My first concert with my son was a Coldplay show in Vancouver a couple of years ago. I was completely captivated by the show, the music, the immersive experience, and the focus on sustainability—but mostly by watching my youngest experience a concert for the first time. It was truly magical. The band has always been at the forefront of innovation and generating magic with their fans. 

To coincide with their latest project, A Film For The Future, the band collaborated with Microsoft to produce an AI-powered experience that lets fans interact with their new album MOON MUSiC in a unique and personal way.

After some initial skepticism when generative AI emerged, we’re now seeing creators and artists begin to experiment with AI as a creative booster—bringing fresh ways to interact with and enhance their work, come up with new ideas, and even get things done faster.

A Film For The Future is a highly collaborative project, bringing together a diverse group of filmmakers and animators to create unique segments for the 44-minute film, which provides a visual accompaniment to the new album. Each creator was given a broad set of themes and creative license to come up with visuals each felt best represented Coldplay’s music. That collaborative theme now extends to the fan experience, which transcends traditional passive viewing and enables you to create your own 15-second clip of the film using Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI. Your clip, or remix, is then added to the community playback here.

By going to the Community Remix section on the film’s website, you can see clips created by others accompanied by the “iAAM” track (“I Am A Mountain”) from “MOON MUSiC” and can create your own clip.

Not surprisingly, it’s a very emotive experience as you create your own personal remix. Mine is trust in summoning lightning, which is obviously awesome. You can fine-tune your own remix by adjusting the intensity of seven different attributes, such as passion, growth, and peace, that are represented as moons against a rainbow (trust me, you have to see it). Once you’re done, your remix is added to the community and you can download a video and image of your remix if you’d like. You can also create another remix.

Azure AIHow innovators are creating the future.

The memories of that Vancouver concert came flooding back while I was in the app, giving me a wonderful moment to plunge into a cherished memory. It was unexpected and kind of amazing. Not every app can evoke such a response. Coldplay certainly brings some emotional chemistry to the mix, but this creative use of AI opens new ground for fans. 

Microsoft collaborated with Seattle-based Pixel Lab to build this fan remix experience. The platform AI analyzes the emotional context of each video clip and dynamically assembles them to create a unique and immersive experience for every fan. This means that no two remixes are the same, and each fan gets a personalized journey through Coldplay’s music, making the experience deeply engaging and memorable.

From the Community Remix experience, you can chat with Microsoft Copilot about Coldplay, the new album, A Film For The Future, or whatever you want to chat about using simple prompts.

The fusion of generative AI and human creativity is opening new vistas for artists and businesses alike. The fan remix experience is more than a showcase of cutting-edge technology. Fans can now become co-creators, using Microsoft AI to craft their own unique interpretations of Coldplay’s music. It highlights one of the many strategic values of integrating AI into creative processes to unlock new opportunities for innovation and differentiation. 

Made with Azure AI Foundry

This fan remix experience was built with a collection of Azure AI services available in Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft’s unified AI platform announced a few months ago at Microsoft Ignite. It integrates advanced AI services like natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning to help organizations across industries create AI-powered solutions that accelerate innovation and differentiate them in the market. Azure AI Foundry enables everyone—from developers to data scientists, to business and IT leaders—to collaborate seamlessly design, customize, and manage innovative solutions that transform ideas into reality. 

Simplify development and improve AI efficiency with AI Foundry

Enhancing human creativity with AI 

At the heart of the Coldplay project is the belief that AI can enhance human creativity rather than replace it. Technology has been an important part of creative expression for a long, long time. Artists are often among the first to test the creative potential of technical innovation. Generative AI expands the role of technology in artistic expression, bringing audiences into the creative process, and in this case, elevating fans to co-creators with the artist. It’s a glimpse into how AI is changing expectations for how we engage with our favorite artists.

A Film For The Future

Try the remix experience to create your own

Learn more >

The post Coldplay evolves the fan experience with Microsoft AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

At Microsoft, we are ready to help our customers do two things at once: innovate with AI and comply with the EU AI Act. We are building our products and services to comply with our obligations under the EU AI Act and working with our customers to help them deploy and use the technology compliantly. We are also engaged with European policymakers to support the development of efficient and effective implementation practices under the EU AI Act that are aligned with emerging international norms.  

Below, we go into more detail on these efforts. Since the dates for compliance with the EU AI Act are staggered and key implementation details are not yet finalized, we will be publishing information and tools on an ongoing basis. You can consult our EU AI Act documentation on the Microsoft Trust Center to stay up to date. 

Building Microsoft products and services that comply with the EU AI Act 

Organizations around the world use Microsoft products and services for innovative AI solutions that empower them to achieve more. For these customers, particularly those operating globally and across different jurisdictions, regulatory compliance is of paramount importance. This is why, in every customer agreement, Microsoft has committed to comply with all laws and regulations applicable to Microsoft. This includes the EU AI Act. It is also why we made early decisions to build and continue to invest in our AI governance program. 

As outlined in our inaugural Transparency Report, we have adopted a risk management approach that spans the entire AI development lifecycle. We use practices like impact assessments and red-teaming to help us identify potential risks and ensure that teams building the highest-risk models and systems receive additional oversight and support through governance processes, like our Sensitive Uses program. After mapping risks, we use systematic measurement to evaluate the prevalence and severity of risks against defined metrics. We manage risks by implementing mitigations like the classifiers that form part of Azure AI Content Safety and ensuring ongoing monitoring and incident response.  

Our framework for guiding engineering teams building Microsoft AI solutions—the Responsible AI Standard—was drafted with an early version of the EU AI Act in mind.  

Building on these foundational components of our program, we have devoted significant resources to implementing the EU AI Act across Microsoft. Cross-functional working groups combining AI governance, engineering, legal, and public policy experts have been working for months to identify whether and how our internal standards and practices should be updated to reflect the final text of the EU AI Act as well as early indications of implementation details. They have also been identifying any additional engineering work needed to ensure readiness.  

For example, the EU AI Act’s prohibited practices provisions are among the first provisions to come into effect in February 2025. Ahead of the European Commission’s newly established AI Office providing additional guidance, we have taken a proactive, layered approach to compliance. This includes:​ 

• Conducting a thorough review of Microsoft-owned systems already on the market to identify any places where we might need to adjust our approach, including by updating documentation or implementing technical mitigations.​ To do this, we developed a series of questions designed to elicit whether an AI system could implicate a prohibited practice and dispatched this survey to our engineering teams via our central tooling. Relevant experts reviewed the responses and followed up with teams directly where further clarity or additional steps were necessary. These screening questions remain in our central responsible AI workflow tool on an ongoing basis, so that teams working on new AI systems answer them and engage the review workflow as needed.  
• Creating new restricted uses in our internal company policy to ensure Microsoft does not design or deploy AI systems for uses prohibited by the EU AI Act.​ We are also developing specific marketing and sales guidance to ensure that our general-purpose AI technologies are not marketed or sold for uses that could implicate the EU AI Act’s prohibited practices.  
• Updating our contracts, including our Generative AI Code of Conduct, so that our customers clearly understand they cannot engage in any prohibited practices.​ For example, the Generative AI Code of Conduct now has an express prohibition on the use of the services for social scoring. 

We were also among the first organizations to sign up to the three core commitments in the AI Pact, a set of voluntary pledges developed by the AI Office to support regulatory readiness ahead of some of the upcoming compliance deadlines for the EU AI Act. In addition to our regular rhythm of publishing annual Responsible AI Transparency Reports, you can find an overview of our approach to the EU AI Act and a more detailed summary of how we are implementing the prohibited practices provisions on the Microsoft Trust Center. 

Working with customers to help them deploy and use Microsoft products and services in compliance with the EU AI Act 

One of the core concepts of the EU AI Act is that obligations need to be allocated across the AI supply chain. This means that an upstream regulated actor, like Microsoft in its capacity as a provider of AI tools, services, and components, must support downstream regulated actors, like our enterprise customers, when they integrate a Microsoft tool into a high-risk AI system. We embrace this concept of shared responsibility and aim to support our customers with their AI development and deployment activities by sharing our knowledge, providing documentation, and offering tooling. This all ladders up to the AI Customer Commitments that we made in June of last year to support our customers on their responsible AI journeys. 

We will continue to publish documentation and resources related to the EU AI Act on the Microsoft Trust Center to provide updates and address customer questions. Our Responsible AI Resources site is also a rich source of tools, practices, templates, and information that we believe will help many of our customers establish the foundations of good governance to support EU AI Act compliance.  

On the documentation front, the 33 Transparency Notes that we have published since 2019 provide essential information about the capabilities and limitations of our AI tools, components, and services that our customers rely on as downstream deployers of Microsoft AI platform services. We have also published documentation for our AI systems, such as answers to frequently asked questions. Our Transparency Note for the Azure OpenAI Service, an AI platform service, and FAQ for Copilot, an AI system, are examples of our approach. 

We expect that several of the secondary regulatory efforts under the EU AI Act will provide additional guidance on model- and system-level documentation. These norms for documentation and transparency are still maturing and would benefit from further definition consistent with efforts like the Reporting Framework for the Hiroshima AI Process International Code of Conduct for Organizations Developing Advanced AI Systems. Microsoft has been pleased to contribute to this Reporting Framework through a process convened by the OECD and looks forward to its forthcoming public release. 

Finally, because tooling is necessary to achieve consistent and efficient compliance, we make available to our customers versions of the tools that we use for our own internal purposes. These tools include Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, which helps customers understand and take steps to improve compliance capabilities across many regulatory domains, including the EU AI Act; Azure AI Content Safety to help mitigate content-based harms; Azure AI Foundry to help with evaluations of generative AI applications; and Python Risk Identification Tool or PyRIT, an open innovation framework that our independent AI Red Team uses to help identify potential harms associated with our highest-risk AI models and systems. 

Helping to develop efficient, effective, and interoperable implementation practices 

A unique feature of the EU AI Act is that there are more than 60 secondary regulatory efforts that will have a material impact on defining implementation expectations and directing organizational compliance. Since many of these efforts are in progress or yet to get underway, we are in a key window of opportunity to help establish implementation practices that are efficient, effective, and aligned with emerging international norms. 

Microsoft is engaged with the central EU regulator, the AI Office, and other relevant authorities in EU Member States to share insights from our AI development, governance, and compliance experience, seek clarity on open questions, and advocate for practical outcomes. We are also participating in the development of the Code of Practice for general-purpose AI model providers, and we remain longstanding contributors to the technical standards being developed by European Standards organizations, such as CEN and CENELEC, to address high-risk AI system requirements in the EU AI Act. 

Our customers also have a key role to play in these implementation efforts. By engaging with policymakers and industry groups to understand the evolving requirements and have a say on them, our customers have the opportunity to contribute their valuable insights and help shape implementation practices that better reflect their circumstances and needs, recognizing the broad range of organizations in Europe that are energized by the opportunity to innovate and grow with AI. In the coming months, a key question to be resolved is when organizations that substantially fine-tune AI models become downstream providers due to comply with general-purpose AI model obligations in August. 

Going forward 

Microsoft will continue to make significant product, tooling, and governance investments to help our customers innovate with AI in line with new laws like the EU AI Act. Implementation practices that are efficient, effective, and interoperable internationally are going to be key to supporting useful and trustworthy innovation on a global scale, so we will continue to lean into regulatory processes in Europe and around the world. We are excited to see the projects that animated our Microsoft AI Tour events in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin improve people’s lives and earn their trust, and we welcome feedback on how we can continue to support our customers in their efforts to comply with new laws like the EU AI Act. 

The post Innovating in line with the European Union’s AI Act appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

The Business Case for Responsible AI: Read the new whitepaper from Microsoft and IDC

At Microsoft, we are dedicated to enabling every person and organization to use and build AI that is trustworthy, which means AI that is private, safe, and secure. You can learn more about our commitments and capabilities in our announcement about trustworthy AI. Our approach to safe AI, or responsible AI, is grounded in our core values, risk management and compliance practices, advanced tools and technologies, and the dedication of individuals committed to deploying and using generative AI responsibly.

We believe that a responsible AI approach fosters innovation by ensuring that AI technologies are developed and deployed in a manner that is fair, transparent, and accountable. IDC’s Worldwide Responsible AI Survey found that 91% of organizations are currently using AI technology and expect more than a 24% improvement in customer experience, business resilience, sustainability, and operational efficiency due to AI in 2024. In addition, organizations that use responsible AI solutions reported benefits such as improved data privacy, enhanced customer experience, confident business decisions, and strengthened brand reputation and trust. These solutions are built with tools and methodologies to identify, assess, and mitigate potential risks throughout their development and deployment.

AI is a critical enabler of business transformation, offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation and growth. However, the responsible development and use of AI is essential to mitigate risks and build trust with customers and stakeholders. By adopting a responsible AI approach, organizations can align AI deployment with their values and societal expectations, resulting in sustainable value for both the organization and its customers.

Key findings from the IDC survey

The IDC Worldwide Responsible AI Survey highlights the importance of operationalizing responsible AI practices:

• More than 30% of respondents noted that the lack of governance and risk management solutions is the top barrier to adopting and scaling AI.
• More than 75% of respondents who use responsible AI solutions reported improvements in data privacy, customer experience, confident business decisions, brand reputation, and trust.
• Organizations are increasingly investing in AI and machine learning governance tools and professional services for responsible AI, with 35% of AI organization spend in 2024 allocated to AI and machine learning governance tools and 32% to professional services.

In response to these findings, IDC suggests that a responsible AI organization is built on four foundational elements: core values and governance, risk management and compliance, technologies, and workforce.

1. Core values and governance: A responsible AI organization defines and articulates its AI mission and principles, supported by corporate leadership. Establishing a clear governance structure across the organization builds confidence and trust in AI technologies.
2. Risk management and compliance: Strengthening compliance with stated principles and current laws and regulations is essential. Organizations must develop policies to mitigate risk and operationalize those policies through a risk management framework with regular reporting and monitoring.
3. Technologies: Utilizing tools and techniques to support principles such as fairness, explainability, robustness, accountability, and privacy is crucial. These principles must be built into AI systems and platforms.
4. Workforce: Empowering leadership to elevate responsible AI as a critical business imperative and providing all employees with training on responsible AI principles is paramount. Training the broader workforce ensures responsible AI adoption across the organization.

Read the whitepaper: The Business Case for Responsible AI

Advice and recommendations for business and technology leaders

To ensure the responsible use of AI technologies, organizations should consider taking a systematic approach to AI governance. Based on the research, here are some recommendations for business and technology leaders. It is worth noting that Microsoft has adopted these practices and is committed to working with customers on their responsible AI journey:

1. Establish AI principles: Commit to developing technology responsibly and establish specific application areas that will not be pursued. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias and build and test for safety. Learn how Microsoft builds and governs AI responsibly.
2. Implement AI governance: Establish an AI governance committee with diverse and inclusive representation. Define policies for governing internal and external AI use, promote transparency and explainability, and conduct regular AI audits. Read the Microsoft Transparency Report.
3. Prioritize privacy and security: Reinforce privacy and data protection measures in AI operations to safeguard against unauthorized data access and ensure user trust. Learn more about Microsoft’s work to implement generative AI across the organization securely and responsibly.
4. Invest in AI training: Allocate resources for regular training and workshops on responsible AI practices for the entire workforce, including executive leadership. Visit Microsoft Learn and find courses on generative AI for business leaders, developers, and machine learning professionals.
5. Stay abreast of global AI regulations: Keep up-to-date with global AI regulations, such as the EU AI Act, and ensure compliance with emerging requirements. Stay up-to-date with requirements at Microsoft Trust Center.

As organizations continue to integrate AI into business processes, it is important to remember that responsible AI is a strategic advantage. By embedding responsible AI practices into the core of their operations, organizations can drive innovation, enhance customer trust, and support long-term sustainability. Organizations that prioritize responsible AI may be better positioned to navigate the complexities of the AI landscape and capitalize on the opportunities it presents to reinvent the customer experience or bend the curve on innovation.

At Microsoft, we are committed to supporting our customers on their responsible AI journey. We offer a range of tools, resources, and best practices to help organizations implement responsible AI principles effectively. In addition, we are leveraging our partner ecosystem to provide customers with market and technical insights designed to enable deployment of responsible AI solutions on the Microsoft platform. By working together, we can create a future where AI is used responsibly benefiting both businesses and society as a whole.

As organizations navigate the complexities of AI adoption, it is important to make responsible AI an integrated practice across the organization. By doing so, organizations can harness the full potential of AI while using it in a manner that is fair and beneficial for all.

Discover solutions

• Read the whitepaper: The Business Case for Responsible AI.
• Watch the webinar: The Business Case for Responsible AI.
• Learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

¹IDC’s 2024 AI opportunity study: Top five AI trends to watch, Alysa Taylor. November 14, 2024.

IDC White Paper: sponsored by Microsoft, 2024 The Business Case for Responsible AI, IDC #US52727124, December 2024. The study was commissioned and sponsored by Microsoft. This document is provided solely for information and should not be construed as legal advice.

The post Explore the business case for responsible AI in new IDC whitepaper appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Beginning in August 2024, Microsoft launched a new datacenter design that optimizes AI workloads and consumes zero water for cooling. By adopting chip-level cooling solutions, we can deliver precise temperature control without water evaporation. While water is still used for administrative purposes like restrooms and kitchens, this design will avoid the need for more than 125 million liters of water per year per datacenter.*

Zero-water evaporation and the quest for ultra-low Water Usage Effectiveness 

These new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop. Once the system is filled during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply. 

We measure water efficiency through Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which divides total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption for IT equipment. We are continually investing in improving the design and operation of our datacenters to minimize water use. In our last fiscal year, our datacenters operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh. This represents a 39% improvement compared to 2021, when we reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh.  This WUE reduction is due to our ongoing efforts to actively reduce water wastage, expand our operating temperature range, and audit our data center operations. We also expanded our use of alternative water sources, such as reclaimed and recycled water, in Texas, Washington, California, and Singapore. 

We have been working since the early 2000s to reduce water use and improved our WUE by 80% since our first generation of datacenters. As water challenges grow more extreme, we know we have more work to do. The shift to the next generation datacenters is expected to help reduce our WUE to near zero for each datacenter employing zero-water evaporation. As our fleet expands over time, this shift will help reduce Microsoft’s fleetwide WUE even further.

Mitigating energy impacts 

Traditionally, water has been evaporated on-site to reduce the power demand of the cooling systems. Replacement of evaporative systems with mechanical cooling will increase our power usage effectiveness (PUE). However, our latest chip-level cooling solutions will allow us to utilize warmer temperatures for cooling than previous generations of IT hardware, which enables us to mitigate the power use with high efficiency economizing chillers with elevated water temperatures. 

The result is a nominal increase in our annual energy usage compared to our evaporative datacenter designs across the global fleet. Additional innovations to provide more targeted cooling are in development and are expected to continue to reduce power consumption. 

Pilot projects and implementation 

Although our current fleet will still use a mix of air-cooled and water-cooled systems, new projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, will pilot zero-water evaporated designs in 2026. Starting August 2024, all new Microsoft datacenter designs began using this next-generation cooling technology, as we work to make zero-water evaporation the primary cooling method across our owned portfolio. These new sites will begin coming online in late 2027. 

Advancing sustainability: Sustainable by design 

Learn more about how Microsoft is advancing the sustainability of cloud and AI through our blog series:  

• Sustainable by design: Advancing the sustainability of AI
• Sustainable by design: Transforming datacenter water efficiency
• Sustainable by design: Innovating for energy efficiency in AI, part 1
• Sustainable by design: Innovating for energy efficiency in AI, part 2
• Sustainable by design: Advancing low carbon materials

*Based on our FY 2024 global average withdrawal WUE of 0.30 L/kWh.

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Located in Vatican City, St. Peter’s Basilica is over 400 years old, and is one of the most well-known churches in the world revered for its breathtaking Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Famous architects like Michelangelo and Bernini contributed to the design of the church, which took over 100 years to complete.

Today, La Basilica di San Pietro—a collaboration between the Vatican, Iconem, and Microsoft—gives everyone full access to Vatican City’s most iconic church via AI-enabled immersive exhibits and an interactive website.

Making history

Taking photos of every detail of a massive historic cathedral and piecing them all together sounds daunting, especially in less than a month, but with AI, it’s possible. Iconem, a leader in digital preservation based in Paris, uses advanced photogrammetry and AI to create 3D replicas of the world’s most famous historic landmarks and archaeologial sites.

Andrea Louis, software engineer and Technical Project Manager at Iconem, found the La Basilica di San Pietro experience stimulating due to its size and complexity, and the many spiritual, artistic, and historical layers involved. Being inside St. Peter’s Basilica gave her and the Iconem team intimate knowledge of the church, which allowed them to develop new ways to bring visitors inside the space.

It’s like an investigation of the 2,000-year history through one unique monument.

Yves Ubelmann

Founder and CEO of Iconem

To make the 3D version of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Iconem team took over 400,000 high-resolution images using advanced photogrammetry techniques. They spent three weeks scanning the Basilica using various devices including drones, cameras, and lasers, and Azure processed the massive volume of images collected. This data was securely backed up and stored in Azure Cloud, making it accessible to partners. Iconem then created an ultra-precise 3D model, or a digital twin of the Basilica. AI-generated imagery taken from Iconem’s photogrammetry data enhanced visualization of both the interior and exterior of the Basilica, allowing visitors to explore every intricate detail from anywhere in the world.

Bringing it to life with AI

Microsoft provided the AI tech needed to process and analyze Iconem’s vast amount of photogrammetry data used to create the digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica. Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab contributed advanced tools that refined the digital twin with millimeter-level accuracy, and used AI to help detect and map structural vulnerabilities like cracks and missing mosaic tiles. The Vatican oversaw the collaboration, ensuring the preservation of the Basilica as a cultural, spiritual, and historically significant site for years to come.

An experience of a lifetime

In November 2024, ahead of the the 2025 Holy Year Jubilee, both the public exhibition and digital platforms of St. Peter’s Basilica will be available for everyone to see and experience in the Pétros enì exhibit. The Holy Year Jubilee occurs every 25 years as a year of grace and pilgrimage in the Roman Catholic church. During this time, Catholics are encouraged to take a pilgrimage to Rome where they can participate in ceremonies, religious events, and focus on spiritual renewal. “Pilgrims of Hope” is the theme of the 2025 Holy Year Jubilee.

The Pétros enì exhibit will give the 35 million pilgrims in Rome an immersive, in-person experience of a lifetime, and it will also help more than a billion Catholics unable to make the trip feel like they’re in the moment.

Visit the La Basilica di San Pietro, an AI-enhanced experience

This project ultimately allows us to rediscover what is fully human and connects everyone.

Cardinal Mauro Gambetti

Archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica

The post Access for all: La Basilica di San Pietro appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

To help guide organizations on their AI transformation journey, Microsoft recently commissioned a new study through IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI. IDC’s findings show that when organizations truly commit to and invest in AI, the return on investment (ROI) potential grows significantly.

According to IDC, the study’s findings reflect a tipping point as AI gains momentum across industries. As companies worldwide go deeper with AI, Microsoft customers continue to deploy innovative new solutions and discover how tools like Copilot can transform their day-to-day work. In telecommunications, Lumen Technologies estimates Copilot is saving sellers an average of four hours a week, equating to $50 million annually. In healthcare, Chi Mei Medical Center doctors now spend 15 minutes instead of an hour writing medical reports, and nurses can document patient information in under five minutes. Pharmacists are now able to double the number of patients they see per day. In retail, AI models help Coles predict the flow of 20,000 stock-keeping units to 850 stores with remarkable accuracy, generating 1.6 billion predictions daily.

IDC’s 2024 top 5 trends for AI

IDC’s findings align with what Microsoft is seeing as we work with companies across industries to deploy AI. We’ve highlighted more than 200 of our top AI customer stories to show a sampling of how AI is already driving impact today. Below is a look at the top trends we’re seeing in IDC’s study and the impact of those trends on organizations working with AI today.

#1 Enhanced productivity has become table stakes. Employee productivity is the No. 1 business outcome that companies are trying to achieve with AI. The study shows that 92% of AI users surveyed are using AI for productivity, and 43% say productivity use cases have provided the greatest ROI. While productivity is a top goal, generative AI use cases that are close behind include customer engagement, topline growth, cost management and product or service innovation — and nearly half of the companies surveyed expect AI to have a high degree of impact across all those areas over the next 24 months.

Customer snapshot:

At the global marketing and advertising agency dentsu, employees are already saving 15 to 30 minutes a day using Copilot for tasks such as summarizing chats, generating presentations and building executive summaries.

“Copilot has transformed the way we deliver creative concepts to our clients, enabling real-time collaboration. Agility, security and uniqueness are crucial, but our goal is to lead this transformation company-wide, from top to bottom.”

— Takuya Kodama, Business Strategy Manager at dentsu

#2 Companies are gravitating to more advanced AI solutions. In the next 24 months, more companies expect to build custom AI solutions tailored directly to industry needs and business processes, including custom copilots and AI agents. This shows a growing maturity in AI fluency as companies realize the value of out-of-the-box use cases and expand to more advanced scenarios.

Customer snapshot:

Siemens has developed the Siemens Industrial Copilot, which has eased the challenges caused by increasing complexity and labor shortages for dozens of customers in different industries.

“In full appreciation of GenAI’s transformational potential, it’s important to remember that production does not have an ‘undo’ button. It takes diligence and effort to mature AI to industrial-grade quality. The Siemens Industrial Copilot for Engineering significantly eases our customers’ workload and addresses the pressing challenges of skill shortages and increasing complexity in industrial automation. This AI-powered solution is a game-changer for our industry with over 50 customers already using it to boost efficiency and tackle labor shortages.”

— Boris Scharinger, AI Strategist at Siemens Digital Industries

#3 Generative AI adoption and value is growing across industries. Even though it is relatively new to the market, generative AI adoption is rapidly expanding — 75% of respondents report current usage up from 55% in 2023. The ROI of generative AI is highest in Financial Services, followed by Media & Telco, Mobility, Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, Energy, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Education. Overall, generative AI is generating higher ROI across industries.

Customer snapshot:

Providence has leveraged AI to extend and enhance patient care, streamline processes and workflows and improve the effectiveness of caregivers.

“Whether we’re partnering with organizations on the leading edge of this technology — like Microsoft — and building bespoke solutions through Azure OpenAI Service, advancing clinical research to help cancer patients receive personalized and precise treatments faster, or ‘hitting the easy button’ and adopting established technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot or DAX Copilot, we have successfully stayed on the forefront of this tech revolution. For example, physicians who use DAX Copilot save an average of 5.33 minutes per visit, and 80% of physicians have reported lower cognitive burden after using DAX Copilot.”

— Sarah Vaezy, EVP, Chief Strategy and Digital Officer at Providence

#4 AI leaders are seeing greater returns and accelerated innovation. While companies using generative AI are averaging $3.7x ROI, the top leaders using generative AI are realizing significantly higher returns, with an average ROI of $10.3. In addition to the enhanced business value, leaders are also on an accelerated path to build and implement new solutions — 29% of leaders implement AI in less than 3 months versus 6% of companies in the laggard category.

Customer snapshot:

Södra is an international forest industry group that processes forest products from 52,000 owners into renewable, climate-smart products for international market. Every day Södra collects and interprets climate impact data to make thousands of decisions for every part of the value chain.

“With innovative AI technology from Microsoft, our business experts and data scientists have been able to help make us more sustainable while also improving revenue significantly.”

— Cristian Brolin, Chief Digital Officer at Södra

#5 Looking ahead: Skilling remains a top challenge. Thirty percent of respondents indicated a lack of specialized AI skills in-house, and 26 percent say they lack employees with the skills needed to learn and work with AI. This dovetails with findings from the Microsoft and LinkedIn 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, which found that 55 percent of business leaders are concerned about having enough skilled talent to fill roles.

That is why over the past year we have helped train and certify over 14 million people in more than 200 countries in digital skills. And we are committed to working in partnership with governments, educational institutions, industry and civil society to help millions more learn to use AI.

Customer snapshot:

The University of South Florida (USF) is partnering with Microsoft to streamline processes and enhance innovation for all aspects of university operations with AI.

“We’re giving students a leg up to do amazing things with AI as part of tomorrow’s workforce. Our focus on generative AI not only drives operational efficiency but also empowers our community to unlock new levels of creativity and impact, further positioning USF as a leader in AI adoption, which includes being among the first universities in the nation to form a college dedicated to AI, cybersecurity and computing.”

— Sidney Fernandes, CIO & VP of Digital Experiences at University of South Florida

AI’s growing economic impact

While companies today are largely implementing out-of-the-box generative AI solutions and seeing significant ROI, more than half of those surveyed expect to build custom industry and line-of-business applications in the next 24 months — demonstrating that today’s ROI is quickly becoming tomorrow’s competitive edge.

“We are at an inflection point of autonomous agent development and are beginning an evolution from using just off-the-shelf assistants and copilots that support knowledge discovery and content generation to custom AI agents to execute complex, multistep workflows across a digital world,” says Ritu Jyoti, GVP/GM, AI and Data Research at IDC. “With responsible technology usage and workplace transformation, IDC predicts that business spending to adopt AI will have a cumulative global economic impact of $19.9 trillion through 2030 and drive 3.5% of global GDP in 2030.”

Key findings from IDC’s The Business Opportunity of AI study include:

• Generative AI usage jumped from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024.
• For every $1 a company invests in generative AI, the ROI is $3.7x.
• The top leaders using generative AI are realizing an ROI of $10.3.
• On average, AI deployments are taking less than 8 months and organizations are realizing value within 13 months.
• Within 24 months, most organizations plan to expand beyond pre-built AI solutions to advanced AI workloads that are customized or custom-built.
• The ROI of generative AI is highest in Financial Services, followed by Media & Telco, Mobility, Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, Energy, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Education.
• 43% say productivity use cases have provided the greatest ROI.
• The primary way that organizations are monetizing AI today is through productivity use cases. In the next 24 months, a greater focus will be placed on functional and industry use cases.
• The top barrier when implementing AI is the lack of both technical and day-to-day AI skills.

Learn how to fuel your AI journey

IDC’s study, which included more than 4,000 business leaders and AI decision-makers around the world, also identifies the top barriers organizations face when implementing AI. As businesses integrate new solutions, they navigate important considerations such as data privacy, responsible use and the need for investment in both technology and skills.

No matter where you are in your cloud and AI transformation journey, Microsoft can help. To learn more about how customers across industries are shaping their AI transformation with Microsoft, please visit Microsoft’s AI in Action page. For more on how to get started in your AI transformation journey, visit Microsoft AI.

The post IDC’s 2024 AI opportunity study: Top five AI trends to watch appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Today, we’re announcing new agentic capabilities that will accelerate these gains and bring AI-first business process to every organization. 

• First, the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month.  
• Second, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for every sales, service, finance and supply chain team. 

Copilot is your AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain.  

Empowering more customers to build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio 

Earlier this year, we announced a host of powerful new capabilities in Copilot Studio, including the ability to create autonomous agents. Next month, these capabilities are shifting from private to public preview, allowing more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI. Agents draw on the context of your work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric, and can support everything from your IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as a personal concierge for sales and service.  

Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact. Pets at Home, the U.K.’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings. McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%. Thomson Reuters built a professional-grade agent to speed up the legal due diligence workflow, with initial testing showing some tasks could be done in half the time. This agent can help Thomson Reuters increase the efficiency of work for clients and boost its new business pipeline.  

Scaling your teams with 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365  

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value — and are just the start. We will create many more agents in the coming year that will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization. Today, we’re introducing ten of these autonomous agents. Here are a few examples: 

• Sales Qualification Agent: In a profession where time literally equals money, this agent enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities while the agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses. 
• Supplier Communications Agent: This agent enables customers to optimize their supply chain and minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays and responding accordingly — freeing procurement teams from time consuming manual monitoring and firefighting. 
• Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents: A business gets one chance to make a first impression, and these two agents are game changers for customer care teams facing high call volumes, talent shortages and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team. 

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be confident that they have robust data governance and security. The agents coming to Dynamics 365 follow our core security, privacy and responsible AI commitments. Agents built in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge and actions. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls — all managed in Copilot Studio. These include data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols and more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. 

Microsoft’s own transformation  

At Microsoft, we’re using Copilot and agents to reimagine business process across every function while empowering employees to scale their impact. Using Copilot, one sales team has achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals(2). And thanks to Copilot, one team is resolving customer cases nearly 12% faster(3). Our Marketing team is seeing a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers(4). And in Human Resources, our employee self-service agent is helping answer questions with 42% greater accuracy(5).  

With Copilot and agents, the possibilities are endless — we can’t wait to see what you create. Start building agents in Copilot Studio today. Read more about autonomous agent capabilities on the Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 blogs. Head to WorkLab for more insights on Microsoft’s own AI transformation.

The post New autonomous agents scale your team like never before appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

At Microsoft, we have commitments to ensure Trustworthy AI and are building industry-leading supporting technology. Our commitments and capabilities go hand in hand to make sure our customers and developers are protected at every layer.

Building on our commitments, today we are announcing new product capabilities to strengthen the security, safety and privacy of AI systems.

Security. Security is our top priority at Microsoft, and our expanded Secure Future Initiative (SFI) underscores the company-wide commitments and the responsibility we feel to make our customers more secure. This week we announced our first SFI Progress Report, highlighting updates spanning culture, governance, technology and operations. This delivers on our pledge to prioritize security above all else and is guided by three principles: secure by design, secure by default and secure operations. In addition to our first party offerings, Microsoft Defender and Purview, our AI services come with foundational security controls, such as built-in functions to help prevent prompt injections and copyright violations. Building on those, today we’re announcing two new capabilities:

• Evaluations in Azure AI Studio to support proactive risk assessments.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot will provide transparency into web queries to help admins and users better understand how web search enhances the Copilot response. Coming soon.

Our security capabilities are already being used by customers. Cummins, a 105-year-old company known for its engine manufacturing and development of clean energy technologies, turned to Microsoft Purview to strengthen their data security and governance by automating the classification, tagging and labeling of data. EPAM Systems, a software engineering and business consulting company, deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot for 300 users because of the data protection they get from Microsoft. J.T. Sodano, Senior Director of IT, shared that “we were a lot more confident with Copilot for Microsoft 365, compared to other large language models (LLMs), because we know that the same information and data protection policies that we’ve configured in Microsoft Purview apply to Copilot.”

Safety. Inclusive of both security and privacy, Microsoft’s broader Responsible AI principles, established in 2018, continue to guide how we build and deploy AI safely across the company. In practice this means properly building, testing and monitoring systems to avoid undesirable behaviors, such as harmful content, bias, misuse and other unintended risks. Over the years, we have made significant investments in building out the necessary governance structure, policies, tools and processes to uphold these principles and build and deploy AI safely. At Microsoft, we are committed to sharing our learnings on this journey of upholding our Responsible AI principles with our customers. We use our own best practices and learnings to provide people and organizations with capabilities and tools to build AI applications that share the same high standards we strive for.

Today, we are sharing new capabilities to help customers pursue the benefits of AI while mitigating the risks:

• A Correction capability in Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety’s Groundedness detection feature that helps fix hallucination issues in real time before users see them.
• Embedded Content Safety, which allows customers to embed Azure AI Content Safety on devices. This is important for on-device scenarios where cloud connectivity might be intermittent or unavailable.
• New evaluations in Azure AI Studio to help customers assess the quality and relevancy of outputs and how often their AI application outputs protected material.
• Protected Material Detection for Code is now in preview in Azure AI Content Safety to help detect pre-existing content and code. This feature helps developers explore public source code in GitHub repositories, fostering collaboration and transparency, while enabling more informed coding decisions.

It’s amazing to see how customers across industries are already using Microsoft solutions to build more secure and trustworthy AI applications. For example, Unity, a platform for 3D games, used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to build Muse Chat, an AI assistant that makes game development easier. Muse Chat uses content-filtering models in Azure AI Content Safety to ensure responsible use of the software. Additionally, ASOS, a UK-based fashion retailer with nearly 900 brand partners, used the same built-in content filters in Azure AI Content Safety to support top-quality interactions through an AI app that helps customers find new looks.

We’re seeing the impact in the education space too. New York City Public Schools partnered with Microsoft to develop a chat system that is safe and appropriate for the education context, which they are now piloting in schools. The South Australia Department for Education similarly brought generative AI into the classroom with EdChat, relying on the same infrastructure to ensure safe use for students and teachers.

Privacy. Data is at the foundation of AI, and Microsoft’s priority is to help ensure customer data is protected and compliant through our long-standing privacy principles, which include user control, transparency and legal and regulatory protections. To build on this, today we’re announcing:

• Confidential inferencing in preview in our Azure OpenAI Service Whisper model, so customers can develop generative AI applications that support verifiable end-to-end privacy. Confidential inferencing ensures that sensitive customer data remains secure and private during the inferencing process, which is when a trained AI model makes predictions or decisions based on new data. This is especially important for highly regulated industries, such as health care, financial services, retail, manufacturing and energy.
• The general availability of Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which allow customers to secure data directly on the GPU. This builds on our confidential computing solutions, which ensure customer data stays encrypted and protected in a secure environment so that no one gains access to the information or system without permission.
• Azure OpenAI Data Zones for the EU and U.S. are coming soon and build on the existing data residency provided by Azure OpenAI Service by making it easier to manage the data processing and storage of generative AI applications. This new functionality offers customers the flexibility of scaling generative AI applications across all Azure regions within a geography, while giving them the control of data processing and storage within the EU or U.S.

We’ve seen increasing customer interest in confidential computing and excitement for confidential GPUs, including from application security provider F5, which is using Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs to build advanced AI-powered security solutions, while ensuring confidentiality of the data its models are analyzing. And multinational banking corporation Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has integrated Azure confidential computing into their own platform to analyze encrypted data while preserving customer privacy. With the general availability of Azure Confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, RBC can now use these advanced AI tools to work more efficiently and develop more powerful AI models.

Achieve more with Trustworthy AI 

We all need and expect AI we can trust. We’ve seen what’s possible when people are empowered to use AI in a trusted way, from enriching employee experiences and reshaping business processes to reinventing customer engagement and reimagining our everyday lives. With new capabilities that improve security, safety and privacy, we continue to enable customers to use and build trustworthy AI solutions that help every person and organization on the planet achieve more. Ultimately, Trustworthy AI encompasses all that we do at Microsoft and it’s essential to our mission as we work to expand opportunity, earn trust, protect fundamental rights and advance sustainability across everything we do.

Related:

Commitments

• Security: Secure Future Initiative  
• Privacy: Trust Center 
• Safety: Responsible AI Principles

Capabilities

• Security: Security for AI
• Privacy: Azure Confidential Computing
• Safety: Azure AI Content Safety

The post Microsoft Trustworthy AI: Unlocking human potential starts with trust  appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Today, we’re announcing a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Constellation that will enable the restart of an 835 megawatt (MW) nuclear facility in Pennsylvania that was retired in 2019. This will bring a significant supply of net-new, reliable, carbon-free electricity to the PJM power grid, the regional transmission organization covering 13 states, recognizing the importance of nuclear energy and complementing our 34 gigawatt (GW) contracted renewable energy portfolio in 24 countries.

As highlighted by the International Energy Agency, complete grid decarbonization will require a multi-technology approach with a broad range of carbon-free technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal, clean hydrogen, sustainable biomass, nuclear, fusion, energy efficiency, and storage, as well as transmission infrastructure to connect these technologies to the grids that need them.¹ Alongside our extensive work on carbon reduction and carbon removal, Microsoft embraces this multi-technology approach as an essential pathway to achieving our goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.

Carbon reduction

Explore our approach to carbon reduction

Learn more

As we continue to expand our portfolio of solutions to accelerate the energy transition, we collaborate with governments, communities, developers, and energy service providers in many ways. In this blog, I’ll share more about how we approach our work to (1) shape market demand for carbon-free electricity and (2) advance energy policy through advocacy.

Shaping market demand to accelerate the addition of carbon-free electricity

We employ a wide range of contracting mechanisms to meet our goals and secure carbon-free electricity, crafting innovative agreement structures alongside our large portfolio of renewable PPAs. A few examples:

• Our recently announced five-year global agreement with Brookfield Renewable Partners provides a pathway for the development of more than 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity in the United States and Europe, almost eight times larger than the largest corporate PPA ever signed. This agreement provides an incentive for Brookfield to build a large portfolio of new renewable energy projects in the coming years, contributing to the decarbonization of the grid, and matched to the locations where Microsoft consumes electricity.
• In Washington state, our agreement with Powerex matches hourly datacenter demand with direct deliveries of carbon-free hydro, solar, and wind power on a 24-hour basis throughout the year. During the day, when our contracted renewable resources produce more power than needed, Powerex takes the surplus renewable power, conserving water from hydropower reservoirs and effectively storing it like a battery. This energy can then be delivered back to the datacenter in later hours, for example at night when wind and solar sources may be offline.
• As a global company committed to decarbonization on a global level, Microsoft also has worked to develop renewable energy in communities and locations that often are not prioritized. An example of this unique approach was our five-year framework agreement with Pivot Energy to develop up to 500 MW of community-scale solar energy projects across the US between 2025 and 2029. The agreement will enable Pivot to develop approximately 150 US solar projects in roughly 100 communities across 20 states, including Colorado, Maryland, Illinois, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with each solar project including significant community benefits.  

Advancing carbon-free electricity through policy advocacy

Our public policy advocacy relating to the electrical grid is focused on accelerating the transition to clean electricity generation, modernizing and improving grid infrastructure, and encouraging an equitable energy future. A grid mix that includes adding and retaining firm carbon-free energy technologies as well as renewables will be pivotal to providing electricity access across the globe and progressing decarbonization.

In December 2023, we published a policy brief on advanced nuclear and fusion energy that highlights the importance of carbon-free electricity and the role advanced nuclear and fusion energy will have in a decarbonized energy future. As advanced carbon-free energy technologies are developed, each comes with its own set of considerations, benefits, risks, regulatory dynamics, and acceptance. Our policy priorities are focused on advancing research, development, and demonstration projects; enabling safe deployment of technologies; and encouraging an efficient and effective regulatory process for new technologies to be deployed.

Explore Sustainable by design

Discover more about how Microsoft is advancing the sustainability of cloud and AI through our blog series on the topic:

• Sustainable by design: Advancing the sustainability of AI
• Sustainable by design: Transforming datacenter water efficiency
• Sustainable by design: Innovating for energy efficiency in AI, part 1
• Sustainable by design: Innovating for energy efficiency in AI, part 2
• Sustainable by design: Advancing low carbon materials
• Sustainable by design: Next-generation datacenters consume zero water for cooling

¹The path to limiting global warming to 1.5 °C has narrowed, but clean energy growth is keeping it open, IEA, 2023.

The post Accelerating the addition of carbon-free energy: An update on progress appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

As we look toward Microsoft’s 50th year, we remain committed to empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are proud to lead AI transformation and deliver a trustworthy AI platform for customers and partners to enhance their services, increase productivity, and drive business success. Microsoft Copilot, the Copilot stack, and Copilot+ PCs are pioneering the way in alignment with our commitment to security. Together, these tools provide the most sophisticated platform for leveraging data and developing AI solutions that deliver secure, transformative experiences that were previously beyond our imagination.

To help partners better understand the value AI can unlock, Microsoft commissioned a global study through IDC, titled “Microsoft Partners: Driving Economic Value and AI Maturity.” The goal is to provide clear insights into how AI drives economic impact for our partners. For this study, IDC surveyed over 600 partners around the world. The study focuses on the economic value partners realize through their collaboration with Microsoft and our technology—particularly with AI. Key findings from the study show:

• Partner multiplier: For every $1 of Microsoft revenue, partners who provide services generate $8.45 and partners who develop software generate $10.93.
• AI growth: AI is a huge growth opportunity, with GenAI forecasted to grow 86% (2022–2027)—13 times the overall IT market growth.
• Services partners’ value: Partners engaged with Microsoft generate a high average ratio of revenue from their own services, and AI is further elevating this. Based on IDC’s Microsoft Partner Economic Value Survey, 62% of total partner revenue comes from services.
• Software partners’ value: Software development partners are tapping into customer demand for AI by integrating Microsoft AI capabilities into their own software and creating new AI applications.
• Microsoft benefits as a boon to partner businesses: The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program benefits span a broad set of valued attributes for partners, with an emphasis on elevating partner engagement with AI.

n = 638; Source: IDC Microsoft Partner Economic Value Survey, IDC PEVI Model, May 2024.

Microsoft partner revenue multiplier

IDC reports that partners focused on providing services and software have a higher multiplier, and AI is contributing to that trend. The study also illustrates that Microsoft partners are bullish on AI, with the majority stating that AI will increase their Microsoft-related revenue and profit.

n = 638; Source: IDC Microsoft Partner Economic Value Survey, May 2024.

Bain & Company is a global management consulting firm that helps businesses drive transformative change, focusing on strategy, operations, and technology. With a reputation for delivering actionable insights and sustainable results, Bain collaborates with organizations across various industries to co-create solutions that address customers’ biggest problems and identify sources of value from data and AI. These transformations create opportunity and drive customer engagement and services in different stages of the AI journey.

“We wanted to partner with a leader and saw quite clearly that it was a priority for us to build a deep and strong relationship with Microsoft. Especially with the AI wave, Microsoft is a key partner that many of our clients are looking to work with in transforming their businesses.”

—Roy Singh, Partner, Bain & Company

Partner revenue growth and profitability in the age of AI

Convergent Computing (CCO) is a consulting business based in California with 100 employees, focusing on Data & AI (Azure), Modern Work, and Security. CCO has 160 customers who are actively engaged in AI, and they view AI as an accelerator.

“AI is not only contributing to the top line, but it’s also increased the funnel of what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years because I have more migration and security jobs because AI drove them.”

—Rand Morimoto, President, Convergent Computing

AI leads to growth now and in the future

Organizations across a variety of industries are evolving into tech companies, recognizing the business value that generative AI brings. A wave of innovation has accelerated AI adoption, transforming and enhancing how we work and live. Customers and partners worldwide are leaning on Microsoft’s leadership in data, cloud, security, and AI innovation. The impact of AI on growth is evident from the experience Microsoft partners report in the new IDC study.

Wherever you are in your cloud and AI transformation journey, Microsoft can help you accelerate. Microsoft is committed to the success of our partners.

Explore the complete study to identify the most impactful actions your business can take in the coming year.

Additional resources:

• Join us for Microsoft Ignite 2024.
• Explore insights from MCAPS Start for Partners 2024.
• Find a wealth of resources and skilling opportunities to build your readiness to lead in the era of AI.
• Visit our partner success stories site to find real-world examples of business impact driven by AI.

Source: IDC, sponsored by Microsoft, “Microsoft Partners: Driving Economic Value and AI Maturity,” IDC #US52483124, September 2024.

¹ IDC Infographic, sponsored by Microsoft, “The Business Opportunity of AI,” IDC #US51315823, November 2023.

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