We’re thrilled to announce the public preview of the Product Change Management agent template—an AI-powered solution that transforms how manufacturers manage the process of change across equipment, products, processes, and more. Built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, the agent automates workflows and connects systems, helping teams cut approval times from weeks to days, reduce errors, and bring innovations to market, faster.

Learn how Copilot Studio can help build and customize agents that work for your operations.  

Reenergizing change management with AI

Engineering change management (ECM) is how manufacturers manage change without causing production chaos. Changes move through a complex, controlled path with requests reviewed, approved, and rolled out to multiple stakeholders and systems. Whether responding to market shifts, regulatory updates, or quality improvements, manufacturers initiate millions of change requests each year.

Today, ECM is slow. While highly collaborative, the process is easily bogged down by siloed information, manual steps, and disconnected processes. When it breaks down, costs from scrap, stoppages, and delayed product launches pile up.

The Product Change Management agent template addresses these pain points by infusing intelligence, automation, and orchestration into this otherwise manual process. The agent provides a managed solution that can be tailored to specific business needs—accelerating deployment while ensuring consistency and governance. Connecting people, data, and systems together with Microsoft AI, it simplifies execution—cutting approval times to days, improving uptime, and ensuring change traceability.

Powering AI change management end-to-end

The Product Change Management agent template is an AI-powered orchestrator, built in Copilot Studio. It autonomously manages engineering change processes through a series of specialized sub-agents, collaborating with your team to ensure every change is executed efficiently and accurately. Using Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams, the agent shifts manual tasks to focused reviews and refinement—delivering faster, safer changes with fewer errors and less review turmoil, while maintaining compliance and alignment. maintaining compliance and alignment.

Some key capabilities set it apart:

• Automated workflow orchestration. Accelerate approvals by coordinating the entire change process, from request to closure, autonomously. Embedded into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, the agent initiates impact analysis, routes approvals, and updates records—keeping stakeholders informed.
• System of record synchronization. Keep engineering and operations systems aligned. The agent ensures updates are consistently reflected across product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, eliminating rework and maintaining alignment from design through delivery.
• Collaborative stakeholder engagement. Simplify communication across engineering, quality, and operations with natural language interfaces and intelligent routing. This ensures that the right people are engaged at the right time, reducing bottlenecks and accelerating approvals.
• Data-driven impact analysis. Evaluate proposed changes across inventory, suppliers, and production. The agent surfaces real-time insights to guide decision-making and flag potential risks early—empowering teams to act.
• Built-in compliance and traceability. Document and audit changes at every step. The agent enforces governance policies, tracks decisions, and supports regulatory compliance without adding complexity.

In short, product change management lays the agentic foundation for manufacturing digital threads—enabling agility, transparency, and reliability for every stakeholder.

Transforming change management at Coca-Cola Beverages Africa

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the eighth largest authorized Coca-Cola bottler in the world by revenue, and the largest on the continent—operating in 14 countries. Serving more than 800,000 customers, CCBA accounts for 40% of all Coca-Cola ready-to-drink beverages sold in Africa through a host of international and local brands.

With thousands of stock keeping units (SKUs), multiple packaging formats, and a relentless focus on sustainability, CCBA runs one of the most complex beverage supply chains in Africa. Agility is critical especially when managing formulation and packaging changes that ripple across multiple production lines, inventory systems, and financial models.

Every year, CCBA makes more than 1,000 changes to its bottle molds alone, often driven by material availability or sustainability initiatives. Historically, these changes relied on manual workflows: engineers drafting requests, planners emailing spreadsheets, and multiple handoffs across departments. This process was slow, error-prone, and risky. A single misalignment could mean production downtime, inaccurate cost data, or compliance gaps. The Product Change Management agent template from Microsoft is transforming this process.

Acting as a digital orchestrator, the agent brings intelligence, speed, and reliability to the CCBA change lifecycle. Here’s how:

• Smart initiation. When a planner or engineer triggers a change, such as switching a supplier or updating a packaging component, the agent immediately identifies all affected products and plants. It auto-drafts the request, applies the standard template, and fills in known details like part numbers and descriptions—eliminating repetitive manual work.
• Automated routing. The agent ensures the request moves to the right reviewers in the correct sequence, removing guesswork and delays. Notifications flow through familiar tools like Teams and Outlook, alerting stakeholders when action is required.
• Instant system updates. Once approvals are complete, the agent updates Microsoft Dynamics 365 in real time, syncing bill-of-material data. It confirms changes immediately, rather than days of manual checks.

The Product Change Management agent is streamlining equipment management across CCBA’s capital assets and products, enabling faster identification of impact areas and responsible individuals, and improving operational efficiency

—Joshua Motsuenyane, Chief Information Officer, CCBA

While this strategic collaboration is still new, CCBA is already seeing results. Actions that once took days of back-and-forth now happen in hours or less. Product change management also represents a major milestone in its Frontier Firm journey—making change management a focus across one of Africa’s most dynamic manufacturing networks.

Creating the future of change management in manufacturing, together with partners

AI-powered change management is now imperative. As changes proliferate across more assets and systems, manufacturers need governed, AI-guided workflows to maintain speed and quality. Discrete manufacturers—building complex products from computers to cars—feel it the most: disconnected systems and manual handoffs slow adoption, raise error rates, and suppress productivity. PTC and Microsoft are changing that.

Together, we’re building an agentic architecture that bridges operations and engineering systems, enabling faster decisions with enterprise visibility. Enabled by technologies such as model context protocol (MCP), native PLM agents in Windchill and ERP agents in Dynamics 365 interoperate to surface problem reports, collate data from multiple systems, and drive automation in PLM workflows such as change impact analysis, where data governance rules are established, ensuring AI agents work in the right context and within the right controls.

Ready to simplify change and accelerate execution?

Product Change Management agent template

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In combining Microsoft for Manufacturing with expertise from partners, we can deliver better, more comprehensive industry solutions. As we expand this ecosystem, manufacturers will gain even broader interoperability, deeper insights, and more resiliency across their value chain.

Shaping the manufacturing Frontier

With the Product Change Management agent template, manufacturers gain a trusted technology partner in navigating every engineering change. Part of a broader vision to enable intelligent digital treads across manufacturing, product change management is about empowering teams to innovate with confidence, backed by data and AI automation.

Industrial AI can accelerate product design and engineering outcomes. Learn how with our latest Signals Report.

The post Accelerate innovation with AI: Introducing the Product Change Management agent template appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Connect your customers, your people, and your data.

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Microsoft agents—whether built on Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry—provide a conversational AI interface for accessing and managing both data and workflows in retail, enhancing employee productivity and customer experience. Retailers and partners can customize these agents to integrate with business applications, data sources, and workflows, re-imagining interactions between store associates and consumers. By running processes autonomously, they offer significant benefits: better consumer experiences, quicker ramp-up, higher productivity, and empowered frontline workers. These agents provide a comprehensive view of the business, helping retailers make informed decisions, increase customer conversion rates, and improve operational efficiency. 

At NRF this year, Microsoft and its partners are showcasing agents and solutions designed to help retailers unlock the full potential of their data. These include the latest advancements in AI and generative AI, enabling retailers to transform their operations and drive growth. Microsoft Cloud for Retail helps retailers deliver personalized customer experiences, optimize operations, and empower their workforce, demonstrating how Microsoft retail products are truly better together.  

Available agents and solutions include:  

• Personalized Shopping Agent, a conversational commerce experience to improve the shopping experience with a context-aware assistant to help consumers find the perfect products for their needs.
• Store Operations Agent, a conversational interface, puts safe, company-governed generative AI in the hands of store associates so they can spend less time searching for answers to store policies and procedures and more time helping customers. 
• Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, giving retailers the power to unify and enrich a wide range of retail data sources, enabling real-time, actionable insights.

Microsoft retail products are designed to work seamlessly together, creating a unified ecosystem that enhances every aspect of retail operations. Read Shelley Bransten’s blog to see how customers are experiencing the benefits of these solutions and staying ahead in the competitive retail landscape.

Enhancing in-store and online consumer experiences with Personalized Shopping Agent  

The Personalized Shopping Agent enables retailers to offer consumers an enhanced shopping experience. Using conversational design and seamless integration with retail ecosystems powered by generative AI, it provides a truly personalized and efficient shopping experience.  

When used online, in a retailer’s website, or consumer app, the agent allows consumers to shop through an AI-powered, chat-based product discovery experience. The conversational interface allows consumers to describe their product search in term of requirements instead of product specifications—for example, ‘I am a family of five and typically run the washing machine twice a week‘. Through clarifying questions generated by generative AI, the agent will classify the consumer’s intent such as brand inquiry, gifting, advanced product search, or product recommendations, and specify the item search more precisely. This experience can be customized to reflect the merchant’s tone of voice, responsible AI practices, or other company specific guidance. Finally, the agent uses AI semantic search to match items with the consumer’s requirements.

The Personalized Shopping Agent can provide great assistance to in-store employees as well. Combining the agent with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, in-store employees can provide differentiated levels of personalized experience to customers, driving customer satisfaction and brand affinity. The Personalized Shopping Agent engages seamlessly to search for appropriate product options without breaking the employee’s flow of conversation with the customer, providing several relevant prompts to narrow down product suggestions, and offers up selling opportunities. 

Microsoft partner Avanade has built voice recognition control over the Personalized Shopping Agent, providing store associates with a seamless interactive experience where they can seek product recommendations, suggestions, and discover products using voice-based natural language conversation while assisting customers. By using the power of AI, retailers can reimagine the consumer journey and how they discover products and content online. The agent scales the in-store experience too, by transforming the consumers search and providing recommendations combined with brand storytelling, ultimately leading to higher brand loyalty and increased sales. 

Empowering frontline workers with Store Operations Agent  

The Store Operations Agent is designed to enhance the productivity of retail frontline workers and in-store customer experience. A single, conversational interface helps the store associate to execute a variety of tasks and provide service to customers without having to flip between dozens of apps. In the conversational interface, the store associate is able to quickly find store procedures and protocols in documents, create and update incidents, create tasks, and make product, order, and inventory inquiries.

One standout capability of the Store Operations Agent is its ability to integrate with retail data sources and business applications, including Dynamics 365, to access order and inventory information and ServiceNow service requests. Microsoft Copilot Studio provides more than 1,000 connectors as part of the platform. The agent also empowers the store associate to get answers to their questions from the retailer’s knowledge base, search across select internet portals, and connect to other plugins.

The Store Operations Agent is a headless service and can integrate with existing in-store apps. One of the channels that Microsoft Copilot Studio provides is Microsoft Teams. This provides a natural language user interface that allows store associates to access information and perform tasks without toggling between multiple applications.

Microsoft partners Accenture Avanade have developed the Clienteling Copilot Accelerator, which uses the Store Operations Agent to enhance the efficiency of retail frontline workers. This AI-augmented solution helps high-end retailers and brands allow seamless data visibility across the value chain and simplify workflows for in-store teams. By integrating with the Store Operations Agent, the Clienteling Copilot Accelerator provides store associates and client advisors with real-time access to product information, order details, and customer interactions, and seamlessly manage store tasks. 

We’re excited about our Personalized Shopping and Clienteling Copilot Accelerators because they help retailers use context to help meet customers where they are. These solutions foster more relevant interactions through personalized shopping experiences and empowered store associates. By converting vast amounts of data to create seamless customer experiences, we see improved conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and higher transaction values. Our partnership with Microsoft and their AI retail technologies enables us to deliver this value to retailers quickly and effectively.”

Ruth Harrison, Global Retail and Consumer Goods Managing Director, Avanade

Increase efficiencies with Retail data solutions in Fabric 

Retailers understand the importance of using their data to optimize inventory, segment customers, forecast sales, implement dynamic pricing, retain customers, and detect fraud. However, they often face significant challenges, such as managing vast volumes of data, dealing with siloed applications, achieving real-time responsiveness, and making decisions without data, which can lead to lower customer satisfaction, poor business management, and higher costs. 

Retail data solutions in Fabric, now generally available, helps retailers to unify, enrich, and model data for faster insights. By applying the power and flexibility of Fabric, retailers can address their unique challenges and seize new opportunities. Retail data solutions come with retail data model, a variety of connectors (e.g. Sitecore OrderCloud), AI models (e.g. frequently bought together), application templates (Personalized Shopping Agent), and business intelligence capabilities (e.g. sales cockpit) that are easy to configure and use. With Retail data solutions, retailers can improve their bottom line by driving operational efficiencies, standardizing and harmonizing their data estate, and storing their data in an industry data model template.  

Fabric Real-Time Intelligence allows retailers to analyze streaming data for instant insights and actions. This capability is crucial for retailers who need to respond quickly to customer needs and market changes. With Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, retailers can dynamically transform streaming data and query it in real-time to gain immediate insights. For example, they can monitor inventory levels, track customer behavior, and adjust pricing strategies on the fly. This real-time data processing helps retailers make informed decisions quickly, improving operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Sitecore, a Microsoft partner, created the Sitecore OrderCloud connector, which integrates with Fabric to align data with the Microsoft Retail industry data model. This connector consolidates retail data into a unified hub, enabling Microsoft Power BI reports on sales, products, and customer data, providing actionable insights for informed decision-making. 

By harnessing the power of data, Retail data solutions in Fabric empowers retailers to make strategic decisions, improve operational efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer value in a dynamic and competitive environment. 

Join us and our partners at our NRF booth

Microsoft partners play a crucial role in this AI-powered evolution. Working closely with Microsoft, industry leaders such as XTEL are unlocking new levels of productivity and innovation. These partnerships bring together AI and cloud technologies, enabling retailers to create seamless, data-driven experiences for their customers.  

XTEL, a global leader in commercial enterprise systems, has launched MAX AI, an innovative AI-powered platform designed to transform productivity and the design of commercial strategies. MAX AI introduces a custom copilot that extends M365 Copilot, seamlessly integrating with Azure OpenAI and Fabric, and is accessible through Microsoft Teams.  

“MAX AI is setting a new standard for productivity, empowerment, and effectiveness. The synergy of XTEL’s artificial intelligence and data science with Microsoft Azure AI is like equipping each employee with a dedicated team of expert analysts responding instantly.”

Cédric Guyot, Chief Strategy Officer, XTEL 

Join us at the Microsoft booth (#4503) at NRF to experience this transformative AI-native, agentic enterprise planning solution firsthand and see what it can do for your business.  We look forward to seeing you at the event.   

Learn more about agents

• Learn more about Personalized Shopping agent.
• Learn more about Store Operations agent.
• Get started with Fabric.
• Learn more about Retail data solutions.
• Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce.

The post AI-powered retail: Elevating customer experience and operational efficiency  appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Beyond the illnesses they cause, food safety incidents have significant negative effects on economies, farmers, the environment in the form of food waste, and governments. Returning to the example of the United States for a moment, the federal government each year budgets over $7 billion of its tax revenue to foodborne illness response programs.³ This is a reactive system, and to reduce the human, financial, and environmental effects of food safety incidents, we need to become more proactive.  

The good news is that we have the tools at our fingertips to create much more predictable food systems. Removing the farming sector’s dependencies on paper record-keeping is a simple first step, as it increases the visibility and reliability of reports. With this groundwork, farmers can start digitizing the food system and using generative AI to analyze large datasets, identify trends, and present insights in easily digestible language and visualizations through tools like Copilot in Excel and Copilot in Power BI.  

Farmers and food suppliers can detect important issues easily with generative AI solutions, like a disruption in the cold chain between the farm and the grocer, which can lead to spoilage. Generative AI can also be used to check for compliance issues and security breaches. It can suggest process improvements, track demand, and trigger alerts that automate real-time responses—all with the goal of responding to food safety incidents before they transform into public health incidents. 

Paving the way for the advancement of AI 

Microsoft Copilot and industry-specific AI agents built by partners with specific expertise in the food production industry represent a potential leap forward in preventative food safety, but they aren’t the only benefit digitalization represents. Other solutions, themselves part of the roadmap toward generative AI adoption, are already enabling meaningful change for food producers. Recent advancements in both Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and the AI technology behind them have enabled technology to mimic the human senses of sight, hearing, and smell to improve traditional food sorting, grading, and inspection processes. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture helps collect data on farms, aiding in the identification of conditions likely to introduce bacteria to crops. 

For example, a food processing company can digitize its quality control process with the help of Microsoft Power Apps, Power BI, and Dataverse. Together, these technologies help the company better capture real-time data, generate more insightful reports and improve overall operational efficiency.

As companies build out capabilities like these, they gain the type of financial benefits and actionable insights and can simultaneously establish a deeper pool of information for future generative AI solutions to draw from. Microsoft Fabric also plays a crucial role in building an AI-ready data estate. By integrating data sources like IoT sensors, temperature monitors, and historical data, Fabric helps companies establish more comprehensive data platforms. With the advanced predictive analytics these platforms can generate, food suppliers can reduce product recalls, prevent the spread of counterfeit goods, minimize food waste, and increase consumer trust.  

Bringing better farming data into the mix 

By consolidating its data, increasing the number of advanced sensors it employs, and tracking broader types of data, the food production industry is making way for even greater advancement. Copilot and customized agents can rapidly analyze every stage of the food supply chain, from farm to table. Today’s visual recognition technology often identifies contaminants in food products faster and in smaller concentrations than its human counterparts. Generative AI models can use this data to aid in the detection of foreign objects and pathogens in either raw ingredients or finished food products. Analysis of historical and real-time data from temperature sensors in food production and warehousing facilities can help alert producers to conditions that contribute to excess food spoilage. When an agent recognizes farming or food processing irregularities, it can generate predictions based on historical data, check for compliance issues, and suggest operational improvements. By bringing together farm-specific data like local weather conditions, soil makeup, and pest populations, agents could help predict and mitigate seasonal risks to crops.

Looking ahead 

The future of food safety will rely on the continued integration of technology and data into the world’s food production and distribution processes. Customized agents powered by AI can perform tasks and provide decision support to improve food safety. These agents can be built to analyze vast amounts of data from spreadsheets, handwritten documents, voice memos, and videos, uncovering previously undetected errors and missing information.  

Companies in the farming sector can leverage Microsoft Copilot Studio to develop their own intelligent agents that assist with their most critical and risk-prone agricultural processes. Using the low-code interface of Copilot Studio, businesses can quickly create and deploy custom applications without extensive coding knowledge, enabling them to automate tasks such as crop monitoring, pest detection, and resource management. Companies can also choose to collaborate with Microsoft partners with industry-specific expertise, ensuring their solutions are tailored to their specific needs and comply with industry regulations. This partnership approach not only accelerates innovation but also ensures the deployment of robust and effective AI-powered solutions. 

By maximizing the potential of generative AI in food safety, we can predict and prevent many of the sector’s most prevalent issues, improve food quality, and prevent many food safety incidents. There are tremendous opportunities ahead, and collaboration between food producers, the regulatory bodies that oversee them, and technology companies are key to the success of these initiatives. By working together, we can create a safer and more sustainable food system for everyone. 

¹ Food Logistics, Food Recalls in 2024 are Surging. What’s the Crisis Response?, September 2024.

² World Health Organization, Foodborne Diseases Estimates.

³ U.S. Food & Drug, FDA Seeks $7.2 Billion to Protect and Advance Public Health by Enhancing Food Safety and Advancing Medical Product Availability, March 2023.

The post The growing need for AI in food safety appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

In India, one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, the sector sustains over 43% of India’s workforce.¹ However, many Indian farmers face challenges due to limited access to crucial information and agronomic expertise. This gap can hamper their ability to access time-sensitive information, like changes in monsoon patterns, making it even more challenging to adapt to the rapidly growing demand for agricultural products. As India’s agricultural landscape evolves, leveraging generative AI not only supports the shift away from harmful pesticides and fertilizers, but it also helps farmers boost efficiency. 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

Create a more sustainable future by innovating with agriculture data

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Copilots: Working toward sustainable change 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is a powerful tool designed to enhance agricultural practices by leveraging high-quality datasets and AI capabilities. This platform connects farm data from various sources, enabling organizations to develop innovative solutions that provide valuable insights into farming operations. With Microsoft copilot templates, organizations easily create custom copilots to seamlessly retrieve and analyze data in natural language—making it easier to gain actionable insights. Microsoft supports its customers and partners by offering comprehensive tools and resources, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation across the agricultural value chain. Microsoft is working closely with customers like ITC, a versatile Indian multi-business company, to optimize agricultural decision-making and promote sustainable farming practices. 

ITC is deeply committed to sustainability and the welfare of small holder farmers, and they have developed Krishi Mitra, aptly named “farming friend.” This agricultural super app, created using Microsoft’s copilot template, enables farmers to ask questions in their own language and uses generative AI plugins to provide answers on weather and agronomy. By incorporating natural language chat functionality powered by generative AI, Krishi Mitra offers tailored guidance on crop management, pest control, soil health, water conservation, and more. Additionally, Microsoft language localization tools enable the app to cater to a diverse linguistic audience, ensuring that farmers across various regions can access crucial farming information in their preferred language. 

Microsoft is working closely with partners like ITC to extend Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Supporting farmers by providing AI-powered tools, Microsoft and its partners are working together to provide optimized agricultural decision-making. ITC plans to bring generative AI to over 100,000 farmers in India by end of 2024, with an anticipated user base of around 10 million by 2030. Plans include integrating the copilot with Azure Data Manager for Agriculture in subsequent phases, allowing for access to a wide range of additional data sources.

A streamlined development process using plugins 

The development process of Krishi Mitra was streamlined using orchestrated plugins, which access specific functionalities—such as weather data and farming advice. This method ensures a flexible and efficient user interface from ITC, eliminating the need for substantial modifications to the core system architecture. Moreover, the application of contextual indexing and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques has significantly refined the quality of the app’s responses. 

Krishi Mitra’s queries are meticulously processed by a Semantic Kernel-based orchestrator, which then gets responses from Microsoft plugins. This feature empowers farmers to pose questions on weather forecasts and get agronomic advice for crops while the app identifies and utilizes the most suitable plugin to retrieve the optimal answer for each inquiry. This seamless integration and user-friendly interface are what set Krishi Mitra apart, making it an essential tool for farmers aiming to enhance their agricultural efficiency and outcomes. 

Boost productivity and profitability with AI 

In addition to conventional farming challenges such as soil fertility and climate, many farmers contend with limited access to agricultural technology and relevant information that can support their work. Krishi Mitra delivers a comprehensive array of benefits to farmers by equipping them with the necessary tools and information to refine their agricultural practices and market strategies. The app’s core objective is to provide instantaneous access to critical information, boosting the productivity and profitability of smallholder farmers while promoting sustainability and climate resilience.  

In 2021, approximately 61,000 metric tons of pesticides were used in India for agricultural purposes.² Some pests that were once minor have become major threats thanks to rising temperatures that alter insect-crop interactions. With access to Microsoft AI tools, Krishi Mitra can continuously learn and adapt from new agricultural data and user interactions. This feature allows the app to improve its recommendations and stay updated with the latest farming techniques and information, helping farmers stay ahead of pest issues and use fewer pesticides when they catch problems early. 

Personalized data enhances farming opportunities  

Maximizing profits for small farmers hinges on determining the optimal harvest time to ensure crops are of the highest quality and yield, while also capitalizing on the best market prices. Krishi Mitra empowers farmers with immediate access to essential information like precise weather forecasts, enabling farmers to align their farming operations with upcoming weather conditions. Additionally, it provides comprehensive market insights, including detailed data on market locations, pricing, and other critical factors. Data like this helps farmers make strategic decisions regarding irrigation, the timing of their harvests, and choosing the most profitable buyers located nearest to their farms.  

The diversity of languages in India has traditionally posed challenges to widespread technological adoption among farmers. Krishi Mitra addresses this barrier with its capability to process natural language queries and offer translations in local languages. This functionality allows farmers to use their smartphones not just for communication but as a tool for receiving actionable farm management advice in a language they understand. The app’s personalized advisories are tailored to meet the specific needs of each farmer, ensuring that the guidance they receive is not only relevant but comprehensible. This personalized support is instrumental in improving agricultural yields and subsequently increasing the income of the farmers, truly making Krishi Mitra a transformational tool in the hands of the Indian agricultural community. 

Discover agriculture solutions 

• Learn more about Azure Data Manager for Agriculture features.
• Explore Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions for agriculture.
• Learn about Headstorm’s AgPilot tool.

¹ World Bank Group, Employment in agriculture (% of total employment)(modeled ILO estimate)—India, February 2024.

² Statista, Volume of pesticides used for agriculture in India from 2011 to 2021, March 2024.

The post AI in the fields: Copilot powers smarter farming appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

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Driving change with copilots 

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

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

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

Enhance communication using AI-generated insights 

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

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

Facilitate sustainable practices with real-time data 

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

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

Deployment is simple 

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

Create a more sustainable future by innovating with agriculture data

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Powering agriculture with new copilot templates and generative AI

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

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

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

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

ITC empowering farmers with fast, hyper-localized answers

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

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

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

Bayer extends deep agriculture expertise through multiple innovations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headstorm agriculture AI solution poised to boost productivity

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

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

It was great to see industry infused throughout several sessions and news at Microsoft Inspire 2023. Our partner strategy continues to reflect the investments we’re making in our global partner ecosystem. These investments are detailed in our upcoming 2023 wave 2 release plans. 

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 2 plan

Learn about the latest updates for customers.

Read the latest updates

Optimizing for partners 

We continue to invest, build, and expand industry-specific capabilities that accelerate time-to-value for our customers and partners, including lifecycle commitments every wave. In a recent blog, Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Global Industry Marketing discussed in detail, our partner strategy, which aligns to three growth pillars: 

• Accelerate your innovation and reduce time to market.

• Quickly scale your go-to-market by helping partners drive. 

• Win new customers with industry solutions.

We believe the industry cloud solutions will provide customers with simplicity and predictability when engaging with Microsoft. Watch on-demand sessions at Microsoft Inspire 2023 to learn more about our industry-specific investments. 

The latest capabilities  

The release notes cover new features for Microsoft Cloud for Industry releasing from October 2023 through March 2024. The latest plans for Microsoft Cloud for Industry bring new innovations that provide organizations with significant capabilities to transform business. The release contains several new features across Microsoft Cloud for Industry applications, including Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 

Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted and integrated capabilities that make it easier for healthcare organizations to create personalized patient experiences, give health teams connected collaboration tools, and adopt data standards important to healthcare. Together with Nuance, users can access the broadest and deepest set of trusted AI solutions to address some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Organizations can use AI to provide full visibility into data, relieve provider administrative burden, boost clinician productivity, increase workflow automation to improve the quality of care, reduce clinician burnout, and deliver better care faster at a lower cost. 

Key investment areas for wave 2 include: 

Personalized access and outreach  

• Releasing patient journey capabilities in Patient outreach. 

Care management 

• Enabling better support for payor and insurance companies. 

Virtual health  

• Launching virtual consultations both directly from electronic health records (EHRs) and from Teladoc Solo in Microsoft Teams, enabling health systems to maximize their EHR investments while also providing access to virtual care workflows for members of the care team who may not have routine access to the EHR. 

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. 

Retail 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is a comprehensive solution developed to support retailers in using their data, enhancing customer shopping experiences, and empowering store associates to work more efficiently and knowledgeably. In the 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft Cloud for Retail will include investments in retail workforce management, address customer feedback, and improve the Store Operations Assist and Smart Store Analytics features. We will also utilize AI, machine learning, and generative AI models to provide valuable insights into customer engagement, advertising, inventory management, and supply chain management. These insights can seamlessly integrate into relevant applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and other Microsoft solutions, enabling retailers to take actionable steps based on the intelligence gained. 

Read the details on retail workforce management planned for this release wave in the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Retail. 

Sustainability 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We are investing in multiple areas to help your sustainability initiatives and reporting. We’re incorporating new features to enable and simplify the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requirements, including adding a CSRD template into Purview Compliance Manager (in preview). We’re expanding on our improved data ingestion experience, including enhancements to data approval management and more third-party connectors. Our new Project ESG Lake will help you aggregate your ESG data in one place and provide rich analysis and insights. We’re also adding features for recording and reporting on water usage and calculating waste intensity. Environmental Credit Service, which was released in preview in November 2022, continues to expand capabilities that are being validated by customers and partners. Finally, we’re bringing our AI capabilities to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to provide what-if analysis scenarios and other important insights. 

During this wave, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will invest in: 

• Value chain visibility

• Data integration and calculations

• System expansion and enhancement

• Reporting, disclosure, and automated insights

In the 2023 release wave 2, we are also adding more reporting capabilities for the European Union’s CSRD and AI capabilities to provide what-if analyses and other insights. 

Learn more about the new and planned features for Microsoft Industry Clouds, 2023 release wave 2 and watch our sustainability session on demand.

Watch Microsoft Inspire 2023 on demand 

• Microsoft Inspire Keynote 
• Winning customers with industry specific solutions and AI 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty – accelerate government transformation 

The post Empowering your business: The latest from Microsoft Cloud for Industry appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.