If you’ve read The AI Strategy Roadmap: Navigating the stages of value creation, you’re already familiar with the five drivers of AI value. This research paper and blog series explore what organizations need to succeed with AI, including establishing a clear strategy and securing senior leadership support. Our research found that AI success isn’t solely about technology—strategic, organizational, and cultural factors are equally critical.

We’ve heard from customers that it’s crucial to consider how prepared your organization is for this technological leap. In this blog post, we’ll share some learnings to help you gauge your AI readiness so you can plan how to move forward effectively.

AI Readiness Wizard

Assess your AI readiness

Get started

Assess your AI readiness

When I meet with customers, they often share that they’re not sure where to start when it comes to assessing their readiness for large-scale AI transformation. It requires a strategic approach to understand your current capabilities, identify areas for improvement, and align these efforts with your business priorities to focus on the areas that will deliver the highest value. We’ve created a new AI Readiness Wizard to help you get started in evaluating your preparedness. Use the assessment to:

• Evaluate your current state. The assessment includes questions that help you determine how well your AI objectives align with your business priorities and the effectiveness of your current data access and security measures. Understanding your starting point is essential for identifying the right next steps.
• Identify gaps. By scoring your responses in the assessment, you can identify focus areas that may need more attention, such as business strategy, AI governance principles, or team expertise. This step helps prepare you for formulating a clear path forward and addressing specific areas for improvement.
• Plan your next steps. Based on your scores, the assessment categorizes your readiness into one of five stages: exploring, planning, implementing, scaling, or realizing. Each stage represents a different level of AI maturity and preparedness, guiding you on where to focus your efforts:
  • Exploring—At this stage, focus on building your AI strategy and experience. You might want to learn about key AI concepts and explore how AI is transforming the business landscape.
  • Planning—Here, you’ll concentrate on formalizing your business strategy. Look at the ways other organizations are driving value with AI and develop an informed plan for prioritizing AI projects.
  • Implementing—This stage involves focusing on leadership support and scaling AI expertise. Ensure you have the necessary resources and expertise to execute your AI initiatives effectively.
  • Scaling—At this level, you’ll aim to create an organization and culture of innovation. Scale your AI initiatives and begin analyzing the impact of AI in your organization.
  • Realizing—Focus on fostering continuous innovation within every team and the organization. Aim to embed AI technology in your operations and culture for sustained value creation.

Assessing your AI readiness requires a strategic approach to understand your current capabilities and identify areas for improvement.”

This assessment offers a structured way to reflect on your current practices and identify key areas to focus on as you develop your strategy for the future. You’ll also find resources for each stage to help you advance.

How AI is reshaping industries

Financial services

We’re seeing the financial services sector make rapid advancements in AI readiness, with 40% of organizations currently in the “implementing” stage. According to recent research, 70% of financial services organizations are using big data analytics in their operations, and 27% have piloted AI applications or AI-assisted solutions.

Additionally, more than half are allocating budgets for AI projects, providing AI-specific training, and fostering internal knowledge sharing. This commitment has enabled 27% of firms to reach the “scaling” and “realizing” stages, surpassing the 25% industry benchmark.

Healthcare

The healthcare industry shows a diverse mix of AI readiness, with 28% of organizations in the “scaling” and “realizing” stages, according to one study. Notably, 44% are actively laying the groundwork in the “exploring” and “planning” stages, focusing on learning and developing their AI strategies. The sector leads in overall maturity, but 14% of organizations report receiving no discernible value from AI, highlighting challenges in measuring the impact of AI investments within their broader business strategies.

Manufacturing

With 38% of organizations in the manufacturing industry still in the “exploring” and “planning” stages, many are focused on learning and developing AI strategies. Research shows that manufacturers actively deploy AI across operations, research and development (R&D), and supply chain management to address key business challenges. 25% believe they achieve significant value from AI implementation.

Manufacturing organizations also have a greater likelihood of appointing AI leadership, which we’re learning enables them to excel in fostering the operational and cultural factors that support value creation, resulting in more firms reaching the “realizing” and “scaling” stages.

Retail

We’ve seen a wide range of AI readiness in the retail sector. While some retailers use AI to enhance customer relationships and drive revenue, research shows that 43% are still in the “exploring” and “planning” stages. This divide is evident between those who adopted cloud technology early—about 25%—and those who have yet to embrace it, with 8% still not using cloud services. Notably, 21% of retailers have a chief AI officer, highlighting commitment among leadership to embed AI into their operations.

Map your AI journey

After assessing your readiness and gathering insights, you’ll want to outline a plan to address gaps and advance through the stages of AI maturity. Our findings at Microsoft have shown that crafting a strategic plan outlining how AI technology will fit into your organizational framework is a great place to start. The AI Strategy Roadmap: Navigating the stages of value creation is a valuable resource designed to guide you through this process.

As you define your AI strategy and roadmap, you might find our e-book, Building a Foundation for AI Success: A Leader’s Guide, helpful in identifying key focus areas for AI implementation.

The post A strategic approach to assessing your AI readiness appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

According to the 2024 Work Trend Index, a study exploring into the global trends affecting employee work and wellness, employees are struggling to keep up with the pace and volume of work. Many employees report feeling burned out and as a result, staff turnover is on the rise.

These trends have profound implications, underscoring a crucial shift: employees are now prioritizing their health and well-being over work. This is a pressing concern for all business leaders, particularly in customer service. 

At Microsoft, we recognize the vital role our customer service agents play in delivering world-class care. As the front line between our business and our customers, the quality of our customer care directly impacts customer satisfaction. 

Recently, Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work joined Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to discuss how our customer service teams are using AI solutions like Microsoft Copilot to ensure our customer service employees are empowered to focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs. Here’s what she had to say: 

Adapting to the customer service surge with the power of AI 

Since 2019, Microsoft’s customer service teams, like many in the industry, have been managing a rising surge in calls from customers with complex needs. 

As a service industry veteran and leader of our customer service organization, Mala and her team realized that just adding more call-handling capacity wouldn’t suffice. Their goal was to help teams at scale—to empower them to manage more inquiries, address more complex customer needs, and to more rapidly onboard new employees to help with the surge. They also saw an opportunity to reduce case volumes by introducing self-service options for customers. 

The team began exploring the use of generative AI to enable a more consistent and seamless experience. Already one of the world’s largest support organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, harnessing new AI capabilities could help the organization to automate and augment common support scenarios. As customer zero for our products, turning to Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 Customer Service would enable us to quickly adopt the transformative power of generative AI, and share those learnings with business leaders to implement and improve their own customer support experience at scale.

Reimagining the customer experience with the power of AI

Stay competitive in today's market with AI

Read more from Mala

Transforming the employee experience with generative AI 

As Mala explains in the interview, adopting Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Copilot Studio created an opportunity to transform work across four key areas of Microsoft’s customer service landscape. 

First, the Customer Service and Success team needed to speed up how quickly new hires could start helping existing customer service agents. Second, they wanted all support teams to access accurate information quickly and spend less time working across tools and data sources to collect customer and incident details. Third, they aimed to cut down on mundane tasks like data entry and paperwork so that customer service agents could focus more on complex issues that require empathy and judgment. Lastly, they aimed to improve self-help options for customers to handle their own questions, reducing the need for support requests. 

AI has the potential to drive operational excellence, nurture customer loyalty, and grow value through the entire customer journey—making it one of the most valuable tools for enterprises to create a consistent, differentiated experience, build meaningful relationships, and deliver better customer care.

Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft

1. Supporting new hires with better onboarding

The Microsoft Customer Service team introduced Copilot’s case summarization feature to break down complex information into simple summaries, helping new hires understand customer issues more quickly. By surfacing relevant information from diverse sources such as internal documentation, knowledge bases, and websites, Copilot accelerates the learning curve, enabling agents to resolve customer queries faster and deliver superior service. 

What’s more, Copilot supports new hires with ongoing learning and skill development by providing real-time assistance and insights. By using AI capabilities integrated into platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents can more easily access tools and diagnostics and recommend optimal solutions. This empowers agents to deliver highly personalized customer experiences across all customer support needs, at a global scale.

2. Helping employees find the right information faster

With Copilot, agents can now find important information quickly, even if it was spread across different systems. Dynamics 365 Knowledge Assist helps agents zero in on the relevant information and articles faster than traditional search. It not only can suggest relevant information but provides context about the specific relevance of content and cites the source.

Having a more comprehensive and streamlined method to seek information not only helps agents solve issues more quickly—it gives them a more complete understanding of information relevant to the issue they’re trying to solve. Agents can now use this context, with Copilot, to craft a more thorough and accurate response to customers.

3. Automating burdensome tasks

Before Copilot, creating detailed case summaries could take up to 30 to 40 minutes. Now, with Copilot, it’s done in 15 minutes or less. This not only speeds up how quickly customer service agents can handle customer requests but also lets them manage more cases without sacrificing quality. 

Automating summaries and common email and communication tasks allows agents to spend much less time on repetitive tasks, giving them more time to focus on the more meaningful and often more rewarding aspects of their job.  

4. Transforming support with self-service

Prioritizing self-service by integrating Copilot Studio into our customer-facing experiences is starting to make a big difference in how Microsoft handles customer service. Now, customers can use the power of generative AI in Copilot Studio to access self-help resources.

This change has reduced the amount of work customer service teams have to do and lets agents concentrate on more complex issues where customers require assistance. As a result, they’re getting things done more efficiently, working together better, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs. 

Harnessing the business impact of Copilot  

As Mala explains in her interview, generative AI and Copilot have played a pivotal role in transforming our customer service organization at Microsoft, enabling teams to achieve more with fewer resources. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:

1. Improved collaboration: Collaboration required among customer support agents decreased by 13%, making case resolution smoother and operations more efficient.

2. Enhancing efficiency: With Copilot, average chat case handling time reduced by up to 16%, giving agents better access to knowledge and improving overall efficiency.

3. Increasing productivity: Agents using Copilot became more productive, handling up to 12% more cases, which allowed them to serve more customers effectively. 

And that’s just the start. Mala sees a future for Copilot that will revolutionize the customer services industry, making it more efficient, responsive, and customer-centric.  

These include things like automatically connecting customers with appropriate experts, helping customers solve complex problems on their own, predicting issues before they happen, and personalizing interactions based on customer information and preferences. 

Copilot learning hub

Learn how to use Microsoft Copilot based on your role

Get started

Join Microsoft on our AI journey  

By automating routine tasks and helping teams find information faster, Copilot helps our employees focus on what really matters to them, allowing them to dive deeper into the parts of their jobs they love.  

The speed at which AI is transforming business today is unprecedented, reimagining the way we work. We envision a future where AI alongside human expertise reduces and eliminates the seams in the support experience. 

Mala Anand, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft

Today, the power of AI is revolutionizing how companies innovate and create large-scale impact in all areas. Leveraging generative AI throughout the customer journey enables businesses to foster enduring customer loyalty by improving the overall experience, adding value at each interaction. 

This interview is part of our All in on AI series that explores how Microsoft is adopting AI across different areas of our business. Next, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer, sits down with Jared Spataro to share how AI is helping human resource teams do more with less and to share the transformative best practices she used to drive some of the highest, fastest AI adoption rates Microsoft has ever seen. 

The post All in on AI: Exploring Microsoft’s AI journey through customer service appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

When our teams face new challenges and are encouraged to try new things, they’re more likely to find new and creative solutions. It all depends on workplace culture. Over the years, we’ve helped thousands of organizations adopt new technology, and time after time we discover the same truth: culture is the engine of innovation.

So, what happens when an industry built on tradition and precedent finds itself at the crossroads of new challenges and established ways of working?

Recent surveys show 62% of legal professionals now report spending up to seven hours a week tracking and analyzing regulatory developments, and the overwhelming majority (73%) anticipate this surge in regulatory activity to continue.¹ 

Like many companies, Microsoft is exploring how AI can help our legal teams more efficiently handle these new workloads at scale and deliver impact. 

To recap our journey so far, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Vice President, Hossein Nowbar and Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro recently discussed how our Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) organization is integrating AI into their workloads to stay ahead of the curve. They emphasized the importance of strategy, data, and culture. By reimagining the way the team works, they are harnessing the power of AI to bring significant enhancements to the legal field, including better services, smoother operations, and more time for essential tasks.

Wherever you are on your AI journey, we’re excited to partner with you—whether you’re just dipping your toes into AI exploration or looking to build on your current achievements. If you’re facing the same regulatory challenges as many of our customers and are curious how AI can help, I encourage you to watch this interview.

Strategy in the era of AI

Guided by data and collective contributions, CELA defined a strategy and launched a departmental initiative to harness the power of AI focusing on three key areas of broad impact: enhance advisory services, streamline transactional processes, and strengthen compliance and risk management. A multifunctional team led by Hossein and his co-executive sponsor, Chief Data Scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres, was assembled to execute on a strategy focused on experimentation, technical development, cultural change initiatives, adoption, and beyond. 

The AI Strategy Roadmap

Learn how to build and optimize your strategic plan for AI

Get started

Better data means better AI

When asked about the biggest learnings from his AI journey, Hossein emphasized the importance of data and sharing it more broadly across the organization. To harness its full potential, AI needs access to vast amounts of high-quality data. However, gathering this data can be challenging, especially if it’s siloed across the organization with disparate storage structures and governance models. Navigating a legal technology ecosystem with various domain-specific applications requires consolidation and aggregation of data from those systems. 

To address this challenge, the team built a data factory. CELA’s data factory is the foundation for their AI infrastructure to centrally and securely manage their diverse data sets and ultimately power AI solutions. AI and Microsoft Copilot, coupled with data infrastructure investments, are helping CELA to effectively transform vast amounts of data into valuable insights to accelerate AI transformation while also managing data privacy, security, and governance. 

It’s not just about tech—it’s about people

The success of an AI initiative depends not just on the technology but also on how people within the company adopt and use it.

When AI and Copilot was brought to our legal teams, some team members were uncertain about how this new technology would affect the way they worked.

One of the first tasks was to help teams understand the tangible benefits of AI and Copilot through proactive experimentation and invite them to imagine what they could use it to do. CELA embarked on a range of experiments to inform opportunity analysis and bring about measurable improvements in efficiency, quality, and scale. 

As the customer zero for all our products, we understand how it’s one thing for people to learn how to use a new tool, but it’s another to get them genuinely excited enough to truly adopt it. 

As Hossein explains in the interview, to navigate this cultural shift, the team implemented a multifaceted approach to model, recognize, and incentivize innovation and experimentation.

To support this, the team established a communication and change management plan. A community of AI catalysts representing all practice groups was formed to help drive AI transformation. They also introduced recognition opportunities to celebrate team members who contributed innovative ideas.

You have to celebrate people who are adopting AI and showcase their efforts.

Hossein Nowbar, Corporate Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft

By encouraging teams to join in the innovation and showing them real examples of what AI can do, it helped ease uncertainties and fostered a culture that embraces AI integration in their work. 

Upskilling empowers employees to adapt to AI transformation

Closing the gap in skills and knowledge is crucial for making the most of advanced AI tools. When companies invest in solid training programs and online resources, they’re not just teaching their employees how to use new tools—they’re showing they care about their team’s growth and future.

In our own journey, CELA established training programs to help teams adapt to new tools. For example, with support from Microsoft, the CELA Academy hosted the CELA Copilot skilling series, resulting in a 50% increase in employees using Copilot experiences in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. 

Whether you’re getting started with Copilot or building custom AI solutions, implementing effective training isn’t something you have to do alone, either. The Microsoft AI learning hub helps organizations prepare for AI transformation with the Microsoft Cloud and offers tools for building AI-powered apps, generative AI solutions, bots, and other AI models. 

You can also discover more insights from our AI journey, along with advice from experts in the field in Building a Foundation for AI Success: A Leader’s Guide. This guide can help your organization start using AI, inspiring your team to innovate and get excited.

AI tools like Copilot will help you save time on legal tasks

Using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot for certain legal tasks not only speeds things up but also enhances work product quality, increases agility to support business velocity, and facilitates decision making. Employees get more time to focus on the work that matters. The team is leveraging Copilot and AI to deliver broad impact across CELA by prioritizing use cases, such as:

• Create efficiencies for regulatory work: Quickly summarize regulations, streamline analysis, gather research to stay up to date on industry news and legal developments, draft guidance, and provide actionable insights, empowering legal professionals to stay ahead of the curve. 
• Strengthen compliance and risk management: Analyze large data sets, help proactively spot possible compliance issues, respond to requests for information, and enable agile and efficient action. 
• Improve client Interactions: Redirect high volume low-risk inquiries to client self-service capabilities to deliver faster responses. 
• Enhance advisory services: Quickly find relevant information across sources, including outside counsel work product, to facilitate rapid decision making, and draft communications tailored for different audiences verifying key advisory points are clear and relevant. 
• Simplify transactions: Condense intricate agreements, pinpoint essential clauses, flag potential risks, compare contracts, compile insights, draft clauses, and research legal structures for increased velocity and better decision-making. 
• Support pro bono: Impact the world around us by creating efficiencies to enable pro bono volunteers to help more clients in need in less time by using AI to empower volunteers with information they need and automate tasks such as form completion.

Join Microsoft on our AI journey

AI transformation continues at a fast pace. Every day, we are leveraging Copilot and AI, discovering the benefits and new use case scenarios. 

Making legal departments more efficient with AI

Learn from our journey

In the end, the right culture is key. By fostering a culture that values new ways of working, companies can set the stage for a successful AI transformation. Forward-thinking leaders, like Hossein Nowbar, play a pivotal role in this success by actively supporting AI initiatives, boosting their teams’ and partners’ confidence, and modeling the change mindset needed to unlock AI’s true transformative value. 

Adoption of AI is not a luxury for legal departments; it’s a necessity. It can never replace human judgment, but it can help us do our work better and faster.

Hossein Nowbar, Corporate Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft

This interview is the first part in our All in on AI series that explores how Microsoft is adopting AI across our business. Next, Mala Anand, CVP, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft, sits down with Colette Stallbaumer to see how AI is helping customer service teams by using AI solutions like Microsoft Copilot to ensure our customer service employees are empowered to focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs.

¹Cost of compliance 2023 report examines the top three operational insights, Thomson Reuters.

The post All in on AI: Explore Microsoft’s journey to redefining legal support with AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

In every industry and around the world, over the past year we have seen organizations embrace generative AI to transform their businesses. From Canada to Finland to Hong Kong—and everywhere in between—leaders are seeing the potential and possibility made possible by this transformative technology, and they’re beginning to realize the benefits. According to IDC, for every $1 an organization invests in AI technology, they’re realizing an average return of $3.50 on that investment.¹

Looking ahead to 2024, the question facing business leaders is this: How will you seize the opportunity to lead in this new era of AI? Microsoft is continuing to innovate with AI so that we can empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—and it starts when “I can’t” becomes “Watch me.” Take a look.

As your organization charts its journey into this era of AI, we are excited to be your partner—whether you’re just starting to explore AI or looking to build on what you’ve already achieved. To learn more about how the Microsoft Cloud can help power your transformation journey, I’d like to invite you to watch our 20-minute webinar.

AI transformation

Learn how your organization can unlock productivity, build your AI capability, and innovate with trust at the core

Watch the webinar

Unlock productivity across your business with Microsoft Copilot

Becoming an AI-powered organization starts with bringing AI right into the flow of work for any employee. And that’s what we’ve enabled with Microsoft Copilot.

Imagine a tool that makes your work so much more productive you don’t want to give it up. A tool that helps you sell more effectively, code more efficiently, respond to customers more accurately—and so much more.

“Copilot use cases are growing. In Microsoft 365, easily getting data from Excel files, creating a first draft in Word, or creating a PowerPoint presentation are some of the top examples,” said Sarah Lewandowski, Global Technology & Innovation Lead at Bayer.

We are seeing incredible results from early adopters of Microsoft Copilot. Our recent Work Trends Index study found that 70% of Copilot users said they were more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work. And in fact, 77% of people using Microsoft Copilot said once they used it, they didn’t want to give it up.

Identifying how Microsoft Copilot can unlock productivity across business roles and functions should be a key element of your AI transformation.

Build unique, transformational experiences to suit your needs

Deploying generative AI solutions like Microsoft Copilot is one part of your AI transformation journey. But you should also be thinking about the ways generative AI can support your business in a more tailored way.

This may mean extending Microsoft Copilot with Copilot Studio, as we are seeing at organizations like dentsu. The creative agency’s IT team are working on how to create customized prompts for key business functions or roles, as well as how they can connect Copilot with the in-house or third-party apps that already support their business.

“I have a lot of ideas, including using it for our onboarding employee experience with prompts that could help new employees find content. HR or Finance’s systems could have custom prompts in those applications,” says Julie Duvillier, Head of Unified Communications Platforms for Global Technology, at dentsu.

But you can also explore creating your own copilot solution that leverages the full power of Azure AI, the same platform that powers Microsoft Copilot. KPMG Australia, for example, created its own conversational AI assistant called KymChat, which leverages not just the generative AI capabilities of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service but also the vector search capabilities of Azure Cosmos DB to help the solution deliver faster results at scale.

“Let’s say an employee is about to interview a candidate for an open senior tax advisor role, and they want to know what questions to ask,” says Robert Finlayson: Senior Product Manager at KPMG Australia. “In the past, this employee might have had to liaise with HR or conduct a time-consuming web search of multiple sources to obtain viable questions. Now they simply ask KymChat to create a list of 10 role-specific interview questions, and they have their interview prep finished in seconds.”

Scenarios like this, which are highly unique to your own organization, are crying out for a custom copilot that takes advantage of the full Azure AI portfolio. You can develop these solutions in-house, or work with a Microsoft partner bringing their own expertise to the table.

Rely on a trusted, responsible AI partner

AI innovation is nothing without trust. Trust must be built into the AI apps you deploy and the AI solutions you create from the very beginning—and that’s why Microsoft commitment to Responsible AI is so important.

Our approach to Responsible AI is grounded in a set of principles that guide everything we do. These principles are brought to life through our corporate standards, the implementation and tooling we create, and the oversight and governance we have in place.

We’ve also seen the new importance of safeguarding your business and your data in this era of AI—especially as security becomes a defining challenge of our time. Microsoft’s approach to security can level the playing field for defenders, helping you protect your organization with AI-powered, end-to-end security.  

“One of the benefits of being able to use Copilot through Microsoft is that security’s already built in. And so the logged in user only has access to things they have access to, through the bigger security enterprise that you have set up, and it follows all your policies in your Microsoft landscape,” said Coşkun Çavuşoğlu, EY Americas Financial Services Tax AI Go-to-Market Leader.

Shape the next step of your AI journey today

Wherever you are in your AI journey, whether you’re just getting started or pushing the edge, you can take that next step today. Your AI journey should be multifaceted, encompassing the AI-powered apps you can use to unlock productivity across your business, the AI solutions you’ll build to serve your unique business needs, and a trusted and responsible foundation for AI innovation.

To dig into some real-world examples that can help you visualize your own AI success, check out the 20-minute webinar.

If you’re interested in learning more about Microsoft Copilot or building your own AI capability with Microsoft Azure AI, check out Microsoft AI for the latest news and information.

¹SOURCE: IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Microsoft, The Business Opportunity of AI, IDC #US51364223, November 2023.   

The post The AI capabilities you need to power your AI transformation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

If you missed the event, don’t worry—most sessions are available on-demand now, including all the amazing keynotes along with breakout sessions, discussion sessions, and more. One clear theme emerged across the event: the promise of AI is becoming real.

Over the past year, we’ve been living in the AI hype cycle. We’ve seen headlines, we’ve heard promises, and we’ve talked about potential. But at Microsoft Ignite, it was clear that potential isn’t coming a few years down the road, or even in a few months. It’s happening right now. One news roundup even called Microsoft’s vision for AI an “everyday reality.”

In November, we shared the results of an IDC study commissioned by Microsoft that explores how AI can drive economic impact for organizations across industries and around the world. At Microsoft Ignite, we shared even more detail from the study—and there are three key takeaways every business leader should know as this platform shift continues.

The business opportunity of AI

Explore the approaches and strategies enterprise organizations worldwide are using

Get the IDC ebook

AI is a strategic priority and a source of competitive advantage

The study found that AI adoption is both widespread and growing—71% of organizations are already using AI today, and 22% of those organizations who aren’t already using AI expect to do so in the next 12 months. And AI implementation is faster than you might think—the study found that 92% of AI deployments are taking 12 months or less, and 40% of organizations had implementation times of less than 6 months.

These results show that AI is becoming an increasingly integral part of business operations. Failing to invest in AI today means that organizations risk falling behind their competitors, and missing out on the benefits that AI can bring, such as increased efficiency, smarter decision-making, and enhanced customer experiences.

At Microsoft Ignite, we saw firsthand how companies are using AI solutions such as Microsoft Copilot to transform how their employees work today. Take Bayer, for example: their employees are more productive, collaborative, and creative when they’re able to use Microsoft Copilot in their daily work. Bayer is already seeing more than 700 use cases for generative AI—it’s clear this is just the beginning.

United Kingdom retailer Marks & Spencer is using AI across many different lines of business, including customer engagement, and both the return on investment (ROI) and competitive differentiation they’re seeing is significant.

AI has been a game-changer for Marks & Spencer, delivering exceptional value across our enterprise and personalization initiatives. We have seen a tenfold return on our enterprise investments, generating seven figures in savings and efficiencies. On the personalization side, we have unlocked eight figures in incremental revenue thanks to AI-powered recommendations and offers, which has exceeded our expectations on the impact AI can have on our business.

Russell Johnson, Chief Data Scientist, Marks & Spencer

AI requires a clear vision, a robust data foundation, and a responsible approach

The study also explored the top use cases for AI, both today and in the future. Today, 41% of organizations are using AI to automate IT tasks—the top use case among respondents. However, in 24 months, a new set of use cases rises to the top: Copywriting, running simulations, and automating business processes and workflows. But to get there, organizations need to build a strong foundation.

That starts with a clear vision for success. This is critical to becoming an AI leader, which means an organization has an enterprise-wide AI strategy aligned to business goals, with business models that continually create business value.

IDC found that AI leaders represent 23% of respondents worldwide, and those organizations are seeing some tangible benefits, including better reduction in business risk, improvement in customer satisfaction, and higher revenue growth. AI leaders also have rules, policies, and processes in place to ensure alignment with Responsible AI principles.

Along with a clear vision and a responsible approach, AI leadership requires a robust data foundation—one of the factors IDC found was a challenge for many organizations. One telecommunications company based in Asia said, “The biggest challenge was getting hands on the right data from trusted sources. The data ecosystem itself is one of our biggest challenges.”

AI is only as good as your data—so you need an approach to your data platform that sets you up for success.

AI skills are in high demand as companies chart their path forward

As with any technology breakthrough, organizations are looking for experts to help guide and shape their path forward. But the generational platform shift of AI has been incredibly fast—after all, it’s only been one year since ChatGPT burst onto the scene. So it’s no surprise that finding skilled talent who can help deploy and manage next-generation AI solutions is cited most often as a barrier to AI success.

Along with factors like cost, concerns about data or intellectual property (IP) loss, and a strong data foundation, 52% of leaders cited a lack of skilled workers as one of the top challenges their organizations are experiencing when implementing AI technology.

Helping demystify next-generation AI—whether you’re looking for the basics, starting your learning journey, or digging into advanced AI scenarios in a technical breakout session at Microsoft Ignite—is one way Microsoft is helping power this global AI transformation.

The business case for investing in AI today

Throughout Microsoft Ignite and nearly every day since, AI is grabbing headlines and driving the global conversation. But as Satya said in his opening keynote, “all of this innovation will only be useful if it’s empowering all of us in our careers, in our communities, in our countries.”

How we apply AI innovation to solve real business challenges and seize new opportunities is what will change the world—and organizations across industries and around the world are already getting started today.

Explore top use cases for AI across industries in “AI Use Cases for Business Leaders: Realize Value with AI,” and catch up on all the announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2023 by reading the announcement blogs.

SOURCE: IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Microsoft, The Business Opportunity of AI, IDC #US51364223, November 2023.  

The post Microsoft Ignite 2023: A front-row seat to the tangible impact of AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.