Take environmental sustainability, for example. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Pollution and climate change affect all of us and threaten to have a lasting impact on future generations. People care deeply about protecting our planet, but many do not know what actions they can take to make a difference.

I found an empowering example of using AI and data to support sustainability in a recent episode of the Pivotal podcast. This episode features Loic van Cutsem, Director of international partnerships and development at BeeOdiversity.

This Belgium-based tech company is harnessing a 12 million-strong workforce to monitor biodiversity—the health of an ecosystem.

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BeeOdiversity uses AI to interpret data on biological health

BeeOdiversity saw an opportunity to use bees as data collectors at scale. As bees search for nectar in flowers and other plants, they collect valuable information from gardens, fields, and other features in the land and air as they browse. By analyzing the pollen and other microscopic materials that the bees bring back to the hive, BeeOdiversity can get a living snapshot of the biological health of any designated area. This data can reveal factors that harm the environment and where they are located, such as invasive species, heavy metals, and pesticides.

BeeOdiversity leverages AI to interpret this data from bees and offer insights to their clients. Their recommendations do more than help companies comply with regulatory requirements. By having this information, communities and businesses can work together to improve the ecosystem that surrounds them, from increasing water quality to protecting soil health, preventing flooding, and mitigating climate change impacts. They have a better understanding of what actions to take to operate more sustainably, and an army of tiny data collectors who can continue to measure their progress.

That’s what I love about this use case—it’s AI-powered innovation that’s incredibly impactful and scalable to communities around the world. And what’s inspiring about BeeOdiversity’s story is that it holds lessons for other organizations that want to use data and AI to solve complex business problems.

Having good data is essential for driving change

Getting clean and accurate data is essential for any organization to drive change. Data provides a common basis to identify issues and discover solutions. This is especially important if you’re using AI to address a societal issue such as sustainability, which requires collaboration across multiple sectors. When there are so many stakeholders at the table, the recommendations from AI need to be powered by data that everyone can trust and accept.

Today there is no standardized data source in the field of biodiversity monitoring. But BeeOdiversity is unique in how they have recruited bees to collect data through their everyday pollinating behavior. By using bees, they are essentially standardizing the data collection, while giving nature a chance to give us feedback. For this reason, BeeOdiversity has not faced much skepticism from clients. You can’t argue with the bees.

The stakeholders are almost in awe of all this information gathered by the bees, and they’re responsive to the findings. They understand that this is what the bees are telling us. It’s the truth.

Loic van Cutsem, Director of international partnerships and development, BeeOdiversity

Democratizing access to data leads to impact at scale

Quality data is a crucial ingredient for success with AI. But at the end of the day, data is only a tool. It’s what you do with the data that matters the most. Data’s real value comes from how it empowers people to make smarter decisions, and you can maximize that impact by expanding the number of people who have access to that data.

BeeOdiversity has been building their proprietary data set for the last decade. Now, they are working to empower as many people as possible to make better sustainability decisions with that data, including businesses, governments, and soon, individuals.

They have customers from a wide range of industries, from agrifood producers to financial institutions, that are all keen on better managing their natural resources to build more resilient businesses. Governments are also working with BeeOdiversity to improve the environment for the communities they serve. For example, Knokke-Heist, a coastal city in Belgium, was able to achieve a 300% drop in pesticide levels and a four-times increase in plant diversity.  

And for maximum impact at scale, BeeOdiversity is developing a mobile app that will allow people to scan the plants in their garden and get tailored recommendations on how to improve their local ecosystem.

By democratizing access to their invaluable data, BeeOdiversity is enabling better sustainability decisions across society. This shows the power of having standardized data that everyone can rally behind.

Accelerate innovation by unlocking new insights

One of the benefits of AI is how quickly it can accelerate innovation for those who embrace it. Just point the AI to new sets of data, and it unlocks more levels of analysis and insight, allowing businesses to easily expand their coverage area or improve their processes.

BeeOdiversity is a great example. They developed a solution called BeeOimpact that incorporates satellite imagery to assess the crops and industries in a given area. It draws from this satellite data, along with data from their existing dataset that was collected by bees, and uses a predictive AI model to provide almost instantaneous estimates of the pesticides that are likely to be there.

BeeOdiversity is also developing a method to allow beekeepers to take photos of pollen, instead of manually collecting the pollen to send in for lab analysis. Their aim is to use computer vision and machine learning to identify the pollen in the photo. This new method would require less human effort and speed up their process of analyzing pollen samples.

As they develop these new capabilities, BeeOdiversity uses Microsoft Azure’s data and AI capabilities to enable their AI use cases, and GitHub as their platform for developers. With these tools, BeeOdiversity can achieve an extraordinary pace of innovation and make a sizable impact for sustainability.

Listen to the full conversation on Pivotal

By standardizing biodiversity data, empowering people to take action, and unlocking new innovation at a fast pace, BeeOdiversity is tackling sustainability head-on with the help of technology.

It’s brilliant how Loic and his team have found a way to leverage the diligence of bees with the analytical power of AI to unlock the kind of insights that many of us have dreamed about for decades. They’re giving a voice to mother nature and giving us humans a chance to take action so that we can live in greater harmony with the planet.

To hear more about BeeOdiversity and their ingenious use of AI, listen to the episode on the Pivotal podcast.

The post How BeeOdiversity leverages 12 million bees and AI to create a more sustainable future appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

I spoke with Shamim Mohammad, Chief Information and Technology Officer at CarMax, on the Pivotal podcast about his company’s approach to data and AI.

CarMax has applied AI to improve the experience for both customers and employees. For instance, it is using machine learning to provide the best images, reviews, and details for each car. It has built patented technologies to optimize that process, including a recommendation engine that can understand what the customer is trying to do and offer targeted car content.  

When customers look at a car, AI also helps aggregate information about the car from multiple data sets and turns it into easily digestible summaries for the shopper. ChatGPT working in the background to draft these summaries frees time for CarMax’s employees to work on higher-value projects. 

CarMax was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, and its success in scaling AI has a lot to do with how it organized itself to drive innovation across the company. Here are some highlights from my conversation with Shamim.

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Setting up cross-functional innovation teams

CarMax has set itself up like a digital startup, creating dozens of small, cross-functional innovation teams. Each team is focused on tackling a defined set of business challenges, and resourced with engineering, marketing, and operations talent. They are encouraged to move fast to build and test their solutions. 

Every few weeks, these teams present their progress and results at a product showcase. CarMax senior leaders watch these presentations, provide feedback, and decide which projects to scale. When a good idea is proved effective, teams are empowered to move their solutions to production with minimal bureaucracy. This allows them to quickly iterate and scale. 

When our teams have a good idea, they can optimize and scale it on their own, and then they present their progress on a biweekly basis, and we make a joint determination how and if to proceed further as a team. That’s how the teams work today at CarMax, which is amazing. I feel like I have this massively large company, but it’s still working like a startup.

Shamim Mohammad, Chief Information and Technology Officer, CarMax 

This cross-functional team structure would not have been possible without close leadership alignment. When Shamim first became Chief Information Officer, he partnered closely with the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer to organize these teams so that they could become digital-first. That collaboration has thrived to this day. 

Implementing strong AI governance 

CarMax has created a strong model for AI governance to support its innovation. It set up an AI Center of Excellence that includes top technical leaders, as well as leaders from legal, operations, finance, and marketing. 

This center’s chief role is to ensure that any innovation with AI remains consistent with the company’s core values of transparency and integrity. It focuses on educating CarMax teams about the power and risks of AI, provides guidelines on how to use AI responsibly, and offers tools to help teams evaluate their ideas and projects.  

The work of the AI Center of Excellence has created a culture of responsible innovation within CarMax, allowing teams to feel safe to experiment with AI.  

It starts with creating a culture that empowers employees to experiment and learn. And that’s supported by a strong data foundation. Because if a company is not good with data, they cannot be good with AI.

Shamim Mohammad, Chief Information and Technology Officer, CarMax

Building a foundational data estate for AI 

CarMax knew that the transformation it sought depended heavily on getting its data estate in order. Starting five years ago, the company invested to build a clean and organized data estate in the cloud. That has allowed it to combine the power of AI with its massive trove of car and customer data. 

It started by moving its data to Microsoft Azure. It worked to make that data scalable, updated, and constantly refreshed. It also applied strong data governance policies to ensure security and privacy. 

Today, that data is available for its teams to use. Its early data estate investment has positioned it to drive AI innovation at an incredible pace.  

Our teams have been leveraging our data and AI to create great customer experiences, drive competitive differentiation, and also make the lives of our associates better. 

Shamim Mohammad, Chief Information and Technology Officer, CarMax

Learn more about AI innovation on the Pivotal podcast 

CarMax is an exciting example of what an organization can accomplish if it makes some foundational changes to prime itself for AI innovation.  

By clearly defining achievable goals, providing teams with the environment to experiment and scale, and putting strong AI and data governance in place, it was able to unleash a wave of AI innovation that completely transformed its business. CarMax’s journey offers important lessons for organizations wanting to succeed with AI. 

If you want to hear more about CarMax’s approach, tune into the episode on the Pivotal podcast.

The post How CarMax organized and scaled innovation with Microsoft AI solutions appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Over the past year, I’ve spoken with many customers around the world about how their use of AI has evolved. They have gone from playing with consumer-facing solutions such as Bing Chat and ChatGPT, to deploying AI use cases that could reinvent their industries.

Examining how people approach the use of disruptive innovations is a passion of mine and the reason why I launched the Pivotal podcast earlier this year. Pivotal focuses on the inflection point where people learn what a technology is capable of and start using it to achieve a purpose, making an impactful change for their organizations or communities. That inflection point is fascinating, because it is through learning, building, experimenting, and deploying that we can draw important lessons on what works and what doesn’t.

In season one, we looked at how trailblazing innovators are leveraging technology solutions in all sorts of ways, from driving action on sustainability and scaling the teaching of digital literacy in developing countries, to accelerating conservation research and improving the experience for frontline workers.

I’m excited to launch a second season of the podcast, featuring 12 stories of innovators who are using AI and other cutting-edge technologies to solve problems for those they serve.

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On the forefront of the unfolding AI transformation

Since Microsoft began integrating generative AI within our solutions such as Bing, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform this year, people everywhere have been developing a new way of working alongside machines.

But we have always believed that our customers are the ultimate experts of their domain. By sharing our learnings, our AI capabilities, and our technology stack with them, we know our customers will leverage this technology in unexpected places and find surprising new ways to drive impact.

In season two, we talk to these innovators about what sparked their AI initiatives, what problems they are trying to solve, and how they have empowered their teams to experiment with AI while doing so in a responsible way.

Nota harnesses AI to revitalize local journalism

Season two opens by exploring how Nota, a tech startup, is using AI to help small newsrooms across the United States survive in the digital age.

Over the last two decades, large portions of the United States have become “news deserts” as small newspapers struggle to compete against media conglomerates and lose advertising revenue to digital platforms. The Brookings Institution has estimated that as many as 65 million people in the United States currently live in a county with only one local newspaper or none at all.¹

According to Josh Brandau, Nota’s CEO, when a region loses its local newspaper, that vacuum reduces the quality of civic engagement within the communities of that region. Without a solid understanding of current events, citizens become more susceptible to misinformation.

Josh describes how a lack of resources within small newsrooms means that journalists must take on a variety of roles outside of reporting, including web-optimizing their content and producing multimedia stories.

Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Nota has built AI-assisted tools that help ease the burden on journalists. Their tools help newsrooms generate SEO-optimized content from news articles and can even create video summaries of those articles that yield greater engagement on social media platforms. These tools empower small newsrooms to drive traffic and produce more digital advertising revenue. They also free up local journalists to focus on the craft of reporting the news.

Josh’s passion for journalism began as a kid growing up around newsrooms, and he had a long career in the news industry before founding Nota. He shares how that experience has fueled Nota’s mission to help save small news outlets in underserved areas, and why this is such an important goal to support the fabric of local communities.

We’re really endeavoring to provide tools where journalists can get back to what they are effectively the best at, which is finding, uncovering, telling us about the communities that we live in and connecting us to those around us.

Josh Brandau, CEO, Nota

Join us to explore all the possibilities with technology

Season two features guests who are using AI and other cutting-edge technologies across different industries and use cases, from sports and education to retail, agriculture, and customer service.

Their stories remind us that people lie at the heart of any effort to drive change with technology. That is why the focus of the podcast is on the human side of tech implementation. We take the time to explore how these innovators prioritized their use cases, secured buy-in from stakeholders, and fostered the right culture to support the change they seek.

We hope you’ll join us by listening to season two of Pivotal, and get inspired by the possibilities that technology can enable for you.

New episodes of Pivotal will be released every other Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

¹Brookings Institution.

The post A deep dive into AI innovation: Pivotal season two appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

I’m reminded of this pivot table revelation as I look to the new generation of AI and see a similar game-changing moment on the horizon for us all. Today, many of us are weighed down at work by the constant inflow of emails, notifications, and meetings. It’s just too much to keep up with, so we always feel like we need to catch up. This is the digital debt we all carry.

People are eager for AI to help them cut through this drudgery. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey, 70 percent of employees say they would want to delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads. It’s no mystery why. Who would say no to having a superpowered digital personal assistant?

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Lifting the burden of work

AI can help free us from this digital debt by becoming our copilots and taking care of the busywork. Imagine coming back from a long vacation to face an overflowing inbox, a list of missed meetings and announcements, and an outdated to-do list. Now imagine asking your Microsoft Copilot to highlight only your most important emails, show you the moments when your name came up in those missed meetings, and provide a list of personalized, up-to-date action items. What if you could catch up in a single day instead of an entire week?

AI opens up so many possibilities. It has already begun to help workers in many different ways. For instance, CarMax has sped up the creation of text summaries for its car research pages by using AI. With Azure OpenAI Service, CarMax created 5,000 of these summaries in just a few months. This allowed CarMax’s marketing team to shift their energies to projects with greater impact and value, such as developing original campaigns and writing creative, longer-form content.

Global construction company Strabag SE partnered with Microsoft to build an AI solution that assesses risk for their construction projects. They live in an industry with razor-thin margins, so picking the right projects makes a big difference for their business. Strabag SE’s solution analyzes potential projects, compares them with past project data, and provides project managers with a risk assessment that helps them make decisions quickly. Instead of burning time to do risk assessments, project managers can now focus on making projects successful.

Finally, consider Nota, the software as a service (SaaS) startup harnessing Azure OpenAI to help reverse the closure of local newspapers in the United States. Nota offers AI-assisted tools that add value to articles already written by journalists by generating SEO-optimized content and video summaries of their articles. These tools do much of the heavy lifting needed to drive traffic and produce revenue in the digital world, empowering local journalists to focus on their craft.

In the coming months, we will showcase more customers and how they are using AI in transformative ways as part the Pivotal podcast.

Reclaiming our time

These examples show how AI can augment all types of workers and give them a chance to reclaim their most precious resource: time.

Instead of filling this extra time with expectations of even more work, I see this as time we can give back to individuals. We know workers today are already feeling exhausted under the weight of their digital debt and looking for purpose in their jobs, especially post-COVID-19. AI will free up time for more creativity and innovation. This will reinvigorate our relationship with work and give people a chance to feel more engaged and inspired.

Others might choose to spend this extra time to acquire new skills, or to just relax and focus on their family or hobbies. Put that time toward whatever makes you happier and more fulfilled. This is one of AI’s impacts on the workforce that I’m most excited about. AI will be a key for unlocking well-being and helping people thrive in their professional and personal lives.

AI gives us the gift of time and allows us to find higher-quality ways to use that time. Imagine the possibilities this creates as we all search for happiness and success in our lives. As Arianna Huffington reminds us, “We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.”

The post How to lift the burden of work and reclaim time with AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.