming how we protect patient privacy.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

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The post Enhancing healthcare with data and responsible AI: New innovations from Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Learn more about how Microsoft is enhancing healthcare with data and responsible AI. Read the latest Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announcements.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a comprehensive solution that enables organizations to ingest, store, and analyze healthcare-related data from various sources and modalities into one unified data store for analytics and AI. Also, the healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview, an innovative suite of features designed to help you govern your healthcare data with confidence, is now available in public preview. With these advancements, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare now offers an expanded bundle of general availability services to further empower healthcare organizations in their digital transformation journey.

EPAM, renowned for supporting Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare clients with advanced technical solutions, has experienced substantial benefits from leveraging healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. These advantages manifest as heightened customer satisfaction, notable cost savings, and accelerated project timelines. The solution’s impact is particularly noteworthy as it provides healthcare clients with reliable, AI-ready data in an efficient manner.  

“For a recent AI and Advanced Analytics Solutions, our projections estimated a significant investment to develop the necessary data products for the analytics needs, with a substantial portion dedicated to establishing the data foundation. However, with the launch of this solution and a successful pilot, we were able to revise the project scope significantly. This resulted in more than 40% reduction in implementation time and costs, highlighting the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the solution.” 
—Brian Blanchard, Cloud Chief Technology Officer, EPAM

Unify your multi-modal healthcare data for analytics and AI with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric 

The general availability of healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric represents a significant leap in the journey towards data-centric healthcare. This all-encompassing platform streamlines the integration, preservation, and examination of diverse biomedical data, bridging the gaps between isolated data repositories and fostering powerful analytical insights. 

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables healthcare organizations to ingest, store, and analyze data from various sources and modalities. These data solutions provide a set of capabilities that enable a multi-modal biomedical lakehouse, which can handle clinical, imaging, claims, conversational, and social determinants of health (SDOH) data. It adheres to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standards, introduces data transformations, and ensures a secure, regulatory-compliant framework for managing data. 

By using healthcare data solutions, you can benefit from the following features:  

• A unified data model that supports industry standards such as FHIR and DICOM. 

• A rich set of data transformation and enrichment tools that prepare your data for analysis, as well as add clinical and demographic annotations.  

• A suite of data visualization and cohorting experiences, that can help you discover patterns, trends, and outliers in your data, as well as create dashboards and reports.  

• A secure and compliant environment that aims to meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements, with role-based access control, data governance, and data lineage.  

Additionally, we are pleased to announce the public preview of additional functionality that enhances the existing capabilities within our healthcare data solutions offering. These include: 

• Conversational Data Integration: Enable customers to send their conversational data, such as patient conversations from DAX Copilot to Fabric. By sending DAX audio files, transcripts, and draft clinical notes to Fabric, customers and partners can leverage various native tools in Azure and Fabric to analyze this data or combine it with other data to generate comprehensive insights. 

• Social determinants of health public datasets transformation: Ingest, persist, harmonize, and consume SDOH public datasets such as Location Affordability Index, Food Environment Atlas and Rural Atlas from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Environmental Justice Index, ACS Education Attainment, SDOH Dataset from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Australian Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), and United Kingdom Indices of Deprivation to enable healthcare organizations to identify risks and health-related social needs to create equitable health care for all patients and communities. 

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Claim and Claim Line Feed Files (CMS CCLF) claims data ingestion: Streamline the ingestion of CMS CCLF claims data and harmonize with clinical, imaging, and SDOH data to unlock actionable insights on patients and populations. Use this data to understand and manage healthcare costs, identify care gaps, and help health outcomes. 

• Care management analytics: Leverage unified healthcare data and care management analytical templates to enhance patient care by identifying high-risk individuals, optimizing treatment plans, and improving care coordination and empower your organization to deliver personalized, efficient, and proactive care. 

• Data discovery and cohorting: An integrated workflow that allows you to create, manage, analyze, and share patient cohorts. Create cohorts using natural language and export cohorts into AI pipelines, notebooks, or downstream applications.

With healthcare data solutions, you can unlock the value of your data and enable data-driven healthcare. You can use your data to help improve patient outcomes, enhance population health, optimize operational efficiency, and accelerate research and innovation. You can also leverage the power of AI and machine learning to build predictive models, identify risk factors, and personalize interventions.  

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare data with the new features and capabilities now available in Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize your healthcare services; start your free trial now.

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Unlock the full potential of your healthcare data with the new features and capabilities now available

Learn how

Protect your data with the healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview 

Healthcare organizations need to govern their data with assured confidence—guaranteeing robust security and strict compliance. Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance service that helps you discover, catalog, and classify data across your data estate. The healthcare application templates for Microsoft Purview accelerates our customers journey by providing healthcare-specific classifications, glossaries for healthcare standards, and guidelines on how to use them together with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. 

“Healthcare application templates in Microsoft Purview strengthens Microsoft’s commitment to support its clients in the healthcare industry. Here at Sentara we have been leveraging its glossaries and classifications to identify and tag our critical assets. We look forward to partnering with them on their journey continuous advancement in data governance.”
—Abdul Ghani Mohammed, IT Manager (Data Governance & Data Quality), Sentara Health 

Identify sensitive healthcare data with healthcare classifications 

One of the key challenges of governing healthcare data is identifying and protecting sensitive information, such as protected health information (PHI) or personal identifiable information (PII). Microsoft Purview addresses this challenge by providing a set of healthcare-specific classifications based on HIPAA privacy rules. These classifications cover important healthcare classifications such as date of admission, date of discharge, and more. You can also create custom classifications using regular expressions or keywords, allowing you to automatically discover and classify sensitive data across different data sources like Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI. 

Understand your healthcare data with glossaries based on healthcare standards 

Healthcare data is often complex and diverse, coming from various sources and formats. To help you understand and manage your data, Microsoft Purview provides glossaries for healthcare standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). These glossaries contain definitions and metadata for common healthcare terms and concepts, improving data quality, consistency, and interoperability across your data estate. 

Test your governance solution with healthcare sample data 

Sample data is essential for evaluating, testing, and validating the custom healthcare classifications and glossaries. By providing a realistic and relevant healthcare dataset, customers can validate if the Purview healthcare application templates meet their organization’s needs without bringing in their own production or sample data. 

Protect your data in healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric 

The healthcare application templates provided by Microsoft Purview facilitate the discovery, cataloging, and classification of data, thereby enhancing data quality, consistency, and interoperability across the healthcare data estate.  

Using these templates, you can enhance your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric with data governance capabilities that help protect your data. You can use Microsoft Purview to scan your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric data lake and catalog your data assets with classifications and glossaries. You can also use Microsoft Purview to monitor your data lineage, data quality, and data access across your healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric pipelines and applications. By integrating Microsoft Purview with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, you can gain a holistic and trusted view of your healthcare data and leverage it for better insights and outcomes. This unified approach not only strengthens security but also ensures strict compliance, enabling healthcare organizations to govern their data with confidence.  

Learn more about how to get access to the public preview, and learn how you can use healthcare application templates to protect your data in the healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is helping your organization shape a healthier future with data and AI 

We are excited to strengthen our data and AI investments through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we are making it easier for our partners and customers to create connected experiences at every point of care, empower their healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from their data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry. 

Learn more about all of our solutions in healthcare: Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.

The post Power healthcare AI with unified and protected multi-modal healthcare data appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Here are examples of what our customers are saying about the value they see: 

Generative AI is proving to be the key to unlocking unprecedented levels of personalization, performance, and customer engagement, as well as the opportunity to change the experience of being on the operator’s network. Microsoft’s strategy to support generative AI adoption in telecommunications centers on four pillars:

1. Elevating customer experience
2. Optimizing business and operations support systems
3. Modernizing the network
4. Unlocking new revenue streams

By focusing on these areas, we aim to enhance customer satisfaction through AI-powered support, streamline business operations with advanced automation, upgrade network infrastructure for better performance and security, and create new revenue opportunities through innovative AI-powered solutions. This comprehensive approach ensures that telecommunications providers deliver exceptional service while driving growth and efficiency.  

Elevating customer experiences 

Differentiation in the telecom industry is a growing challenge, and customer experience is emerging as a key competitive advantage. By leveraging AI-infused customer care, telecommunications companies are enhancing customer experiences through the use of branded service assistants. These AI-powered assistants provide personalized customer support and unique interactions—helping telecoms differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Vodafone Group is investing in both employee and customer experiences. Recently, they announced a plan to provide Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to their workforce. This generative AI tool will be rolled out to 68,000 employees across the organization to further improve productivity, innovation, and digital efficiency. This follows a successful pilot where Copilot for Microsoft 365 saved over three hours per person, per week—freeing employees to work on more creative, innovative, and valuable tasks, improving work-life balance and enhancing services and supporting Vodafone’s 350 million customers worldwide.   

Vodafone continues to personalize services and improve customer satisfaction by leveraging Microsoft Azure AI Studio, Azure OpenAI Service, and Microsoft Copilot along with Azure AI Search to enhance its customer experience with their virtual assistant, “TOBi,” and their customer agent solution, “SuperAgent.”   

“We aim to provide fast, personalized customer experiences that inspire confidence, but to continue to do that in the face of rising customer expectations, we needed to find a way to better manage complex customer inquiries efficiently and ensure timely and personalized responses.”

Ahmed Elsayed, Chief Information Officer United Kingdom and Europe Digital Engineering Director at Vodafone Group

Today, TOBi engages in more than 45 million conversations a month with customers and is expected to grow to half a billion over the next few years while reducing average hold time by more than one minute.  

Recently, PLDT selected Amdocs’ market-leading Intelligent Networking Suite to transform their network operations. The solution operates on the public cloud, featuring unified network inventory, service and network orchestration, and business process automation capabilities. This agreement also includes the customer service solution for case management, which is part of the Microsoft and Amdocs Customer Engagement Platform (CEP). CEP is a comprehensive, AI-powered solution designed for telecommunications service providers. It offers a unified platform for marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service—enabling telecoms to deliver seamless, digital-first experiences to both consumer and enterprise customers.

Optimizing business and operations support systems 

Telecoms are benefiting from modernizing their Business Support Systems (BSS) and real-time Operations Support Systems (OSS) with data solutions and Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI-powered productivity tool that integrates with Microsoft 365 apps. At Telkomsel, their chat–based virtual assistant Veronika contributed to a 15% reduction in customer escalations resulting in a net promotor score (NPS) that is 27% above the industry average.

Generative AI assistants for employees empower customer care agents to manage multiple inquiries efficiently, broadening their expertise and resulting in more personalized services leading to improved customer satisfaction and retention.  

Orange France is using generative AI to enhance customer service, marketing, internal and external communications, and network operations, with dedicated support from Microsoft. Use cases include fully integrated tools for rewriting FAQs, generating product sheets, and assisting developers with writing code. Laetitia Orsini Sharps, Consumer Department Director at Orange France, sees this technology as “a promising vector for improving customer service and making employees’ work easier,” allowing service teams to reduce the time it takes an agent to investigate and analyze the root cause of complex cases from 20 minutes to less than 3 minutes.

Modernizing the network 

Telecoms can improve security, network efficiency, scalability, and reliability by using a carrier-grade, AI-infused, and secure hybrid cloud. This modernization effort will reduce costs and drive revenue growth, positioning telecoms as leaders in the digital age.  

Telecoms are protecting their networks from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Nokia’s latest innovation, the integration of a generative AI assistant with its NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, demonstrates this proactive approach to security. Leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, this assistant enhances the efficiency of threat detection and resolution. Nokia expects the generative AI assistant to reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve a threat by up to 50 percent, depending on the nature of a cyberattack. As telecoms continue to fortify their defenses, such advancements are crucial in ensuring the security and reliability of critical operations. 

Real-time analytics capabilities allow telecoms to monitor network performance, detect anomalies, and optimize resource allocation to make data-driven decisions. Microsoft Fabric provides telecoms with real-time data, bringing order to a diverse and complicated data estate, enabling them to scale AI efforts. Fabric integrates data from various sources, including other clouds or on-premises sources, extending to where their data resides, providing a holistic view of telecom operations. The platform’s data visualization tools enable telecom companies to present complex data in an understandable format, facilitating better communication and collaboration across the organization.  

Unlocking new revenue streams 

Using Azure OpenAI Service to scale personalized customer experiences can result in an annual increase in average revenue per customer of 3% to 7% and a reduction in annual churn of 20% to 30%.² Telecom investments in AI and network modernization are unlocking new revenue streams with a platform for rapid development, deployment, and monetization of new services.  

As digital ecosystems expand, telecoms are offering advanced services where applications interact with their networks through APIs, turning their networks into programmable platforms that adapt to changing demands. Azure Programmable Connectivity (APC) offers a seamless Azure experience, providing a unified, standard interface across multiple operator networks globally while abstracting the complexities inherent to network APIs, ensuring code consistency and reliability, as networks continue to evolve. Developers can focus on building applications without worrying about underlying network changes.  

Telecoms can enhance their B2B strategy by leveraging Microsoft’s advanced technologies and strategic partnerships. Yobi Data works with telecoms to better understand customer behavior without compromising privacy.

“Accessing and managing the data necessary for effective AI can be prohibitively expensive—not to mention risky, and inefficient. Yobi Data finds the signal in the noise, empowering telecoms with access to advanced analytics and AI-derived insights into consumer behavior, network performance, and operational efficiency, all based on our own Private-by-Design data set. With these tools, telecoms can reduce churn, increase revenue, and improve customer experience—all without the time, expense, or burdens of new data acquisition.”

Max Snow, Chief Executive Officer, Yobi

The integration of real-time voice AI services using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Translator, and other services allows telecoms to differentiate themselves in the market.

“By partnering with Microsoft, Norwood Systems is pushing the boundaries of innovation in telecommunications. Leveraging Azure AI in our cutting-edge solutions like our CogVoice™ and Visual Voicemail platforms, we’re empowering telecoms operators to unlock new revenue streams, elevate customer engagement, and deliver next-generation experiences. Together, we’re reshaping the future of communication services.”

Paul Ostergaard, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Norwood Systems 

As telecoms continue to integrate AI into their strategies, the opportunities for growth and innovation are boundless. Recently Korea Telecom (KT) announced a multibillion dollar partnership with Microsoft to accelerate AI transformation for 650,000 companies and 17 million customers in Korea. “The partnership with Microsoft presents a pivotal opportunity, not only for technological collaboration but also for expanding Korea’s AI foundation and driving transformative innovation across industries and daily life,” said KT CEO Young-Shub Kim.

Microsoft’s commitment to supporting this transformation through advanced AI technologies and strategic partnerships will empower telecoms to stay ahead of evolving market and customer demands. 

Explore further how AI is reshaping the telecom industry

Microsoft for telecommunications

Accelerate telco transformation in the era of AI

Start your journey

• Learn more about Azure OpenAI Service capabilities.
• Read the white paper “Scaling telecommunications AI at speed.”
• Connect with us at Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas, Nevada from October 8 to 10, 2024, where Microsoft is a Platinum Sponsor for the Telco AI Summit. We look forward to welcoming you to our speaking sessions or in our executive meeting rooms in the West Hall, Level 2.

¹ IDC’s “Telecommunications Service Provider DX Plans and Strategies Survey Highlights Study”, IDC #US52480824, August 2024. 

² New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Azure OpenAI Service In Reinventing Customer And Constituent Engagement, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, July 2024. 

The post Transforming telecoms with AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

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Enabling energy industry innovation through modern technology

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

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

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

The path forward for carbon capture storage

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

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

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

How scalability, standardization, and security contribute to sustainability

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

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

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

Clearer skies ahead

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

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

Explore more on carbon management

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

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

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

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

Generative AI is revolutionizing the way that people interact with their applications. Microsoft is at the forefront of this change by integrating Microsoft Copilot into its products and empowering customers and partners to build their own copilot experiences. Today, copilots have been developed to enhance the productivity of industry functions and roles. These copilots synthesize data from multiple systems, providing information workers with streamlined access to data that can lead to faster, better decision-making and empowers the workforce.  

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The power of mobility copilots 

In the automotive industry, information workers are found across many business functions: research and development, manufacturing, sales, digital experiences, after-sales, and commercial operations. Information workers have different roles and tasks, for example: 

• Requirement engineers: Define functions of the vehicle based on market requirements.
• Software developers: Create new software defined vehicle functions.
• Fleet operators: Operate mobility services and fleet operations for commercial operations using fleet management solutions.
• Repair and maintenance technicians: Provide repair and maintenance services in the workshop. 

A function-based copilot can leverage multiple systems to provide a unified user experience for increasing productivity. To be more effective, the copilot user experience can be optimized for each type of end-user depending on the nature of their tasks and work environments. For example, the copilots run in different types of applications, devices, and uses, such as, end-user programs, desktop computers, mobile applications, or as voice only assistants—requiring different types of user interactions. Application and data integration in automotive can be complex as the ecosystem of software vendors create specialized data and applications that address industry-specific needs, such as functional safety and compliance during development, and right-to-repair regulation for after sale. 

For connecting, ingesting, and analyzing mobility and industrial data, organizations can use Microsoft Azure data analytics and messaging services such as Microsoft Fabric,  Real-Time Intelligence, and Event Grid, to process streaming data from different kinds of devices, from vehicles to robots. Furthermore, Copilot, available across the Microsoft stack in trusted products such as Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, can promote additional collaboration, and increase productivity. 

The latest mobility partner copilots 

Microsoft Industry Clouds is redefining the way industries operate, with tools and guidance to support partners in the creation of industry copilots. Mobility-specific reference architectures are available to help to plan and build complete solutions. As part of the Microsoft commitment to empowering a global partner ecosystem of industry experts, we work closely with partners to build solutions based on customer pain points. Microsoft recently collaborated with industry partners, Netstar and KPIT, to create copilots that address concrete needs in the automotive industry. These solutions will soon be available in Azure Marketplace:

• Netstar has created a fleet operations copilot that simplifies the work of the fleet manager by interacting with vehicle, driver, and task management subsystems.
• KPIT has created a repair and maintenance copilot that enables repair and maintenance workers to fix vehicles faster, at first visit, thus increasing customer satisfaction. 

Fleet operations copilot from Netstar 

Fleet operators need to focus on operational efficiency to maintain and increase business profits—this means making quick decisions on vehicles, driver allocations, schedules, and tasks to optimize cost. Furthermore, to obtain a comprehensive view of the operation while in the office and on the move, a fleet manager relies on information from multiple systems. 

Netstar has created a copilot that integrates different systems to provide a unified experience that enables fleet managers to extract relevant information quickly and make decisions grounded on data insights in a short amount of time.  

The copilot integrates fleet information and telemetry data from the Real-Time Intelligence component from Fabric using two techniques: 

• A predefined query set that executes common queries on vehicles, trips, and health.
• A Kusto Query Language (KQL) query generation approach that creates dynamic queries on a scoped data set. 

To simplify interaction, Netstar has integrated custom cards that provide location information and maps to visually represent the position of vehicles and trips.

Repair and maintenance copilot from KPIT  

Modern vehicles are complex from the mechatronic and software point of view. This leads to longer repair times, dissatisfied customers, and unnecessarily replaced part warranty cases, known as “no-fault found”, incurring costs for the automotive manufacturer. Customer satisfaction is deeply affected if vehicles cannot be fixed correctly at a fair price, on the first try. Hence, repair and maintenance is critical to the profitability of the automotive OEMs and their relationship with customers. 

A repair and maintenance technician uses multiple systems to fix a car. These systems range from specialized tools for vehicle diagnostics to digital repair and maintenance manuals, repair procedures, and schematics. Additionally, they need to track all labor and cost times. 

To address these challenges, KPIT has created Trace2Fix, a repair and maintenance copilot that interacts with the following elements: 

• Vehicle diagnostics tooling to communicate with the car and read vehicle health, measurements, actuator control, and software lifecycle management.
• AI-powered reasoning engine to diagnose issues by analyzing symptoms, evidence, and fault codes to identify the most probable root cause. The copilot then directs technicians through optimal test steps, providing access to relevant repair procedures and schematics.
• Sample connections to the dealer management system and customer relationships management that leverages Dynamics 365 to handle appointments, scheduling, customer information, and inventory management. 

KPIT addressed interaction with the technician using both voice-only interfaces to facilitate hands free operations as well as custom cards to quickly display relevant repair information on different device types. With this solution, a repair and maintenance technician can access multiple systems to have information at their fingertips, leverage the Trace2Fix’s dynamic root-cause analysis and reasoning engine, and perform all necessary business actions to perform their tasks quicker. 

Tools for building your own copilot 

There are several options for creating industry specific copilots to address a variety of function and role-based needs.

For pro-code developers, copilots can also be created as services that leverage Semantic Kernel and connect to data sources and systems that are relevant for the customer scenario. The copilots are deployed as services in the cloud and integrated into front-end solutions. 

This high-level diagram shows a common approach for the creation of a function-based copilot backend: 

• API Management provides managed access to the copilot API, simplifying integration with multiple device front ends (such as mobile apps, desktop applications, augmented reality, and more.)
• Usage statistics to improve the operation of copilots are stored in Fabric. They are used to improve the response of the copilots based on feedback from the users.
• Memory along with user and vehicle profiles are stored using Azure Cosmos DB.
• Plugins implement the required data and capabilities for copilot—such as integration of vehicle telematics data using Fabric with Real-Time Intelligence, retrieval-augmented generation using AI search for vehicle documentation, and integration of business data from the dataverse.

For businesses looking to get started building copilots right away, Microsoft Copilot Studio offers an accelerated approach to creating copilots with minimal development expertise. Businesses can create function-based copilots to meet specific user needs. Organizations can also leverage the Copilot Studio Gallery, which offers industry-specific copilot templates that incorporate tailored business logic and custom prompts, streamlining operations and decision-making processes.    

Learn more about how you can create your own copilots using Microsoft Copilot Studio. 

Explore mobility solutions

• Discover how Microsoft is powering the future of mobility. 
• Learn more about the featured partners: Netstar and KPIT.   

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