At the heart of this initiative are industry prompts in Copilot Lab and industry templates in Microsoft Copilot Studio—two platforms tailored to meet the unique demands of various businesses. These platforms are not just about providing tools; they’re about delivering a seamless experience that aligns with our customers’ operational workflows, enhancing productivity and fostering creativity.

Copilot Lab serves as a portal for innovation, offering diverse industry prompts that cater to the specific needs of job functions and industries. Getting up to speed on AI prompts can be challenging from both a technical and practical standpoint. If AI prompts are vague or lack necessary details, AI models can produce off-target responses. Copilot Lab provides a repository of prompts that resonate with industry professionals, enabling them to generate meaningful outcomes with Microsoft Copilot’s assistance.

Copilot Studio includes industry copilot templates that can simplify the adoption process for businesses. These templates incorporate industry-specific business logic and custom prompts that streamline operations and decision-making processes. These templates, available in the Copilot Studio Gallery, represent fully working copilots that often only require configuration or integration for an organization to adopt them.

As we continue to build and co-create, our vision is to not only enhance the capabilities of Microsoft Industry Clouds but also to help redefine the way industries operate. By providing accelerators that drive mainstream adoption and co-building with industry partners, we’re setting a new standard for industry solutions.

Copilot Lab

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Industry AI prompts in Copilot Lab

In our continuous pursuit of empowering organizations across various industries, Microsoft has introduced a suite of industry-specific prompts within Copilot Lab. These prompts are a culmination of our efforts to provide a more context-aware AI experience that leverages users’ domain expertise to drive better outcomes. Our new industry prompts help customers quickly get started using Copilot for sector, job, and role-specific scenarios and can be customized with domain-specific details, best practices, and industry context to reduce trial and error and ensure high-quality output. These prompts can create an interactive experience for sector-, job-, and role-specific users, which can enhance prompts and deliver tailored responses, continually improving based on user interactions.

The genesis of these prompts was a collaborative effort, drawing on insights from industry professionals to ensure quality and relevance. The initiative begins with the financial services, retail, and manufacturing industries, introducing 24 industry-specific prompts within Copilot Lab, marking the start of a broader vision to integrate industry-specific intelligence into business operations.

These prompts are readily accessible in Copilot Lab, where users can select prompts that resonate with their professional needs. They are designed to help users ask relevant and specific questions, enabling Copilot to generate insights from data that are finely tuned to their industry’s nuances.

The introduction of these prompts is part of our broader vision to bring industry-specific intelligence to the forefront of business operations. By providing these tailored tools, we aim to enhance productivity and foster innovation within the Microsoft 365 environment.

Accessing these prompts is simple. Within Copilot Lab, a collection of pre-built prompts categorized by industry. Users can select the one that fits their role, and let Copilot do the rest. Users can further customize the prompts with domain-specific details and best practices.

Industry copilot templates in Copilot Studio

Industry copilot templates in Copilot Studio help users streamline the adoption of AI solutions across various sectors, providing pre-built dialogs, intents, entities, prompts, and actions that can be easily customized and extended according to the user’s needs using a low-code/no-code experience.

The templates offer a quick and efficient way to get started with AI, with configurations and rollout typically taking only a few hours. They include publicly accessible and customizable data sources, allowing customers to change the default data source with their own to get the copilot ready for business. This feature is particularly beneficial for industries that require rapid deployment and flexibility, such as retail and sustainability.

For instance, the sustainability insights template in Microsoft Copilot Studio empowers users with easy access to data and insights regarding a company’s sustainability goals and progress, while the copilot template for store operations is designed to enhance the efficiency of retail frontline workers by providing easy access to store procedures and policies. These templates were part of the Microsoft Copilot template gallery unveiled at Microsoft Build 2024 and represent Microsoft’s commitment to empowering users with AI tools that are both powerful and adaptable to their specific industry needs.

Copilot Studio is available worldwide, across 22 datacenters, and supports multi-lingual experiences, making it a versatile tool for global enterprises. The studio’s capabilities are continually expanding, with support for 23 languages and growing, helping to ensure that users can build solutions and respond in their preferred language.

For more detailed information on how to utilize these new features and to stay updated on future releases, users can refer to the resources provided by Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Learn more about industry-specific AI tools

Microsoft remains dedicated to empowering customers through innovation. Our latest offerings in Copilot Lab and Copilot Studio reflect our commitment to providing industry-specific AI tools that are not only powerful but also intuitive and accessible. By continually investing in these technologies, we aim to help ensure that organizations, regardless of size or sector, can harness the full potential of AI to drive efficiency, creativity, and growth.

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Learn how to use Microsoft Copilot based on your role

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Get started by exploring detailed guides and information on our industry prompts and templates at Copilot Lab and Copilot Studio. Learn more and stay informed about Microsoft’s advancements in AI by exploring Copilot for Microsoft 365 Tech Community Blog and the Microsoft Industry Blog for insightful articles, or discover more at Copilot learning hub. Together, let’s shape the future of industry innovation with AI.

The post Innovating at the speed of AI: Microsoft’s industry Copilot solutions 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.

So when it comes to refueling her body after a long day, Delacruz has no interest in scrolling through endless recipes. Instead, she turns to AI for help and recently made a tasty chicken stir-fry.

“I’ll say, ‘Give me high-protein dinner ideas that are sports dietitian-approved’ for very specific results, so I don’t get a million dinner ideas,” says Delacruz. “It’s been fun to explore, because I feel like I get in a rut with dinner.”

Using AI to learn about nutrition is just one part of a new technology project that Delacruz and other women athletes are participating in to help improve their well-being, performance and careers as they train for a spot at the Olympics or Paralympics. Or, in the case of Delacruz, who recently qualified, a spot on the podium.

The athletes are using Microsoft tools for research, data analysis and more with expertise from Parity, a sports marketing and sponsorship organization focused on closing the gender income gap in professional sports. The company connects women athletes with high-profile brands, including Microsoft.

“Generative AI has the ability to democratize access to a lot of capabilities like data analytics that have been fairly expensive to access, and things that are expensive to access are typically not available to women athletes,” says Phillippa Thomson, chief data scientist at Parity. “Microsoft is an amazing partner, in that we’re very aligned in how we think about equity in sports.”

The athletes were already tracking their performance data with their coaches, so Thomson is largely helping them analyze things outside the gym: sleep, nutrition, mood and self-care. They’re logging their data in Microsoft Excel for Thomson to analyze, as well as using Microsoft Copilot to make their busy lives a little easier. Thomson also looks forward to helping the athletes use Copilot in Excel so they can explore data trends themselves without having to be statistics experts.

“The benefit of this particular project is that the barrier to entry to start using data with Microsoft products is very low, because they’re designed to be accessible to a lot of people,” she says.

Jourdan DelacruzJourdan DelacruzJourdan Delacruz

“I hope I’m inspiring girls and women to try strength-based sports.”

“I hope I’m inspiring girls and women to try strength-based sports.”“I hope I’m inspiring girls and women to try strength-based sports.”

For Delacruz, who competed at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, tracking well-being data is a way to holistically improve her performance, whether it’s sleeping better, practicing mindfulness or logging her nutrition more accurately. In addition to researching recipes with Copilot, she found new stretching exercises with the tool.

Her use of digital technology also reflects her passion for science and advocacy for women athletes. A registered dietician student and founder of the platform Herathlete, Delacruz wants to give evidence-based sports nutrition and performance support to women athletes and address issues affecting them like menstrual cycles and bone density. She says data analytics is important for competitive performance and keeping athletes safe and healthy.

“Having more women in STEM and sports science means we can study more of these topics,” says Delacruz, who wants to be a role model for all women.

“I hope I’m inspiring girls and women to try strength-based sports,” she says. “Even if you don’t want to do weightlifting full-time, it’s great when a woman is stronger.”

Samantha BoscoSamantha BoscoSamantha Bosco

“I feel the most at home and capable when I’m on my bike. It makes me feel the strongest.”

“I feel the most at home and capable when I’m on my bike. It makes me“I feel the most at home and capable when I’m on my bike. It makes me
feel the strongest.”feel the strongest.”

A self-proclaimed “data nerd,” Paralympic and world champion cyclist Samantha Bosco wears a sleep tracker, logs her macronutrients and pores over biometric and bike data in a push to get to the Paris Paralympics. The analytics are helping her make incremental improvements like figuring out how much protein she needs for recovery and how much hydration she needs to sleep well.

“It’s helped with really fine-tuning those little things that add up,” she says. “It keeps my motivation up and reminds me of why I’m tracking the data in the first place.”

Bosco has long embraced digital technology like analytics to facilitate her achievements, which include multiple world championship gold medals and two Paralympic bronze medals in 2016. She also qualified for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics but didn’t participate due to a serious cycling accident.

These days, Bosco often turns to Copilot to learn new ways to improve health and fitness. She has used it to discover new mobility exercises, jokes to relieve stress, songs for workouts, tips for improving sleep and vegan restaurant recommendations when she travels. She’s eager to try the tool in Excel, despite being a spreadsheet expert with a master’s degree in accounting.

“I think having it be my data assistant to help free up some time is exciting,” she says. “It can help take off the stress of having to figure things out yourself.”

Bosco’s goals as a Paralympian aren’t just about being an athlete but also an advocate for people with disabilities. Born with a bowed tibia, she had several surgeries to address the condition that left her with a shorter, atrophied leg. She spent three years on crutches as a child and developed her love of cycling and competing through bike rides with her dad.

“I feel the most at home and capable when I’m on my bike. It makes me feel the strongest,” she says. “My parents were really big on not letting my disability define me, so I feel like I’m an advocate by showing people that they’re capable of so many things.”

Kendall EllisKendall EllisKendall Ellis

“As someone who was a little resistant with AI, I’ve found that Copilot has shown me the convenience of having a fast answer to my questions and helpful feedback to my creative blocks.”

“As someone who was a little resistant with AI, I’ve found that Copilot“As someone who was a little resistant with AI, I’ve found that Copilot
has shown me the convenience of having a fast answer to my questionshas shown me the convenience of having a fast answer to my questions
and helpful feedback to my creative blocks.”and helpful feedback to my creative blocks.”

For Olympic medalist and sprinter Kendall Ellis, tracking her mood and daily activities has helped reinforce good habits for mental health. A gold and bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Ellis has talked openly about her anxiety, which emerged in childhood as panic attacks before competitions and often involved a lot of negative self-talk.

Analyzing her mood and time spent sleeping, using social media and hanging out with friends have helped Ellis realize the importance of connecting with loved ones. The project has motivated her to be more deliberate in getting together with people who make her feel good.

“As an introvert, I do like spending time alone, and often we’re told as athletes that anything outside of our sport is a distraction,” says Ellis, a 400-meter specialist. “But I also enjoy hanging out with my friends, and it’s nice to have the data to support that. I think the brain loves a logical response to things.”

She also spends less time on social media and makes a point of seeing friends before a competition, when she often feels her anxiety rising despite being ranked among the world’s best athletes. The changes have helped her feel more confident and enjoy her sport more.

“The data gives me support to lean into the things I enjoy and that helps me go into competition with a clear head and a happy space,” she says.

The Parity project has even helped Ellis be more comfortable around AI: One of the first things she did was ask Copilot how to use Copilot. She also asks the AI tool for content ideas for her social media, which makes the creative part of building her following easier when she feels stuck.

“As someone who was a little resistant with AI, I’ve found that Copilot has shown me the convenience of having a fast answer to my questions and helpful feedback to my creative blocks,” she says.

Skyler EspinozaSkyler EspinozaSkyler Espinoza

“Cycling is a cool environment for us to push our limits and learn about ourselves, and I think this data project has been very helpful for that self-reflection.”

“Cycling is a cool environment for us to push our limits and learn about“Cycling is a cool environment for us to push our limits and learn about
ourselves, and I think this data project has been very helpful for that self-ourselves, and I think this data project has been very helpful for that self-
reflection.”reflection.”

Tandem cyclist Skyler Espinoza was initially skeptical of tracking her well-being data. Her training as a guide for the U.S. Paralympic Trials was already heavily measured, and the idea of tracking more data felt stressful.

But working with Parity allowed her to customize the metrics she wants to analyze, such as her resting heart rate, mood and time spent at home or on the road. She also tracks words she uses when journaling notes in Excel about daily things like having a nice dinner or walking in the sun.

After seeing her trend of lower moods when she travels, she has become more intentional about self-care, like packing a nutritious dinner for a long flight or spending time in nature.

“It’s been helpful to be more cognizant of what I can do to make a travel day less stressful and actions I can take to make my mental health better,” says Espinoza, an able-bodied guide for her tandem partner, Hannah Chadwick, who has a visual disability.

Espinoza is also building a sports community through her writing and asked Copilot for help on a post about supporting teammates after this year’s para-cycling world championship. She and Chadwick had strong performances as a tandem pair but had to compete against their U.S. teammates, a difficult part of international events. The tool generated a draft that helped her create a compassionate post on a tough topic.

“I’m still learning about AI, and I’m definitely curious about using it as a tool for creativity,” she says.

The digital tools are paving the way for Espinoza to reach her goals of being a supportive guide for her partner, enjoying her career, growing as an athlete and making the Paralympics.

“Keeping Hannah safe and making her feel empowered are big goals of mine, but I also want to see how this changes me,” she says. “Cycling is a cool environment for us to push our limits and learn about ourselves, and I think this data project has been very helpful for that self-reflection.”

Lead photo: Jourdan Delacruz lifts weights at a gym in Lawrenceville, Georgia. (DV Photo Video)

The post How world-class athletes are turning to the power of AI and data appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy in the era of AI

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

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Better data means better AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upskilling empowers employees to adapt to AI transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Microsoft on our AI journey

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

Making legal departments more efficient with AI

Learn from our journey

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

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

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

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

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

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AI’s transformative power is now evident globally. Deemed a technology of the future not long ago, AI-powered business transformation is unfolding across all sectors. It’s clear that mastering AI is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge, and Japan has risen to this challenge. Bolstered by robust infrastructure, advanced technological capabilities, and significant government support for AI initiatives, Japan ranks second on the Asia-Pacific AI Readiness Index.¹

To support this progress, Microsoft plans to invest $2.9 billion over the next two years to expand hyperscale cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Japan. This marks the largest investment Microsoft has made in Japan since it opened its first international office there 46 years ago.

The investment also emphasizes AI digital skilling, which Microsoft aims to provide to more than 3 million people in Japan within three years, targeting full-time and part-time workers, developers, students, and especially women. In partnership with Japan’s government, we will open the first Microsoft Research Asia Lab in Tokyo. Here, we’ll focus on embodied AI, societal AI wellbeing, and scientific discovery aimed at strengthening cybersecurity defenses in response to Japan’s updated National Security Strategy.

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Microsoft’s expanded initiatives and partnerships with educational, governmental, and private organizations in Japan are poised to enhance AI capabilities across various sectors and amplify the societal benefits and economic growth that are already part of Japan’s culture of innovation. I’m excited to showcase some of the very organizations that are contributing to AI leadership, not only in Japan or Asia, but globally.

Dentsu unlocks employee creativity with Microsoft Copilot support

Dentsu, a global leader in creative media with a 120-year history and 72,000 employees, has effectively integrated Microsoft Copilot into its operations to tackle the increasing demand for high-quality content across multiple channels. As part of this integration, Copilot has been deployed to automate routine tasks such as email management and meeting recaps, and to enhance creative processes through faster ideation and content visualization. This strategic deployment also includes Microsoft Teams Premium, which offers features like intelligent recap and real-time translations, optimizing communication across dentsu’s global teams.

The adoption of these AI tools has significantly benefited dentsu employees by reducing the time spent on administrative tasks, thereby allowing more time for creative and strategic work. For instance, the automation provided by Copilot has saved employees approximately up to 60 minutes per day, translating into substantial productivity gains across the company. These efficiency improvements have also led to superior creative outputs, enabling dentsu to maintain its competitive edge in the fast-paced media industry.

“We started using Copilot with the hypothesis that it would elevate our people’s potential and bring additional value to our clients. I am delighted our high expectations proved to be accurate based on survey data and insights as we work to broaden access to this and other generative AI technologies,” said Brian Klochkoff, Executive Vice President, Innovation & Emerging Technologies at dentsu.

Moreover, the integration of AI has facilitated a cultural shift within dentsu, fostering an environment where technology enhances creativity rather than replacing it. The company continues to explore new AI capabilities through initiatives like Microsoft Copilot Studio, aiming to expand the use of AI across various functions to further streamline operations and enhance creative capabilities.

Recruit Co., Ltd. uses conversational AI to address nuanced customer requests

Recruit Co., Ltd., a prominent human resources technology company, has implemented a conversational AI user interface for Jalan.net, one of Japan’s leading travel booking platforms, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Initiated in May 2023, this innovative application aims to quickly gather user feedback and adapt to customer needs not typically met by conventional search functions.

As a result, user interactions on Jalan.net have been significantly enhanced through more dynamic exchanges that accommodate nuanced and implicit customer preferences related to travel themes, purposes, and modes, which were previously difficult to discern. Attracting tens of thousands of users monthly, the implementation has been widely accepted, with negative reactions constituting less than 1% of user responses.

The successful implementation of Jalan.net has prompted wider integration of Azure OpenAI Service within Recruit itself, creating more than 30 internal environments for projects like interactive resume building and internal information sourcing tools. Moving forward, the company plans to automate approval processes for AI usage and integrate internal data into AI models to enhance personalized experiences, maintaining a focus on security and compliance.

TXP Medical enhances emergency response with AI-powered mobile service

TXP Medical has released an AI-based smartphone application for paramedics, NSER mobile. With nearly 22,000 users per month, NSER mobile streamlines traditional, labor-intensive operations such as manual data entry, paperwork, and direct telephone communications, which are error-prone and time-consuming. The service incorporates AI-powered voice command input, allowing emergency personnel to input patient data hands-free using voice recognition algorithms that accurately interpret medical terminology, even in noisy environments, while AI-powered image analysis processes images of medical documents. Employing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and advanced image processing allows NSER mobile to quickly extract essential data, speeding up the conversion of visual information into digital formats and reducing the need for phone confirmations with hospitals.

The impact of the NSER mobile service is notable, particularly in Kamakura, Japan, where it reduced average telephone communication time with hospitals from 3 minutes and 30 seconds to 2 minutes and 44 seconds, doubling the target time achievement ratio.

Overall, TXP Medical’s NSER mobile service not only boosts the operational efficiency of emergency medical teams but also improves patient care quality. It showcases AI’s potential to transform emergency medical services by optimizing critical processes and easing the workload on healthcare providers.

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DENSO enhances robot’s understanding with generative AI

DENSO Corporation, a leading automotive parts manufacturer in Japan, is leveraging Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to develop advanced autonomous robots capable of human-like interaction. Designed to understand and execute tasks based on verbal instructions, DENSO faced numerous challenges, including the robots’ ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances as well as managing the complexity of programming, ensuring operational accuracy, and integrating advanced AI technologies into practical robotic applications. These challenges were compounded by the need to create user-friendly interactions that allowed non-technical users to easily operate and instruct the robots based on simple verbal commands.

Advanced generative AI powered by Azure OpenAI Service addressed these challenges by enhancing the robots’ ability to understand and process complex verbal instructions for greater adaptability and functionality. The service improved operational accuracy through features that allowed for precise action selection based on input text, simplifying the programming process and making the technology accessible to non-technical users. Additionally, Azure’s cloud-based infrastructure facilitated scalability and flexibility in deployment, and streamlined the development processes, reducing complexity and boosting efficiency across various applications.

In addition, GitHub Copilot significantly enhanced DENSO’s development process by quickly generating and testing new robotic functions, thus reducing costs and accelerating capability expansion. This tool streamlined code generation and debugging, improving productivity and easing the learning curve for new developers.

Takeshi Narisako, Executive Officer of Cloud Service Development Department at DENSO, views the project as “a good start to research and development to create social value through the use of generative AI.” Looking forward, the company will invest in ongoing collaboration with various organizations, including Microsoft, to harness technological and operational strengths, furthering the development of AI-powered robotics and enriching society through human-robot interactions.

Mitsubishi Corporation leverages Azure OpenAI Service for customer GPT

Mitsubishi Corporation, one of Japan’s leading trade, investment, and management companies, is using generative AI to streamline text operations and support better investment and management decisions. Having explored AI from various vendors since 2015, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company’s IT Services Department opted for Azure OpenAI Service to further the development of its custom generative AI application, MC-GPT, emphasizing security and comprehensive features.

“First of all, Azure itself is largest global service with the ability to handle a variety of languages including Japanese and English and operates securely at a high speed,” explained Hidenori Kurashima, team leader of the Process Transformation Promotion Team of Mitsubishi Corporation’s IT Services Department. “In fact, in the area of generative AI, Microsoft is ahead of the competition. On the other hand, peripheral tools such as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse Analytics are also available, making it easy to integrate with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel that we use in our daily work.”

Within two months of adoption, the company had created and evaluated two prototype applications internally. In collaboration with partner Knowledge Communication Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi established a robust environment for deploying Azure OpenAI Service extensively, integrating it with additional Azure services like Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse Analytics for superior data handling and user interface development.

The prototypes generated interest from 12 different departments, prompting the company to create a customized AI engine using its internal data to address both overlapping needs and department-specific requirements. Looking forward, Mitsubishi plans to harness Microsoft’s extensive AI offerings, including Copilot for Microsoft 365, to further streamline business processes, boost operational efficiency, and enhance decision-making in investments and management.

AI for everyone in Japan

These stories illustrate the substantial progress Japanese companies are making in integrating AI across sectors and highlight Japan’s collective commitment to reinforcing its position as a global leader in innovation.

Microsoft’s extensive investment and strategic initiatives underscore the robust foundation being laid for cutting-edge technological advancements and AI integration, focusing on enhancements in digital skilling, cybersecurity, and AI-powered automation that supports economic growth and fosters an environment where technology enhances human creativity and operational efficiency.

We hope these narratives have not only informed but also inspired you to explore how AI can revolutionize your own fields of interest or business. As we conclude our series, we encourage you to take the next steps in your AI journey, leveraging the insights and innovations shared to ignite transformative projects in your own organization.

Take the next step in your AI journey by exploring Microsoft’s AI solutions, diving into our insightful white paper on the five pillars of AI success, and getting skilled up with Microsoft Learn’s AI learning hub to ensure you’re ready to leverage Microsoft AI to its fullest potential.

Footnote

¹New Salesforce Report Reveals How Asia Pacific AI Readiness Will Impact Deployment of Generative AI, Salesforce.

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This piqued our curiosity. We wanted to go deeper and learn more about how approaches to governing civil aviation might apply to a set of technologies that would never be assembled in a hangar or guided by air traffic control officers. And we were eager to learn about nuclear commitments that emerged in an entirely different geopolitical era to regulate technology that showed promise as a tool but had only been used as a weapon.

Indeed, history has long taught us that the way in which technology transforms our world is in part a product of how effectively it is governed, and that international governance is vital for technologies that know no borders.

Today, we’re excited to share Global Governance: Goals and Lessons for AI, a collection of external perspectives on international institutions from different domains, brought together with our own thoughts on goals and frameworks for global AI governance. Through case studies and analysis, experts chart the history and evolution of institutions such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and the Financial Stability Board and share insights on their successes and challenges to inform the global governance of AI.

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Drawing on this deep, expert insight, we came away with three high-level takeaways for AI:

• As with civil aviation and global capital flows, AI governance involves three interrelated layers: industry standards, domestic regulation, and international governance
• At the international governance layer, three outcomes are important for AI: globally significant risk governance, regulatory interoperability, and inclusive progress.
• Four international governance functions will enable those outcomes: monitoring for and managing global risks, setting standards, building scientific consensus, and strengthening appropriate access to resources.

Below, you can hear directly from our expert contributors, sharing some of their insights that helped us land on these takeaways.

From Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, former CERN Director General and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford, we learned that enabling access to resources is core to the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN.Audio Player

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Building scientific consensus is a governance function epitomized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), about which we learned from Diana Liverman, a lead author at IPCC, and Youba Sokona, an IPCC vice-chair and lead author. Reflecting on the IPCC’s link to the United Nations, they shared the benefits and drawbacks of working to infuse a political process with science-based decision-making.Audio Player

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As we learned from Dr. Julia Morse, an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, many different international institutions have a standards-setting function, though how they perform it varies depending on the formality of their governance structures. Dr. Morse contributed a chapter on our “highly institutionalized world,” comparing international institutions that emerged in the immediate post-World War II era to those that have emerged more recently.Audio Player

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The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) facilitates collaboration among government and industry experts to set standards that are primarily enforced at the domestic level through member state audits. Incentives to implement standards are strong – ranging from safety and security imperatives to economic drivers, as detailed by David Heffernan and Rachel Schwartz, aviation law experts.Audio Player

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As we learned from Christina Parajon Skinner, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and Financial Stability Board (FSB) also have a standards-setting role. However, the evolving nature of global financial institutions is emblematic of more recent and informal international governance structures, especially around the function of risk monitoring and management.Audio Player

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Despite its more formal treaty basis, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has evolved since its establishment. Best known for its mandate to monitor for and manage risks of nuclear weapon development, it has also grown to develop safety and security standards and to provide technical assistance to member states, as Dr. Trevor Findlay, a Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne and former appointee to a United Nations advisory board on disarmament matters, helped us understand. Dr. Findlay also pointed out the nuclear energy industry’s limited involvement in IAEA until recently.Audio Player

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These expert insights articulate the layered, evolving, and interconnected nature of global governance, and help us chart an informed path forward for international AI governance. There is a growing need for effective governance at the global level to ensure that domestic efforts towards safe, secure, and trustworthy AI are interoperable; that AI’s benefits are shared widely; and that globally significant risks are managed effectively.

Today, many governments, international institutions, and members of the private and non-profit sectors are engaged in initiatives that ladder up to these goals. But it remains the case that we are still in the early days of AI governance. To achieve the outcomes that we have offered in the book, we need durable frameworks to guide an evolving global governance system and new approaches that are informed by lessons of the past.

We hope that this book and the rich insights it shares are a useful contribution to that effort.

The post Global Governance: Goals and Lessons for AI appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

1. Amplify human ingenuity with a copilot for everyone: Offering built-in and extensible AI capabilities in Microsoft Copilot to help people be more productive, creative, and efficient.
2. Deliver transformational experiences with build-your-own intelligent apps: Making it easy for customers and partners to build their own copilot solutions using the same stack and AI services Microsoft used to build its own copilots.
3. Safeguard business and data with a trusted AI platform: Microsoft has demonstrated leadership and delivered powerful tooling to help build safety and responsibility into AI solutions from the start—this includes guidance and best practices around responsible AI as well as secure AI principles that empower organizations with an end-to-end cyber risk approach that reinforces human control.

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Part of enabling customers to adopt AI and deploy copilots includes empowering partners. Microsoft helps partners benefit from its unified data estate platform to create personalized, role-specific AI that can empower customers with meaningful and relevant experiences. Copilots can enhance development capabilities and allow partners to share the value of their domain experience with customers, reinforcing their commitment to innovation and excellence. Partners can extend and customize existing copilots from Microsoft or modify how copilots assist with core business functions, such as human resources, sales, or customer service interactions.

Building with partners

Partners play a crucial role in extending Microsoft’s offerings to customers with their domain expertise. When tailored to specific roles, copilots can personalize generative AI experiences, offering access to relevant business flows and data, when and where users need it.

The partners featured here have created copilots and AI platforms that support a wide range of industries and lines of business:

• TomTom has created its Digital Cockpit to turn cars into conversational companions.
• Modern Requirements has created an AI work item and requirements management assistant for healthcare, finance, automotive, aerospace, government, and defense industries.
• Dynatrace has developed Davis® AI which empowers countless use cases, supporting Microsoft Azure customers in areas like observability and security.
• Intellect Design has developed generative AI-powered copilot which allows a relationship manager to generate valuable insights from ISO 20022 payments repository data thereby helping corporations manage their funds better.
• Datamatics has created a partner onboarding copilot to help streamline and reduce the time spent on the onboarding process for vendors, partners, and more.
• MiHCM has developed an AI-powered human resources (HR) copilot called MiHCM SmartAssist.

TomTom

The TomTom Digital Cockpit is an open, modular in-vehicle infotainment platform. Their new AI-powered voice assistant enables users to engage in natural conversation with their cars and tackle complex driving requests. The voice assistant can handle follow-up questions and maintain contextual understanding, which means users can engage in multi-turn conversations and get relevant responses.

Key features include:

• AI-powered voice interaction: The digital cockpit enables natural voice communication with the vehicle, allowing drivers to control navigation, infotainment systems, and vehicle settings through voice commands.
• Integration with Microsoft Azure: TomTom utilizes Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Kubernetes Service to provide a robust and scalable infrastructure, supporting advanced data handling and AI capabilities that enhance responsiveness and personalization.
• Customizable user interface: Automotive manufacturers can customize the digital cockpit to match their brand’s aesthetics and functionalities, making it adaptable to different vehicle models and consumer preferences.
• Cost efficiency: The system offers a cost-effective solution that reduces development expenses by up to 80%, providing a sustainable and economically viable option for car manufacturers.

Modern Requirements

Copilot4DevOps Plus is an AI-powered work item and requirements management assistant, which can be utilized by multiple industries such as healthcare and medical devices, finance, automotive, services and technology, aerospace, government, and defense. This tool, seamlessly integrated with Azure DevOps, optimizes requirement workflows with an easy-to-use interface and improves the requirements management process by enabling several key functions:

• Efficiency and productivity: It allows teams to focus on meaningful work by automating repetitive tasks and improving collaboration. In addition to powerful AI elicitation, analysis, conversion, and summarization, it gives teams cutting-edge features like pseudocode generation, dynamic prompts, and test script creation.
• Enhanced quality and security: Copilot4DevOps improves the quality of requirements by analyzing and refining them according to best practices in technical writing. It also incorporates Microsoft and OpenAI’s latest security features to help ensure data security.
• User control and customization: Users have the final say over the AI-generated content, with options to pick, edit, and refine outputs as per their specific needs.

Copilot4DevOps Plus is available as an add-on with Modern Requirements4DevOps or as a standalone in the Azure and Visual Studio Marketplaces.

Dynatrace

The Dynatrace platform delivers AI-enhanced cloud observability, security, and overall operational efficiency for global enterprises across all industries. With Davis® AI copilot, Dynatrace combined its predictive and causal capabilities and generative AI, built with Azure OpenAI, to bring Dynatrace Davis® hypermodal AI to market. This boosts the technical capabilities of IT teams by simplifying complex processes, enabling businesses to focus more on innovation and less on operational management.

Key features include:

• Davis® AI Engine: This core component leverages predictive, causal, and generative AI to provide deep insights and actionable recommendations. It automates tasks like anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and workflow automation, significantly reducing the manual effort required in managing complex IT environments.
• Predictive operations: The platform predicts potential issues before they impact operations using AI to forecast and automate responses, thereby ensuring reliability and proactive management of IT systems.
• Intelligent observability: Dynatrace uses AI to analyze real-time data across applications, services, and infrastructure. This helps in pinpointing issues quickly and accurately, which is crucial for maintaining optimal operational performance.
• Automation and integration: The platform’s automation capabilities extend to auto-discovery, auto-instrumentation, and auto-baselining, ensuring comprehensive coverage and real-time, dynamic responses to changes within the IT landscape.
• Azure native software as a service (SaaS): Azure Native Dynatrace Service seamlessly provides deep cloud observability, advanced AI for IT operations (AIOps), and continuous runtime application security capabilities native to all Azure customers empowered with Azure OpenAI generative capabilities.

Intellect Design

The iGTB Copilot helps banking professionals generate insights and provide cross-sell assistance in commercial and corporate banking. It leverages generative AI to streamline operations and client interactions, allowing relationship managers to spend less time on manual data analysis and more on strategic client engagement. Here are the key functionalities:

• Comprehensive payment analysis: It enables users to perform detailed analyses of historical payment data, helping to identify trends and patterns without the need for any programming skills. It also helps in identifying delayed payments.
• Visual data summarization: The iGTB Copilot can automatically transform complex data into easily understandable visual graphics and provide insights and suggested actions.
• The iGTB Copilot, composed on the Purple fabric of eMACH.ai, is powered by Azure OpenAI, GPT-4 Turbo model, and other Azure infrastructure services.

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Datamatics

Datamatics Copilot for Partner Onboarding is integrated with Microsoft Teams and leverages Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams bot framework, and Azure OpenAI technologies. The application is designed to streamline the onboarding of vendors, business partners, freight forwarders, and employees across different geographies, making what is traditionally a complex and tedious process much more efficient.

Key functionalities include:

• Natural language querying: Users can query the status of onboarding processes and receive updates using conversational language.
• Automation and integration: The Copilot automates the creation of partner records and integrates seamlessly with other business systems for efficient data management.
• Real-time updates and communication: Enables prompt communication with partners about their onboarding status, including rejections, directly from Teams.
• Document management: Maintains and enforces compliance by specifying required documents for each country, ensuring partners submit the correct documents.

MiHCM

MiHCM SmartAssist is an AI-powered HR copilot designed to streamline HR processes. This tool is part of the MiHCM platform and offers a range of functionalities and customizations that simplify various HR tasks.

Key features include:

• Document generation: SmartAssist, built on top of Azure with services, including Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure App Service, and Azure SQL Database, and leveraging Microsoft’s Copilot framework, can quickly generate employee letters with just a few keystrokes. It ensures that these documents are personalized by dynamically incorporating employee data.
• Job description creation: It automatically generates job descriptions that reflect the company’s unique voice and tone, including key performance indicators (KPIs), qualifications, and experience requirements.
• Customization capabilities: Users can easily adjust the content generated by SmartAssist, ensuring the output meets their specific needs.
• Data analysis and reporting: SmartAssist leverages employee data to analyze and calculate statistics, generate reports, and provide information at high speeds, enabling business leaders to make informed decisions quickly. This tool can answer high-level questions, going beyond mere facts and figures to provide valuable insight quickly. Information that would take days to gather can now be analyzed and provided in seconds.

Next steps to adopt AI and deploy copilots

• Check out our digital session at Microsoft Build 2024, that discusses enabling independent software vendors (ISVs) to transform industries in the age of copilots.
• Assess the drivers of AI success so you can realize meaningful business impact with AI.
• Learn how to power your AI transformation with Microsoft.
• Learn more about creating generative AI experiences with Microsoft Cloud across many Microsoft solutions.
• Envision boosted creativity and work productivity with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and learn how to extend it.
• Start using GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot for Sales, now generally available.
• Learn how to build safety and responsibility into your AI journey from the start.
• Learn more about the featured ISVs: TomTom, Modern Requirements, Dynatrace, Intellect Design, Datamatics, and MiHCM.

The post Building AI solutions with partners: Empowering transformation with copilots appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

AI is reshaping our world as the fastest adopted technology in history—a global phenomenon with profound local implications. As we witnessed during the Microsoft AI Tour event in São Paulo, Brazil is quickly emerging as a world-class AI innovation hub, a testament to the country’s collective ambition and optimism in the power of AI to deliver economic results, foster inclusive development, and ultimately benefit markets, organizations, communities, and individuals. In fact, “By massively adopting AI, Brazil can experience productivity gains that will add a few percentage points to its GDP in the near future,” said Tânia Cosentino, General Manager of Microsoft Brazil.

AI technology harbors significant potential for our customers and partners, echoing the transformative impact envisioned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates when he first sought to place a personal computer in every home worldwide. I am proud and excited to continue this vision of driving digital transformation across the globe alongside Microsoft. At the same time, it is crucial to embrace of this innovation through responsible usage.

As Brazil takes the lead during its G20 presidency in 2024, it faces a significant opportunity to spearhead discussions on establishing global AI governance guidelines. This will help maximize AI’s benefits while addressing matters related to privacy, security, and employment, thus supporting equitable and inclusive growth. The report, AI in Brazil: Exploring Opportunities, examines this junction and illustrates Microsoft’s dedication to making AI technology beneficial and sustainable, considering economic, social, and environmental factors. Together with our customers and partners, we are not merely observers but active participants in a technological revolution that fosters global unity, economic mobility, and local transformation.

The creativity and ingenuity of Brazilian organizations in leveraging cutting-edge AI technology for tangible, real-world impact are incredibly inspiring. As showcased by the companies and public entities featured here, AI presents unlimited opportunities across all sectors. These are inspiring examples of how we can reimagine what we can achieve with AI.

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Petrobras enhances productivity and decision-making with ChatPetrobras AI tool

Petrobras, a leading company in the global energy sector, has formed a partnership with Microsoft to create ChatPetrobras, an internal tool powered by AI. Utilizing the GPT model and AI technologies from Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, ChatPetrobras aims to facilitate faster decision-making, provide valuable business insights, and improve internal workflow efficiency for more than 100,000 Petrobras workers, while ensuring compliance with strict information security standards, data protection laws, and Brazilian government regulations.

Azure OpenAI Service powers ChatPetrobras with capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, translation, and code generation. This tool is set to benefit a wide range of business and administrative tasks, including Exploration and Production (E&P), Reservoirs and Wells, Commercialization, Information and Communication Technology, Engineering, Legal, and Human Resources. Its versatility demonstrates the potential of generative AI to revolutionize both technical and corporate segments of the company. In addition, ChatPetrobras incorporates advanced security and protection layers native to Azure OpenAI Service, ensuring all data remains under the company’s internal domain.

In keeping with the company’s commitment to pursuing innovative solutions to industry challenges, “ChatPetrobras represents our latest effort to harness artificial intelligence to enhance the productivity, quality, and efficiency of our processes,” said Carlos Augusto Barreto, Executive Manager of Information and Communications Technology at Petrobras.

ChatPetrobras is not just a standalone tool but part of a broader strategy to incorporate AI usage within the company, empowering every employee to leverage data science capabilities. Petrobras envisions a future where all employees can easily access advanced tools and technical skills, driving value creation through AI.

SEDUC-SP aims to enhance efficacy of education with AI copilot

The Government of the State of São Paulo has partnered with Microsoft to integrate AI Copilot into daily classroom activities, in a move that aims to benefit teachers and over 3 million students across São Paulo by streamlining tasks such as assignment corrections, test scoring, and providing student guidance.

The integration of Azure OpenAI Service is designed to serve as a comprehensive record center, offering a range of functionalities from analyzing student texts to suggesting potential grades for assignments. For instance, a student can write a text on a computer, and upon completion, the app provides suggestions for improvement and identifies errors. This immediate feedback mechanism is followed by personalized guidance from the teacher, ensuring a holistic learning experience. According to Secretary of Education of São Paulo, Renato Feder, this approach not only streamlines the educational process but also enriches learning outcomes.

The partnership between the Government of São Paulo and Microsoft, through the deployment of Generative AI, marks a significant step forward in leveraging technology to support education. By automating routine tasks and providing immediate, actionable feedback, this initiative promises to enhance the efficiency of teaching and the quality of learning for millions of students in Brazil.

Comgás: Fueling efficiencies with AI-driven data management

Comgás, the largest natural gas distributor in Brazil, is leveraging AI to enhance data utilization, aiming to improve decision-making and customer service. In partnership with Microsoft, the company embarked on a significant digital transformation journey that sought to not only migrate to the cloud but to also create a sophisticated data environment that could leverage AI for better customer understanding and service.

“We realized the possibility of extracting data more efficiently with the use of AI,” said Thiago Rolemberg, Head of Data and AI at Comgás, “and, thus, better understand our customers for more assertive decision-making.”

AI algorithms, alongside standardized data presentation facilitated by Power BI, have streamlined data extraction processes from a duration of 8 to 15 days to real-time in certain areas. As a result, greater operational efficiency enabled Comgás to better understand and meet customer needs, resulting in a more personalized and efficient service.

Since the implementation, Comgás has processed over 55 TB of information, with the platform encompassing 60% of the company’s representative data. A third of the company’s employees have already utilized the environment, with expectations to increase to 55% by the end of the year. This strategic use of AI has not only facilitated a more dynamic use of data but also positioned Comgás at the forefront of the industry in terms of innovation and customer satisfaction.

Atento streamlines customer communications with customer service copilot

One of the world’s leading Customer Relationship Management and Business Process Outsourcing providers, Atento, has unveiled a new AI-driven solution designed to improve customer service and enhance the company’s service agent productivity. Developed with Azure OpenAI Service, the tool automates the distribution of processes and ensures swift, appropriate responses during negotiations. It oversees system formalization steps and update statuses, integrating smoothly with the communication channels preferred by customers. “The new solution enhances the consumer-brand experience and aligns with the demand for increasingly efficient and personalized service. During a pilot program, we observed a more than 20% increase in customer satisfaction within the first few weeks,” stated Eduardo Aguirre, Chief Information Officer of Atento.

In addition, Power Automate facilitated the integration of legacy systems, reducing manual labor and improving response times. This integration led to a 30% boost in team productivity and nearly a 20% decrease in operational errors.

A key focus during the solution’s development was ensuring data security, privacy, and compliance. Leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, Atento was able to anonymize information and maintain data within its own environment, adhering to strict confidentiality standards.

“The project’s success began with a detailed analysis of the customer and employee relationship cycle,” Aguirre added, highlighting the vital role of Atento’s team of experienced consultants in this endeavor.

Brasilprev unlocks new business with a GPT tool for consultants

Brasilprev’s deployment of its AI tool, Brasilprev GPT, marks a transformative leap in using data to empower over 20,000 consultants and relationship managers. This not only facilitates new business but also enables the delivery of more personalized services to end customers. The private pension firm’s collaboration with Microsoft builds upon data-focused digital transformation, leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and ChatGPT within their data hub to streamline interactions and make platform data more accessible and user-friendly.

This integration, a first in Brazil, features the creation of an API that not only stores queries for further analysis but also enhances the user experience by tailoring responses to user profiles, utilizing Azure’s API Management and Azure Cosmos DB. This integration illustrates how the powerful collaboration between human expertise and technological innovation can boost the company’s performance, contributing to a remarkable 28% conversion rate and surpassing $9.86 billion in business.

“Users have embraced the opportunity to explore, understand, and apply generative AI to access information and boost their productivity. This engagement has a profoundly positive effect on the end customer, who enjoys a more personalized and comprehensive response to their needs,” notes Bruno Venceslau, Superintendent of Data and Digital Business at Brasilprev, “that’s what AI has made possible.”

This innovation has not only driven exceptional business outcomes but also reinforced Brasilprev’s commitment to data governance and the strategic application of AI, setting a new standard for the integration of technology in enhancing business and technical operations.

B3 democratizes access to capital market through AI-powered financial education

B3, the Brazilian stock exchange, has launched the first AI tool dedicated to supporting the public in conscious investment. The free tool, developed by B3 in partnership with Microsoft, is part of B3’s purpose to democratize access to the capital market through financial education.

“The financial market is constantly evolving, and so is the way we communicate with investors. Our mission is to simplify the world of investments and show that B3 is for everyone. The financial education chat joins other initiatives as an open and uninhibited dialogue channel. We want individuals to clear their doubts in a light and interactive way, demystifying the idea that investing is complicated,” explains Felipe Paiva, director of Customer Relations at B3.

Based on information from a database curated by experts from the Brazilian stock exchange, the platform’s questions and responses have undergone significant testing. The tool is constantly evolving as the database continues to expand, resulting in more refined answers for investors.

In addition to verifying information, another advantage of this search format is that it minimizes ‘shyness’ when asking questions, which can often inhibit novice investors from asking basic questions. “The answers generated by the chat can serve as a starting point to better understand the concepts of the financial market and encourage investors to deepen their knowledge in other channels”, reinforces Paiva.

“Artificial intelligence can be a great ally in the search for quality information, analyzing huge volumes of data quickly and objectively. This simple and summarized answer format serves as a gateway for those interested in the world of investments, adapting in a light and interactive way to the needs of the user,” says Rodrigo Nardoni, Vice President of Technology at B3.

AI for everyone in Brazil

Brazil has shifted into high gear in terms of AI innovation, propelling not only Latin America but also having an impact on international markets. Microsoft is committed to empowering key Brazilian organizations like Petrobras, SECUC-SP, Comgás, Atento, Brasilprev, and B3, supporting their ongoing digital transformation journeys and unlocking potential across various sectors. This level of engagement is positioning Brazil as a potential leader on AI innovation, capable of setting benchmarks for the region and beyond by influencing global AI strategies and practices.

We work at the forefront of AI evolution, ensuring our advancements align with the needs of customers, partners, and society. Our commitment is to harness AI’s potential to empower every individual, including upskilling employees, guiding students, and supporting vulnerable communities. This approach ensures that technology serves as a catalyst for equitable and inclusive progress worldwide.

Take the next step in your AI journey by exploring Microsoft AI solutions, diving into The AI Strategy Roadmap, and skilling up with Microsoft Learn’s AI learning hub to ensure you’re ready to leverage Microsoft AI to its fullest potential.

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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.

Get started with Microsoft Security

The post Security above all else—expanding Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

While multiple elements play a part in AI success, the most powerful factor—by far—is that leadership consistently communicates a clear vision and commitment to AI. In fact, according to The AI Strategy Roadmap, 100% of organizations at the most advanced stage of AI readiness report strong vision and commitment from senior leaders, compared to 1% of organizations at the earliest stage.

To learn more about his role and the emerging best practices for AI leadership, I sat down with Florin Rotar, Chief AI Officer (CAIO) at Avanade. Rotar is the company’s first-ever CAIO and has been tasked with leading the company to deliver sustainable AI value both for clients and for Avanade itself. We discussed a range of topics, including:

• The milestones that led Avanade to appoint a CAIO
• What distinguishes a dedicated CAIO from other roles in the C-suite
• The critical role that a leader-driven AI strategy plays in AI value creation
• “Guardrails” versus “speed bumps”: Avanade’s approach to responsible AI
• Rotar’s advice for aspiring CAIOs

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Susan: We’ve seen a strong pattern of organizations appointing a CAIO to the C-suite as they progress in their use of AI. What were the milestones that led up to Avanade appointing a CAIO?

Florin: From our perspective, several pivotal milestones led us to prioritize AI as a central strategic focus for Avanade. First, we recognized AI as a potent catalyst for growth and a means to reinvent ourselves, aligning with our strategic priorities and our purpose to make a genuine human impact.

Second, we understood that AI transcends organizational boundaries, so we would have to streamline our approach. In our highly matrixed structure we knew we needed executive-level leadership and focus. One of my first priorities stepping into the role was to launch Avanade’s Center for AI: a hub that pulls together different parts of our business behind a clear AI strategy and vision.

Third, this journey underscored the need for a leadership approach that prioritizes people alongside business, technology, and data considerations. The establishment of the CAIO role reflects a holistic approach that integrates diverse expertise to drive AI innovation.

Susan: Many technology trends have led to the creation of new C-suite roles over the years. What’s different, if anything, about the CAIO?

Florin: When you look at the role of CAIO, you get an appreciation for what’s top of mind for the board and CEO when it comes to AI. It is a uniquely ubiquitous topic that is relevant to everyone from the general counsel to the chief executive officer, chief growth officer, chief people officer, chief information officer, and beyond. The CAIO role encapsulates the breadth of strategic considerations at board level that demands specific executive attention.

My appointment to CAIO was largely based on my background in modern workplace technologies and experience bridging people and technology. This role is much more about people than technology, so as a CTO-turned-CAIO, I spend most of my days talking about the human impact of AI.

Another important distinction of the CAIO role involves overseeing responsible AI practices. While innovation thrives in experimental settings, we must uphold ethical and regulatory standards. At Avanade, we’ve engaged in lively C-suite debates about balancing risk and reward while advancing AI at speed. As CAIO, I’m ultimately responsible for navigating these considerations to ensure ethical decision-making.

Susan: Our research underscores the vital role of a leader-driven AI vision and strategy for value creation. How does that resonate for you and the role of CAIO?

Florin: In my experience, AI leadership truly begins with the company board of directors setting strategic guidance and priorities. Value from AI is inextricably linked to strategic alignment. I see many leaders overestimating short-term gains while underestimating the long-term potential for AI to re-write the rule book.

Therefore, I’ve collaborated extensively with our executive team to thoroughly define our “why for AI”—keeping our organizational purpose as our guiding principle, or north star. Rather than fixating on specific use cases, we prioritize understanding the foundational reasons behind our adoption of AI. Our competitive edge comes from ensuring our AI strategy aligns with our purpose and the strategic outcomes we aim to achieve. Without a clear understanding of our “why,” we risk dispersing our efforts across too many initiatives simultaneously.

Clarifying the “why” behind AI initiatives ensures that you align with organizational goals and prioritizes how to engage your people. This is essential because people are arguably the most critical aspect of any organization’s AI strategy and should not be overlooked. Even as AI copilots, for example, begin to share the load, human expertise and accountability shouldn’t be relinquished. Employee training and support is key to not only educating employees in responsible AI use but showing them that AI is about helping them realize their full potential in role.

Without a clear understanding of our “why,” we risk dispersing our efforts across too many initiatives simultaneously.

Florin Rotar, Chief AI Officer (CAIO), Avanade

Avanade’s AI Readiness Report shows that 98% of business and IT executives agree that support will be required to onboard and train employees to use generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot.¹ As users transition from adoption to advocacy with the support of a people-first approach and adequate training, the true value of AI emerges at scale.

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Susan: You describe responsible AI as a set of guardrails, rather than speed bumps. Can you elaborate on that?

Florin: First, I must emphasize the importance of adopting AI ethically and safely, balancing the need for speed with our responsibility to proceed in a responsible, human-centric manner. Following Avanade’s very early experiences integrating AI, we concluded that a responsible AI framework was the most effective way to put this into practice.

“Speed bumps” symbolize attempts to control AI usage to manage potential unknown outcomes. The consequence is predictable: that approach hinders AI adoption and skill development. At Avanade, we firmly believe that there’s as much risk in moving too slowly as there is in moving too quickly. Therefore, our framework focuses on establishing “guardrails”, which enable us to accelerate progress by providing clear guidelines for decision-making authority and accountability—simply put, what to do and what not to do. This flexible approach allows for failure, quick learning, and onward progress—a cycle of insights we’re now equipped to share with our clients.

At Avanade, we firmly believe that there’s as much risk in moving too slowly as there is in moving too quickly.

Florin Rotar, Chief AI Officer (CAIO), Avanade

This mindset also led to establishing our “Avanade School of AI,” which offers every single employee responsible AI training. The core of this initiative is to change the mindset around AI by mitigating fears and misconceptions about the technology and empowering our employees to embrace the potential of AI with understanding and trust.

Susan: Now that you’ve been in role for more than six months, what advice would you give to aspiring CAIOs?

Florin: Four main takeaways stand out that I urge leaders in the role of CAIO to diligently consider.

First, AI value doesn’t start with technology. It starts with what’s most important: people. We need to look beyond productivity gains and imagine how generative AI can help people become the best versions of themselves, replacing tasks and not jobs. This builds trust and promotes adoption—the business outcomes follow naturally.

Second, don’t forget your “why for AI.” The path to differentiation is to map AI value to the strategic objectives outlined by your CEO and board of directors. Once the “why” is in place, you can drill down on the “what” and the “how.” While most organizations begin by implementing use cases that focus on optimization, I would encourage leaders to be bolder. AI has the potential to disrupt processes, functions, and business models—these are the areas that will drive growth, innovation, and differentiation.

Third, responsible AI is non-negotiable. It must be anchored at the board level and be regarded as a potential for strategic advantage, not just compliance and risk mitigation. This cannot be stressed enough: a framework for governance, including a combination of process, compliance, technology, and training, enables you to move fast while upholding ethical standards.

Fourth, it’s crucial to be discerning about the technology ecosystem you commit to. Differentiation lies in adopting a strategic enterprise architecture mindset: will you be consuming existing solutions, customizing them, or creating entirely new ones? This translates into the three Cs of AI: consume, customize, or create. While we’re inclined towards Microsoft’s ecosystem, we recognize the frenetic market landscape, where choices can significantly impact costs, value, and futureproofing, so it’s critical to make informed decisions in this regard.

Next steps

For more information on how to accelerate your organization’s path to value with AI, please download The AI Strategy Roadmap: Navigating the stages of AI value creation.

Footnotes

¹Generative AI Organizational Readiness Report, Avanade.

To learn more about how Avanade helps organizations ready people, processes and platforms for AI, please visit AI | Avanade.

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