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

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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First, we’re announcing Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration. It’s the first new digital artifact for the AI age. 

Second, we’re rapidly improving Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps. Our customers tell us Copilot in Microsoft Teams has changed meetings forever—in fact, it’s the number one place they’re seeing value. We’re excited to do the same thing for advanced data analysis in Microsoft Excel, dynamic storytelling in PowerPoint, managing your inbox in Outlook, and more. 

Third, we’re introducing Copilot agents, making it easier and faster than ever to automate and execute business processes on your behalf—enabling you to scale your team like never before.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Get more done faster with an AI assistant in your Microsoft 365 apps, documents, and meetings.

Discover more 

We’re excited to share these updates with our customers around the world. From enterprises to small businesses, they help Copilot get better every day. Nearly 1,000 customers have given us feedback on how they’re using Copilot, where it is having the biggest impact, and where it needs to be better. Based on that feedback, we have made more than 700 product updates and shipped over 150 new features this year. Now with GPT-4o and enhanced orchestration, we’ve dramatically improved performance. Copilot responses are more than two times faster on average, and response satisfaction has improved by nearly three times.¹ When you add it all up, we’ve built the world’s best AI feedback loop with Copilot. And we’ll continue to rapidly bring all the latest models to Copilot and rapidly improve the product based on your input, adding new capabilities and new models, including OpenAI o1 with advanced reasoning.

Introducing Copilot Pages—the first new digital artifact for the AI age

Copilot is the new UI for AI. And it all starts with Business Chat (BizChat), a central hub that brings together all your data—web data, work data, and line of business data—right in the flow of your work. BizChat turns all your organizational content into a rich database of information and insight, enabling you to collaborate with Copilot like a partner and turning every artifact into a reusable business asset. And we’re excited to announce Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration. It’s the first step in our new design system for knowledge work.

Start using BizChat today at Microsoft365.com/Copilot

Pages takes ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it durable, so you can edit it, add to it, and share it with others. You and your team can work collaboratively in a page with Copilot, seeing everyone’s work in real time and iterating with Copilot like a partner, adding more content from your data, files, and the web to your Page. This is an entirely new work pattern—multiplayer, human-to-AI-to-human collaboration. For Microsoft 365 Copilot customers, Pages starts rolling out today and will be generally available later in September 2024.

In the coming weeks, we’re also bringing Copilot Pages to the more than 400 million people who have access to the free Microsoft Copilot when they’re signed in with a Microsoft Entra account—offering the combination of web grounding, enterprise data protection (EDP), and Pages. Today, you can try Microsoft Copilot at Microsoft.com/copilot, and pin Copilot right in the flow of work in the Microsoft 365 app, and, soon, in Outlook and Teams.

Supercharging productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot  

Microsoft 365 AppsLearn more 

For millions of people around the world, work happens in the Microsoft 365 apps. It’s where Copilot is already becoming a daily habit, delivering personal productivity gains and time savings. And with Wave 2, we’re taking everything we’re learning from our customers and using it to make Copilot even better. 

Reinvent productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot in Excel 

When people want to work with that data and get real value from it, they turn to Microsoft Excel—it’s the front-end for all your business data. We’re excited to announce that Copilot in Excel is now generally available. Now you can work with data that hasn’t been formatted as a table. We’ve added new skills to tap into the full power of Excel with support for more formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF; conditional formatting; and the ability to iterate with Copilot on visualizations like charts and PivotTables to fit your needs. And Copilot in Excel can now work with text, in addition to numerical, data.  

But we’ve gone even further. We’re announcing Copilot in Excel with Python, combining the power of Python—one of the world’s most popular programming languages for working with data—with Copilot in Excel. Now, anyone can work with Copilot to conduct advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data—all using natural language, no coding required. It’s like adding a skilled data analyst to the team. Copilot in Excel with Python is in public preview.  

Copilot in PowerPoint 

No one goes from an idea to a polished presentation in a single prompt. Now generally available, Narrative builder in Microsoft PowerPoint helps you work with Copilot like a partner, iterating together to build a great first draft in minutes while keeping you in control of the creative process. Copilot uses your prompt to build an outline with topics that you can edit and refine to create a first draft of your presentation. Soon, you’ll be able to add files to the outline to ground your topics. And with Brand manager, Copilot can leverage your company’s branded template, so your presentations are enterprise-ready and on-brand. Soon, Copilot will pull in company-approved images from your SharePoint Organization Asset Library.  

Copilot in Teams 

In meetings today, there are two important conversations: the one that’s spoken, and the one happening in the chat. Copilot in Teams can now reason over both the meeting transcript and the meeting chat to give you a complete picture of what was discussed. For instance, you can ask Copilot if there were any questions that you missed in a meeting, and it will quickly scan across what was said, and what was typed in the chat, to see if anything was left unanswered. Now with Copilot in Teams, no question, idea, or contribution is left behind. This feature is generally available September 2024. 

Copilot in Outlook

We all struggle with email overload. Now, with Prioritize my inbox, Copilot in Outlook helps you quickly get to the messages that matter, analyzing your inbox based on both the content of your email and the context of your role—like who you report to and the email threads where you’ve been responsive. No more wading through lengthy messages—Copilot automatically generates a concise summary of each email, and includes why it prioritized the message along with top insights. And soon, you’ll be able to teach Copilot the specific topics, keywords, or people that are important to you, ensuring those emails are marked as high priority. These features will be in public preview starting late 2024. 

Copilot in Word 

When working in Microsoft Word, you often need to bring in content from other documents and apps. But searching for, and incorporating, the information you need can be time-consuming and disrupt your writing. Coming later September 2024, Copilot in Word will enable you to quickly reference not only web data and work data like Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, and encrypted documents but also emails and meetings. And it integrates this information right in the flow of your work, so you can get to a good first draft fast. We’ve improved Copilot in Word to be an even better writing partner. Recent updates include a new, on-canvas start experience with suggested prompts to jumpstart your creative process and the ability to collaborate with Copilot inline as you work on specific sections of your document—both generally available.

Copilot in OneDrive  

Microsoft OneDrive is a rich repository where professionals store their personal work content—but we all spend too much time trying to find the right documents or remember which document has the content we need. Copilot in OneDrive can reason over all your files quickly to find the information you need, making it easy to gain insights, summarize, and compare up to five files with a clear, easy-to-read summary of the details and differences within your files—without opening a file. Copilot in OneDrive is now rolling out and will be generally available end of September 2024.  

Scaling your team like never before with Copilot agents

Accelerating every business process with Copilot—to grow revenue and reduce costs—is the best way to gain competitive advantage in the age of AI. Introducing Copilot agents, now generally available. Agents are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes, working with or for humans. They range in capability from simple, prompt-and-response agents to agents that replace repetitive tasks to more advanced, fully autonomous agents. And with Copilot agents, you can do all this and more by bringing the power of agents right into the flow of your work. Copilot agents work for you in the background, fully managed and orchestrated by Copilot. Simple and secure to manage, all Copilot agents have the same Responsible AI and EDP promises—your data never leaves the Microsoft 365 trust boundary and everything happens within your tenant. You can also leverage pre-built agents like the new Visual creator agent, which helps you create AI-generated images, designs, and soon videos. 

To make it even easier to build Copilot agents, today we are announcing agent builder, a new, simplified experience powered by Copilot Studio.

Now anyone can quickly create a Copilot agent right in BizChat or SharePoint, unlocking the value of the vast knowledge repository stored in your SharePoint files. Imagine, for instance, firing up agent builder to build an agent right in the flow of your work in BizChat, quickly connecting it to SharePoint to power it with relevant business process data, and in moments you have a powerful knowledge resource you can share with your colleagues in Teams or Outlook. You can @ mention the agent as you would any other teammate, sharing new information and asking questions your agent answers in real time. If you want to build a more advanced agent from there, you can further customize it in Copilot Studio, deploying it to do things like connect to a data source or take actions on your behalf.

Copilot agents and agent builder in BizChat will be rolling out in general availability to all customers over the coming weeks. Copilot agents and agent builder in SharePoint will enter preview in early October. 

Customers experiencing the value of Copilot 

Over the past 18 months, working with Copilot has become a daily habit for people everywhere, helping them complete tasks faster, hold more purposeful meetings, collaborate more effectively, and streamline business processes. Copilot customers grew more than 60 percent quarter over quarter, while the number of people who used Copilot daily at work doubled. Just today, we announced that Vodafone invested in Copilot for 68,000 employees. Amgen uses Copilot to accelerate research on rare diseases. Customer service agents at Teladoc save up to five hours each week using Copilot to draft responses to common client questions. Marketers at Finastra use it to go from content ideation to production 75 percent faster. On average, Copilot users at Honeywell saved 92 minutes per week using Microsoft 365 Copilot, the equivalent of 74 hours over a full year of use.² 

“In the past, if we were building a major campaign like the Finance is Open campaign, it would’ve taken us three months to generate the content. We can do that now with Copilot in less than one.”

—Joerg Klueckmann, Head of Corporate Marketing and Communications, Finastra 

Looking ahead 

This is just the beginning of Wave 2 of Copilot innovation—in the next two months, we’ll be sharing more about how Copilot is supercharging productivity and accelerating business value for every customer. Stay tuned.   

Start using Copilot today—visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device.

For the latest research insights on the future of work and generative AI, visit WorkLab. 

Discover more with Microsoft 365 Copilot

The post Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2: Pages, Python in Excel, and agents appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Identifying a single destination for decision makers to find validated solutions for their organization, industry, or function is a game-changer for them. With a comprehensive set of solutions vetted by Microsoft and ready to deploy on the Microsoft Cloud, the Microsoft commercial marketplace is designed to make it easier for organizations to discover, try, purchase, and manage their cloud solutions in the era of AI. By consolidating purchases through the marketplace, business leaders can have confidence that partner solutions run on Azure and are preconfigured to deploy seamlessly. The marketplace enables organizations to manage their cloud portfolio in a single place with a centralized view, helping to increase efficiency.

Microsoft commercial marketplace

Discover an easier way to find the solutions you need

Shop the marketplace

At Microsoft Ignite 2024, experts will dive further into how the marketplace is transforming B2B commerce. We’ll also share what’s new with the marketplace and show how customers are using these capabilities to innovate faster.  

Find the right solution with confidence 

As Microsoft continues to invest in AI, more software development companies are building innovative solutions on the Microsoft Cloud AI stack and publishing them to the Microsoft commercial marketplace. With triple-digit annualized growth in AI and machine learning offers published,³ the marketplace offers a robust catalog that simplifies discovery of AI solutions such as copilot extensions, Microsoft Teams and Power BI plug-ins, Power Automate connectors, packaged SaaS applications, and more.

The marketplace also provides models as a service (MaaS) to help build AI applications faster and with the latest technology. Organizations can find cutting edge, ready-to-use models from partners like Cohere, Meta, and Mistral AI, as well as get the tools to work with large language models from partners like LangChain, Pinecone, and Unstructured. Models purchased through the marketplace can be deployed directly in Azure AI Studio. 

There are also a growing number of industry-specific solutions, which today comprise more than 40% of partner revenue through the marketplace.³ Thousands of marketplace solutions are tailored to businesses in energy, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail, transportation, and other industries.  

Check out these partner solutions to see how the marketplace can support unique industry needs:  

• Energy—Cognite Data Fusion: Cognite empowers industrial companies with contextualized, trustworthy, and accessible data to help drive the full-scale digital transformation of asset-heavy industries around the world. Their Data Fusion platform, which uses generative AI, big data, machine learning, and 3D modeling, contextualizes operational asset data at scale in real-time, enabling companies to make better decisions about maintenance, production, and safety.
• Manufacturing—Sight Machine on Azure: Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform creates a common data foundation by capturing and contextualizing data from the entire factory to deliver a systemwide view of the end-to-end manufacturing process. With systemwide visibility and AI-powered insights, manufacturers can scale optimal efficiency, quality, and sustainability solutions across entire production processes, multi-factory sites, and even extend the impact to their broader supply and value chains.
• Retail—Blue Yonder Category Management: Blue Yonder supports retailers and suppliers to improve return on inventory and space with AI-powered category management. Automation and data science drive accuracy and improve efficiencies so organizations can respond to rapid changes in demand and industry changes. 

Many industry solutions are built on the Microsoft Industry Clouds, which help organizations further maximize their cloud portfolio. Microsoft Industry Clouds leverage industry-specific common data models for data interoperability across applications and platforms. This means data can move seamlessly in the Azure environment and be utilized for any number of tasks like training generative AI models. 

To make it easier for businesses to confidently choose proven solutions, Microsoft introduced a new Solutions Partner with certified software designation. Partners obtain this designation for customer solution areas including Azure and Security but also for Industry AI solutions across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and sustainability. Designated Industry AI solutions have a demonstrated track record of customer success, align to Microsoft Industry Clouds, and have undergone a technical review to ensure the solution interoperates with Microsoft products and meets industry-specific AI requirements. While “certified software” badging is available in the marketplace today, filtering capabilities will soon be introduced to make it easier for organizations to identify these solutions. 

Simplify purchasing to save time and move faster 

The Microsoft commercial marketplace extends beyond a storefront to help organizations simplify purchasing so they can move faster. In a 2023 Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Microsoft, Forrester Consulting found the marketplace improved time savings for the payments and finance purchasing teams by 30%, as those teams leveraged marketplace features such as automated invoicing and billing systems. Using the marketplace also reduced the time required to onboard new vendors by 75%, meaning new technology solutions could be deployed sooner. Vendors can submit required documentation and access guidance and tools directly in the marketplace, reducing the administrative burden of reviewing paperwork and walking vendors through new processes. 

The ability to move faster doesn’t mean organizations sacrifice flexibility and savings. The marketplace supports free trials and proofs-of-concept so teams can evaluate solutions to ensure they align with business needs before investing. Licenses can also be turned on and off to assess value prior to making larger commitments.  

Additionally, the marketplace allows organizations to purchase solutions in the ways that work best for them, whether that’s self-service online, through a preferred channel partner with multiparty private offers, or with a Microsoft account team. For businesses that require or request implementation services for their solution, professional services can now be added to a private offer, streamlining the buying experience by merging everything onto the Azure invoice.  

For organizations with a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), a contract that provides discounts on Azure infrastructure, they can count 100% of eligible marketplace purchases towards that commitment, ensuring more value for their investment. Azure benefit-eligible solutions have undergone additional technical validation from Microsoft and are easily identifiable directly in the marketplace. 

Get started with the marketplace 

The Microsoft commercial marketplace is accelerating the era of AI by helping organizations find and deploy the cloud and AI solutions they need in a way that simplifies purchasing, maximizes investments, and unifies data. As organizations across industries look to solve business and technology needs, the marketplace provides access to a comprehensive catalog of solutions and makes it easy to buy with confidence.

• Start discovering solutions in Azure Marketplace.
• Check out the marketplace ebook on how to get started.

Join us at Microsoft Ignite for marketplace sessions tailored to customers, software companies, and partners to learn more about how to get started and find success. For those attending in Chicago, marketplace experts will be available to answer questions in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program area of the Hub floor throughout the week. 

• Register to attend Ignite virtually. 

• Attend the Ignite session for customers (BRK125). 

• Attend the Ignite sessions for software companies and partners (BRK343, BRK344, BRK350, THR679, and THR681). 

¹ McKinsey Global Survey, The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value, May 30, 2024.

² Custify, The Future of SaaS: Top Trends and Predictions in 2024 and Beyond, July 12, 2024. 

³ Microsoft internal data  

The post Discover innovative AI solutions with the Microsoft commercial marketplace appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Today, we’re announcing Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT, which will expand the ways researchers can harness the full power of this platform. These breakthrough capabilities will empower scientists to compress the next 250 years of chemistry into the next 25.

With Generative Chemistry, we want to broaden the horizons of scientific exploration. Researchers can generate and explore novel molecules suited for specific industry applications using the latest AI models trained on hundreds of millions of compounds, and then evaluate the steps suggested by the workflow for synthesizing the most promising candidates in a lab more efficiently — all in a matter of days rather than years.

With Accelerated DFT, researchers can expedite and scale their chemical discovery pipelines by simulating the quantum-mechanical properties of molecules at an unprecedented speed — an order of magnitude faster compared to other Density Functional Theory (DFT) codes.

This brings us closer to a new paradigm for scientific discovery, where advanced AI and digital tools are more accessible than ever to scientists, students, and labs across industries. Below is our vision for how researchers will be able to leverage these breakthrough capabilities to design new molecules and enable the transformation of entire sectors from consumer goods and medicine, to manufacturing and energy, in turn addressing some of our most pressing societal challenges.

We’re working towards this vision today. As part of the private preview of Azure Quantum Elements, scientists and developers have the opportunity to explore Accelerated DFT today, with the potential to access Generative Chemistry in the coming weeks.

We’re already putting our vision into practice by collaborating with Unilever, a global leader in consumer goods, which serves over 3.4 billion people every single day. Unilever is harnessing the power of Microsoft supercomputing and AI services to support their digital R&D transformation and product innovation.

Integrating AI into every stage of the scientific method

From global ambitions like reversing climate change and pioneering renewable energy sources to personal ones like living more sustainably and using healthier and safer products, we all want to do our part to create a better world. Time is of the essence for many of these goals, with more than 8 million scientists¹ around the globe working to pioneer innovative solutions and unlock progress. At Microsoft, we aim to empower them with state-of-the-art digital tools to harness the full collective ingenuity of every researcher and lab around the world.

Just as generative AI has unleashed new waves of creativity and improved productivity with collaborative tools like Copilot, we are now bringing AI and natural language processing capabilities to science. Our goal is to integrate AI reasoning into every stage of the scientific method: this requires the power of next-generation AI models to speed up the scientific process from hypothesis to results. It starts with knowledge research and hypothesis generation, connecting the dots by generating millions of potential molecular candidate solutions, then narrowing down candidates with digital experiments and analyzing the outcomes — all in a matter of days. We demonstrated how this approach can land real-world results in our collaboration with PNNL, where we screened over 32 million candidates to discover and synthesize a new material that holds the potential for better batteries — a tangible example of the possibilities in this new era of scientific discovery.

When powered by natural language tools, this new paradigm will help create an autonomous reasoning loop with AI at every stage as a scientific assistant. It will redefine how we approach innovation by democratizing these capabilities for breakthrough discoveries.

Announcing new capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements

Generative Chemistry will unleash a new wave of creativity for scientists tasked with discovering and designing new molecules. This will enable breakthrough growth across many industries, whether helping an oil and gas company discover a stronger fuel additive for enhancing the longevity of engine life, or an adhesive firm creating a new chemical for strengthening adhesion while removing unwanted residue.

We could compare this discovery process to searching for a small box in a large, crowded and dark warehouse with one small flashlight. We can only focus the light on a small area at a time while the rest of the warehouse remains completely dark and unknown. Generative AI gives us a much smarter light that can point in new directions, providing visibility where we may not have considered – or have been able – to look before.

Researchers can ask Generative Chemistry for molecules with desired characteristics, such as the ability to degrade rapidly or be recycled more easily. They can also provide information about their targeted application and let the system help determine relevant molecular properties. After a few more steps, they receive a set of candidates — matching those parameters — for further study.

However, simply generating candidates is not sufficient for transforming the discovery process with AI. The essential criteria for computational tools in chemistry are that they help scientists discover molecules that are novel, synthesizable and useful in the real world. This is why I’m excited to see our approach to Generative Chemistry come to life, suggesting molecules that have not been seen before, with useful properties tuned for a specific application, and whose synthesis is feasible in a reasonable number of steps.

For this reason, Generative Chemistry will offer researchers potential steps to consider as they develop their “recipe” for synthesizing these molecular candidates in a laboratory. Support for this critical component has been developed from the capabilities of our AutoRXN software, exploring chemical reactions in reverse order, which can help to evaluate synthesis pathways for creating a target molecule.

This capability is truly groundbreaking for scientific discovery. Businesses and research groups can look for efficient, cost-effective and innovative methods to develop new molecules in a matter of days, compressing the iterative process of extensive database searches and trial-and-error laboratory experiments. This end-to-end workflow will provide scientists with entirely new compounds that could lead to the next breakthrough in manufacturing, medicine and more.

We’re also announcing Accelerated DFT to offer a simplified and more powerful quantum chemistry solution for scientists. For the past few decades, DFT has been an extremely popular method used across a variety of molecular simulations, helping researchers to simulate and study the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and nanoparticles, as well as surfaces and interfaces.

We can liken molecular systems to traffic systems, where cars moving in various directions at different speeds represent electrons. From a traffic helicopter, we can observe the overall flow of traffic even if we don’t know each car’s speed and destination. DFT provides this “helicopter view’” of molecular systems, simplifying the complex task of tracking individual electrons by instead mapping out the “density” of them at a higher altitude.

Such DFT simulations can be complex to optimize and run, and often require supercomputer-scale resources. This is why our managed DFT service, based on innovation developed by Microsoft Research, enables researchers to perform substantially faster calculations than other DFT codes and offers a 20-fold average increase in speed compared to PySCF, a widely used open-source DFT code.

Accelerated DFT is already used by many organizations such as AspenTech, DTU Energy University of Denmark and Unilever. It seamlessly integrates into broader chemistry and materials science workflows, and paves the way for expediting innovations in therapeutics, environmental sustainability and beyond.

You can learn more about this announcement in the technical blog, Introducing two powerful new capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements: Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT.

Pioneering a new scientific discovery paradigm with Unilever

Unilever stands at the forefront of the consumer goods industry, with a strong portfolio of household brands that are used by 3.4 billion people every day, including Dove, TRESemmé, Omo, Degree, Hellmann’s and Ben & Jerry’s. Whether cleaning, beauty or care products, each requires the latest scientific breakthroughs to ensure the best possible consumer experience and enhance daily life.

Over the past two and a half years, Unilever has worked with Microsoft to identify new digital capabilities to drive product innovation forward. Unilever is bringing its digital vision to life through the transformational DataLab — its digital counterpart to the company’s physical laboratories — with the help of Microsoft Azure. From unlocking the secrets of our skin’s microbiome to reducing the carbon footprint of a multi-billion-dollar business, Unilever is redefining what it means to be a consumer goods company in the modern world with leading science.

With Copilot and the advanced simulation capabilities of Azure Quantum Elements, Unilever can query scientific information using natural language, performing thousands of computational simulations in the time it would take to run tens of laboratory experiments. Unilever scientists can use the data gathered from these simulations to fine-tune models that screen tens of thousands of materials at substantial speed or enable the exploration of intricate chemical reactions.

For example, R&D teams can expand their search space for novel molecules that restore natural bonds in hair fibers across more hair types, in turn redefining the standards of personalized hair care for brands like Dove and TRESemmé. Furthermore, by placing scaled simulations at the forefront of the discovery funnel, Unilever will be further empowered to expedite the delivery of solutions within their key sustainability focus areas.

“Digital tools are unlocking an unprecedented age of scientific discovery. Using advanced computing power and AI, we are able to compress decades of lab work into days, accessing a level of insight we could not previously have imagined. This technological leap, coupled with our vast repository of proprietary data and a century of expertise in personal and household care, means our scientists are able to lead the industry in developing the next generation of consumer goods.”
— Alberto Prado, Global Head of R&D Digital and Partnerships at Unilever

Expanding quantum capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements

We stand on the cusp of unprecedented innovation, and at Microsoft, we continue to pioneer state-of-the-art solutions to usher in a new era of scientific discovery. We remain focused on achieving scaled quantum computing and more breakthroughs on our path to engineering our topological qubits with inherent hardware-level stability.

Earlier this year, we demonstrated with Quantinuum the most reliable logical qubits on record, further advancing the state-of-the-art for quantum computing. And recently, we simulated a chemical catalyst combining classical supercomputers, AI and logical qubits created with Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system and Quantinuum’s H1 hardware. This combination holds the key to unlocking scientific breakthroughs enabled by a new generation of hybrid-computing applications.

In the coming months, we will bring advanced logical qubit capabilities using our software and Quantinuum’s hardware in private preview in Azure Quantum Elements. As logical qubit capabilities scale to deliver increasingly reliable results, we will unlock simulation accuracy, moving us from scientific advantage to commercial advantage, and ultimately to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Accelerating scientific discovery, together

We’re committed to advancing these technologies responsibly, always focusing on innovation, empowerment and trust. That’s why we are committed to responsible computing practices and the Microsoft AI principles, to help ensure that safety measures adequately account for the increasing power of AI and quantum.

For more information about today’s announcements:

• Sign up to learn more about Accelerated DFT and Generative Chemistry, as part of the private preview of Azure Quantum Elements.
• Read the technical blog, Introducing two powerful new capabilities in Azure Quantum Elements: Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT.
• Register for our upcoming ACS Webinar
• Check out the upcoming Future of Cloud webinar series about our vision to accelerate scientific discovery for business innovation.

Top image: Leaders from Unilever and Microsoft discuss the Azure Quantum Elements program.

Sources

1. “Statistics and resources | 2021 Science Report.” This translates into 8.854 million full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers by 2018”.

The post Empowering every scientist with AI-augmented scientific discovery appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Since then, the threat landscape has continued to rapidly evolve, and we have learned a lot. The recent findings by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) regarding the Storm-0558 cyberattack from last July, and the Midnight Blizzard attack we reported in January, underscore the severity of the threats facing our company and our customers.

Microsoft plays a central role in the world’s digital ecosystem, and this comes with a critical responsibility to earn and maintain trust. We must and will do more.

We are making security our top priority at Microsoft, above all else—over all other features. We’re expanding the scope of SFI, integrating the recent recommendations from the CSRB as well as our learnings from Midnight Blizzard to ensure that our cybersecurity approach remains robust and adaptive to the evolving threat landscape.

We will mobilize the expanded SFI pillars and goals across Microsoft and this will be a dimension in our hiring decisions. In addition, we will instill accountability by basing part of the compensation of the company’s Senior Leadership Team on our progress in meeting our security plans and milestones.

Below are details to demonstrate the seriousness of our work and commitment.

Diagram illustrating the six pillars of the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative.
Expansion of SFI approach and scope
We have evolved our security approach, and going forward our work will be guided by the following three security principles:

Secure by design: Security comes first when designing any product or service.
Secure by default: Security protections are enabled and enforced by default, require no extra effort, and are not optional.
Secure operations: Security controls and monitoring will continuously be improved to meet current and future threats.
We are further expanding our goals and actions aligned to six prioritized security pillars and providing visibility into the details of our execution:

1. Protect identities and secrets
   Reduce the risk of unauthorized access by implementing and enforcing best-in-class standards across all identity and secrets infrastructure, and user and application authentication and authorization. As part of this, we are taking the following actions:

Protect identity infrastructure signing and platform keys with rapid and automatic rotation with hardware storage and protection (for example, hardware security module (HSM) and confidential compute).
Strengthen identity standards and drive their adoption through use of standard SDKs across 100% of applications.
Ensure 100% of user accounts are protected with securely managed, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication.
Ensure 100% of applications are protected with system-managed credentials (for example, Managed Identity and Managed Certificates).
Ensure 100% of identity tokens are protected with stateful and durable validation.
Adopt more fine-grained partitioning of identity signing keys and platform keys.
Ensure identity and public key infrastructure (PKI) systems are ready for a post-quantum cryptography world.

2. Protect tenants and isolate production systems
   Protect all Microsoft tenants and production environments using consistent, best-in-class security practices and strict isolation to minimize breadth of impact. As part of this, we are taking the following actions:

Maintain the security posture and commercial relationships of tenants by removing all unused, aged, or legacy systems.
Protect 100% of Microsoft, acquired, and employee-created tenants, commerce accounts, and tenant resources to the security best practice baselines.
Manage 100% of Microsoft Entra ID applications to a high, consistent security bar.
Eliminate 100% of identity lateral movement pivots between tenants, environments, and clouds.
100% of applications and users have continuous least-privilege access enforcement.
Ensure only secure, managed, healthy devices will be granted access to Microsoft tenants.

3. Protect networks
   Protect Microsoft production networks and implement network isolation of Microsoft and customer resources. As part of this, we are taking the following actions:

Secure 100% of Microsoft production networks and systems connected to the networks by improving isolation, monitoring, inventory, and secure operations.
Apply network isolation and microsegmentation to 100% of the Microsoft production environments, creating additional layers of defense against attackers.
Enable customers to easily secure their networks and network isolate resources in the cloud.

4. Protect engineering systems
   Protect software assets and continuously improve code security through governance of the software supply chain and engineering systems infrastructure. As part of this, we are taking the following actions:

Build and maintain inventory for 100% of the software assets used to deploy and operate Microsoft products and services.
100% of access to source code and engineering systems infrastructure is secured through Zero Trust and least-privilege access policies.
100% of source code that deploys to Microsoft production environments is protected through security best practices.
Secure development, build, test, and release environments with 100% standardized, governed pipelines and infrastructure isolation.
Secure the software supply chain to protect Microsoft production environments.

5. Monitor and detect threats
   Comprehensive coverage and automatic detection of threats to Microsoft production infrastructure and services. As part of this, we are taking the following actions:

Maintain a current inventory across 100% of Microsoft production infrastructure and services.
Retain 100% of security logs for at least two years and make six months of appropriate logs available to customers.
100% of security logs are accessible from a central data lake to enable efficient and effective security investigation and threat hunting.
Automatically detect and respond rapidly to anomalous access, behaviors, and configurations across 100% of Microsoft production infrastructure and services.

6. Accelerate response and remediation
   Prevent exploitation of vulnerabilities discovered by external and internal entities, through comprehensive and timely remediation. As part of this, we are taking the following actions:

Reduce the Time to Mitigate for high-severity cloud security vulnerabilities with accelerated response.
Increase transparency of mitigated cloud vulnerabilities through the adoption and release of Common Weakness Enumeration™ (CWE™), and Common Platform Enumeration™ (CPE™) industry standards for released high severity Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) affecting the cloud.
Improve the accuracy, effectiveness, transparency, and velocity of public messaging and customer engagement.
These goals directly align to our learnings from the Midnight Blizzard incident as well as all four CSRB recommendations to Microsoft and all 12 recommendations to cloud service providers (CSPs), across the areas of security culture, cybersecurity best practices, auditing logging norms, digital identity standards and guidance, and transparency.

We are delivering on these goals through a new level of coordination with a new operating model that aligns leaders and teams to the six SFI pillars, in order to drive security holistically and break down traditional silos. The pillar leaders are working across engineering Executive Vice Presidents (EVPs) to drive integrated, cross-company engineering execution, doing this work in waves. These engineering waves involve teams across Microsoft Azure, Windows, Microsoft 365, and Security, with additional product teams integrating into the process weekly.

While there is much more to do, we’ve made progress in executing against SFI priorities. For example, we’ve implemented automatic enforcement of multifactor authentication by default across more than one million Microsoft Entra ID tenants within Microsoft, including tenants for development, testing, demos, and production. We have eliminated or reduced application targets by removing 730,000 apps to date across production and corporate tenants that were out-of-lifecycle or not meeting current SFI standards. We have expanded our logging to give customers deeper visibility. And we recently announced a significant shift on our response process: We are now publishing root cause data for Microsoft CVEs using the CWE™ industry standard.

Adhering to standards with paved paths systems
Paved paths are best practices from our learned experiences, drawing upon lessons such as how to optimize productivity of our software development and operations, how to achieve compliance (such as Software Bill of Materials, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, General Data Protection Regulation, and others), and how to eliminate entire categories of vulnerabilities and mitigate related risks. A paved path becomes a standard when adoption significantly improves the developer or operations experience or security, quality, or compliance.

With SFI, we are explicitly defining standards for each of the six security pillars, and adherence to these standards will be measured as objectives and key results (OKRs).

Driving continuous improvement
The Secure Future Initiative empowers all of Microsoft to implement the needed changes to deliver security first. Our company culture is based on a growth mindset that fosters an ethos of continuous improvement. We continually seek feedback and new perspectives to tune our approach and progress. We will take our learnings from security incidents, feed them back into our security standards, and operationalize these learnings as paved paths that can enable secure design and operations at scale.

Instituting new governance
We are also taking major steps to elevate security governance, including several organizational changes and additional oversight, controls, and reporting.

Microsoft is implementing a new security governance framework spearheaded by the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). This framework introduces a partnership between engineering teams and newly formed Deputy CISOs, collectively responsible for overseeing SFI, managing risks, and reporting progress directly to the Senior Leadership Team. Progress will be reviewed weekly with this executive forum and quarterly with our Board of Directors.

Finally, given the importance of threat intelligence, we are bringing the full breadth of nation-state actor and threat hunting capabilities into the CISO organization.

Instilling a security-first culture
Culture can only be reinforced through our daily behaviors. Security is a team sport and is best realized when organizational boundaries are overcome. The engineering EVPs, in close coordination with SFI pillar leaders, are holding broadscale weekly and monthly operational meetings that include all levels of management and senior individual contributors. These meetings work on detailed execution and continuous improvement of security in context with what we collectively deliver to customers. Through this process of bottom-to-top and end-to-end problem solving, security thinking is ingrained in our daily behaviors.

Ultimately, Microsoft runs on trust and this trust must be earned and maintained. As a global provider of software, infrastructure, and cloud services, we feel a deep responsibility to do our part to keep the world safe and secure. Our promise is to continually improve and adapt to the evolving needs of cybersecurity. This is job number one for us.

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