At the same time, individual financial services firms may encounter a risk of disconnect with these stakeholders, primarily due to challenges and questions around disparities between firms’ presentation of their sustainability products, and the accuracy of the ESG data that underlies those products.  

Meanwhile, firms seek to comply with increasing ESG regulations and standards. And they need to meet, and ideally exceed, internal targets for sustainability progress in their own operations. 

ESG Data Readiness Assessment

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Accordingly, the financial services industry is facing a complex constellation of challenges, with hurdles between the current state and the gaining of comprehensive ESG data insights—against a backdrop of confusion and intense competition.  

But once firms begin their data transformation journey, they’re increasingly well set to leverage data technology to drive meaningful value, from creating audit-ready ESG products to harnessing AI for advanced risk modeling. 

Positioning ESG data as a driver 

Microsoft knows firsthand the value of integrating ESG data with financial, operational, and other enterprise data. Without a connected and systemic view, firms lack holistic insight into equities, loans, or insured assets, leading to a competitive disadvantage. 

As we’ve worked over the last two decades to untangle and solve challenges at Microsoft in support of our own ESG data estate—and to drive on our sustainability commitments—we’ve regularly turned to experts in the field and endeavored to share our learnings. In taking solutions forward to our global customer base, we’ve seen that for financial services firms, the development of a comprehensive ESG data estate can advance speed to market as well as credibility of products. For example, Robeco, a Dutch international asset management organization, can now perform daily data updates for all its sustainable investing solutions—staying laser-focused on returns, but with audit-ready confidence and ESG transparency.  

Priorities for financial organizations translate to inroads in the development of an ESG data estate. For example:  

• Advanced data integration: Develop more sophisticated tools and systems to integrate ESG data seamlessly along with quality governance to inform comprehensive analyses and outcomes. 
• Sustainable and ESG investing and lending: Use data analytics to better identify and expand portfolio-level ESG assessments for risk and performance management.  
• Responsible allocation of transition capital: Help corporate clients achieve their sustainable transition goals through data-driven decision making. 
• Carbon credit markets: Support carbon trading initiatives with robust data management systems for tracking and reporting credits and trading activities.  
• Risk modeling modernization: Leverage AI capabilities to enhance risk modeling practices used in underwriting, pricing, and loan assessments.  

High-value initial steps toward ESG data readiness 

Just like with data security, developing an ESG data estate in a financial services firm doesn’t happen in a single effort. Instead, your firm can benefit from taking a customized approach based on your current data state, regulations, and data governance policy, and desired outcomes as you identify opportunities. 

Depending on the maturity of your existing data infrastructure, your organization may want to consider starting within one, or a mix, of these areas: 

Data gathering

• Develop a plan for integrating ESG data into your portfolio’s due diligence and risk analysis.
• Standardize a process for collecting and updating ESG data—from both internal and external sources. 

Data modernization

• Leverage digital capabilities to deliver new financial products to market.
• Enhance financial data compliance, governance, and security. 

Data insights  

• Implement comprehensive ESG training for your customers to support effective analysis and decision-making, with industry-specific components.
• Develop an AI-powered data system for accelerated ESG analysis tailored to your clients’ needs.  

Data action  

• Develop advanced ESG data systems to pinpoint data gaps and data accuracy risks.
• Align your decision-making and strategy to complete and accurate data. 

Advancing your sustainability journey with Microsoft AI-powered solutions 

We see enormous potential for financial services firms to tackle risks and capitalize on opportunities driven by sustainability, for themselves and their clients, and we believe comprehensive, harmonized, accessible data is the key.  

With cloud-based data capabilities, including Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft Fabric, and our AI-powered data solutions, we can help you shift from siloed data and labor-intensive processes to streamlined management that results in timely ESG insights and transparent reporting out to stakeholders—all with Microsoft security and governance. 

Once firms gain comprehensive management and insights into their ESG data, the potential for new and enhanced client services quickly follows. For example, United States-based economics research firm Moody’s leverages Microsoft Fabric solutions, AI-powered insights, and Microsoft Security to enable their 14,000 global employees to drive innovation for clients. In the United Kingdom, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) selectively deploys generative AI to augment their existing work in Microsoft Fabric with custom chatbots and agents copilots.  

Empowering the financial services industry for sustainability success  

We know that for us to do well, our customers and the world must also do well. Our mission is to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more, by building technology that can deliver business value to our customers, and positive impact to the world. 

Wherever you are in your sustainability journey, we’re here to partner with you—delivering continuous innovation from our solutions teams and our global ecosystem of partners, as we expand our ESG data readiness capabilities to help meet your unique needs in a world that is shifting quickly.  

Explore ESG readiness for other industries

• Retail and consumer goods: Unlocking business value with data-driven sustainability for retail and consumer goods
• Manufacturing: Data is driving a more sustainable industrial transformation

¹ PwC, ESG-focused institutional investment seen soaring 84% to US$33.9 trillion in 2026, making up 21.5% of assets under management: PwC report, October 2022. 

² Stanford Graduate School of Business, The ESG Generation Gap: Millennials and Boomers Split on Their Investing Goals,November 2022. 

The post ESG data readiness drives value for financial services firms appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

As we gather for Microsoft Ignite 2024, we invite you to explore the latest advancements in AI and discover how these innovations can transform your business. With AI-powered agents, organizations can analyze vast amounts of data, adapt to changing environments, and execute complex processes, bringing efficiency and intelligence to your operations. Whether it’s automating customer service interactions, optimizing supply chain logistics, enhancing personalized shopping experiences, or driving sustainability efforts, the potential applications are vast and impactful.

Join us on this journey to unlock the potential of AI and pave the way for a more intelligent, connected, and sustainable world. Together, let’s embrace the future of innovation and drive exceptional value for our customers.

Innovating with new adapted AI models and agents

Adapted AI models are transforming industries by enabling new applications and driving business outcomes such as increased accuracy, enhanced efficiency, better decision-making, and improved customer experiences. These models are designed to meet specific industry needs and tasks, addressing unique challenges more accurately and effectively. By using customized AI for their needs, organizations can enhance their digital presence, improve customer engagement, and streamline operations. With a focus on trustworthy AI, which includes safety, security, and privacy, our AI solutions adhere to high standards of integrity and responsibility, offering a secure approach to advancing industry capabilities. These adapted AI models enable the creation of custom AI solutions within Azure AI Studio and can also be used to configure agents for specific industry scenarios in Microsoft Copilot Studio scenarios. 

We are collaborating with several partners across multiple industries on these adapted and fine-tuned AI models, which are available through the Azure AI model catalog, empowering organizations to build custom AI solutions to address their most pressing needs. Bayer, for instance, offers the E.L.Y. Crop Protection model to enhance sustainable crop protection in the agriculture sector. Cerence provides the CaLLM™ Edge model for in-vehicle digital assistant technology, while Rockwell Automation’s FT Optix Food & Beverage model supports asset troubleshooting in manufacturing. Saifr introduces models for regulatory compliance in financial institutions, and Siemens Digital Industries Software offers a copilot for NX X software leveraging an industry model to optimize the design process. Sight Machine’s Factory Namespace Manager standardizes factory data for AI readiness, and open-source models from Hugging Face are available for summarization and sentiment analysis of financial data. 

Microsoft also provides AI agents designed for various industry scenarios through Copilot Studio. These agents can be customized to meet the specific needs of different organizations. For example, retailers can use the Store Operations Agent to assist store associates, and manufacturers can utilize the Factory Operations Agent to enhance production efficiency. The new release of Agent Builder (preview) in Copilot Studio enables users to create agents directly in Business Chat and SharePoint by defining the agent’s purpose, configuring its knowledge base, and setting up starter prompts. With a user-friendly design requiring only low-code skills, Agent Builder allows integration of diverse data sources to customize agents with industry-specific knowledge and capabilities, improving their effectiveness in addressing key use cases for each industry. 

To learn more about the new adaptive AI models for Industry that are available in Azure AI model catalogue and directly through our partners, visit Azure AI model catalog.

Financial services

Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services are leading the generative AI revolution in financial services, empowering industry professionals to securely and easily incorporate rich industry data and specialty data sets into their everyday activities while providing enhanced security and compliance at the same time. Microsoft has dedicated itself to generating strong partner momentum across the financial services space, including through creating and offering the tools Microsoft partners need to drive innovation, mutual growth, and success both now and as the capabilities of generative AI continue to evolve. LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), among others, has already built pioneering new solutions aligned to this initiative.

Built in collaboration with LSEG, Financial Meeting Prep (see the recent announcement using the preview name, Meeting Prep for Financial Services) aims to streamline client meeting preparation for investment banking professionals. Combining LSEG Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, the solution will consolidate important data, introduce organization-specific insights, easily refresh content as new data becomes available, and enhance relationship manager productivity and decision-making. General availability of Financial Meeting Prep is expected by the end of 2024.

Financial Insights Agent in Copilot Studio

Gathering insights from online sources and proprietary financial documents is crucial for making investment decisions, strategizing, and conducting assessments. However, finding the right data can be time-consuming for financial services professionals, and reviewing the vast amounts of relevant information is nearly impossible.

With the Financial Insights Agent, now available in Copilot Studio, financial services professionals can quickly and easily gather information from financial news and regulatory reporting websites. And because this agent comes ready-made and is easily customized agent, you don’t need advanced development skills to get started.

The Financial Insights Agent gives high-quality results and works best when integrated with the financial document analysis skill for agents (preview), available in Azure Marketplace, which makes it possible for users to gain info and insights from financial documents provided by their organization, such as analyst reports and other complex financial documents that are stored in-house—even when the data is found in complex financial tables, graphs, or charts. This skill not only works with the Financial Insights Agent, but it can also be integrated into custom agents. For example, Reflexivity has been integral in helping Microsoft understand challenges in the industry. Within their own platform, they use this skill for certain document flows, helping financial services professionals derive insights from both structured and unstructured data more efficiently so they can make informed decisions faster.

Financial Services landing zones

Microsoft has recently developed and is now ready to introduce a new Financial Services landing zone. Based on the Azure landing zone—a secure, scalable cloud foundation tailored for compliance needs—the Financial Services landing zone is an infrastructure-as-code solution that provides the baseline governance, resilience, security, automation, and prescriptive guidance that Microsoft industry partners and other financial services organizations need in order to comply with the industry’s strict, mission-critical regulations. As the Financial Services landing zone also provides financial services organizations of all kinds a robust and compliant cloud environment, the solution represents a powerful means to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is experiencing a dynamic transformation, with opportunities for growth and innovation despite challenges like economic uncertainty and supply chain disruptions. Microsoft and its partners are at the forefront of this evolution, empowering manufacturers with cutting-edge solutions that help enable intelligent factories, resilient supply chains, and enhanced customer experiences.

Manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

During Hannover Messe 2024, we announced the preview of manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. This solution integrates operational technology (OT) data, with information technology (IT) data, creating a comprehensive data foundation structured according to the ISA-95 information model.¹ This standardized approach enables manufacturers to break down data silos, enabling cross-domain insights, streamlined processes, and data-driven decision-making. Partner solutions from Sight Machine, Litmus, and Avanade further enhance these capabilities.

Sight Machine Factory Copilot on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing transforms your manufacturing execution systems (MES) data into the ISA-95 standard for consumption in manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, which can be surfaced through factory agent experiences to help address operational issues on the factory floor.

Litmus Edge Manager enables a robust hybrid edge-to-cloud infrastructure, streamlining real-time machine dashboards and facilitating advanced machine learning. Litmus and the manufacturing data solutions in Fabric unlocks unprecedented efficiency and innovation, seamlessly bridging the gap between edge and cloud.

Learn how to get started with manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and Factory Operations Agent.

Factory Operations Agent in Microsoft Azure AI

We’re excited to announce the public preview of the Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI, which empowers manufacturers to develop customized, AI-powered agents for frontline workers. These intelligent assistants leverage natural language processing and retrieval-augmented generation, making complex data analytics accessible for scenarios like root cause analysis, production loss reduction, continuous improvement, and asset maintenance. With the Factory Operations Agent, factory teams can intuitively interact with data, receive timely insights, and resolve issues more efficiently—ultimately enhancing productivity and empowering the workforce to drive operational excellence.

Avanade Manufacturing Copilot, powered by manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, helps customers to overcome OT-IT data accessibility and utilization challenges and leverage AI at-scale to make higher-quality products faster with less waste.

Learn how to get started with Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI (preview).

Factory Safety Agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio

The new Factory Safety Agent in Copilot Studio (preview) is focused on workplace safety. Factory Safety Agent provides organizations with a low code option to quickly develop a customized agent, grounded in occupational health and safety data. Whether using publicly available standards like Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or specific protocols of the organization, this agent can provide critical safety information, insights to factory workers, and streamline critical activities such as safety inspections or incident reporting to reduce risks and ultimately accidents.

Retail

As the retail industry adapts to new customer expectations and competitive pressures, Microsoft and its partners are providing tools for retailers that offer real-time insights, enhance customer engagement, and drive digital innovation.

Retail Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Retail Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric help retailers unify and standardize their data. This platform enables customers to integrate data from different systems and offers ready-to-use agents to speed up AI transformations. Currently in public preview, it includes four customizable features for retail:

• Retail Industry Data Model: Plan and design data solutions for governance, reporting, business intelligence, and analytics.
• Frequently Bought Together: Use insights to enhance upselling, shelf optimization, and store efficiency.
• Sitecore OrderCloud Connector: Standardize commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud to gain actionable insights.
• Personalized Shopping Agent: Improve shopping experiences with tailored customer conversations.

Personalized Shopping Agent

The Personalized Shopping Agent can engage in natural language conversations to understand and respond to shoppers’ needs. It provides tailored recommendations based on the shopper’s specific requirements and preferences. Additionally, it can handle specific requests, such as finding matching items or suggesting outfits for specific occasions. The agent leverages Retail Data Solutions, using aggregated product catalogs, and AI orchestration tools to provide accurate and contextually relevant answers.   

Store Operations Agent

The Store Operations Agent revolutionizes how store associates handle daily tasks with its headless architecture that integrates into applications or websites. It offers ready-to-deploy plugins for:

• Product search or inventory search: Real-time access to product details and stock.
• Order details: Tracks order information down to the line level.
• Incident management: Resolves incidents using Copilot and ServiceNow.
• Task management: Integrates directly with tasking apps.
• Omni channel access: Provides natural language access to current prices, promotions, and information.

The agent integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and ServiceNow. These integrations can extend to other enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and applications with pre-built connectors and APIs. These features are continually updated, adding more plugins to help partners scale operations.

Partners can also utilize the Store Operations Agent alongside their own solutions to accelerate customer adoption. Accenture Avanade has launched a Clienteling copilot, which has Store Operations Agent embedded and assists store associates in managing daily tasks efficiently. It also offers a natural language query interface for store policies and procedures, enabling informed decision-making for store associates and managers.

Public sector

Microsoft is leading the way in helping government and regulated organizations address their compliance, security, and data sovereignty requirements while adopting modern digital technologies. With initiatives like Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and generative AI, Microsoft offers comprehensive solutions tailored to diverse regulatory landscapes, enabling organizations to streamline their compliance processes and enhance their digital capabilities.

Citizen Services agent

Available in Copilot Studio, Citizen Services agent allows public sector organizations to create AI-powered agents using their public websites and information. The agent helps citizens navigate government services and information through a Q&A experience, providing answers from configured knowledge bases, such as responses about city plans, road closures, or service applications, offering citizens access to up-to-date information.

Get started with the Citizen Services agent in Copilot Studio.

Regulated Environment Management

Regulated Environment Management (REM) in Azure, currently in private preview, supports cloud adoption as part of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. REM simplifies the configuration, deployment and management of regulated environments through landing zones, policy and drift analysis. Starting November 2024, REM will shift to a subscription-level service, offering benefits like data isolation, regional boundaries, and group management of landing zone configurations. Transparency logs and the Landing Zone Account (LZA) simplify managing configurations and provide data residency. REM also includes a REST API for easier integration.

Request access in the REM private preview.  

Sustainability

With growing demands for disclosure requirements under regulatory directives like the European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the pursuit of impactful initiatives such as decarbonization, and the increasing need for transparency in corporate sustainability claims, businesses are under pressure to demonstrate genuine commitment to sustainability. To address these challenges, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is introducing Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and enhanced reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Now generally available, Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables customers to unify environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data with organizational data, fostering innovation, process changes, and simplified reporting. With Microsoft Fabric, businesses can create a standardized sustainability data lake for their ESG needs. Features include an extensible ESG data schema, pre-built notebooks for data transformations, data pipelines for various business systems (including Microsoft Sustainability Manager), and built-in dashboards for analyzing ESG topics.

OneLake in Fabric allows businesses to enhance sustainability by building analytical insights with AI and machine learning models and using Copilot agents for autonomous workflows. Learn more about Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.

Partners like UST Global use Sustainability data solutions in Fabric to develop flexible ESG systems of record that align with sustainability goals. Leveraging Microsoft Fabric, they craft customizable solutions for unique ESG challenges and adapt as requirements evolve.

Sustainability data solutions in Fabric offers tools to manage ESG data complexities, improve data integration and accuracy, provide real-time insights, and support compliance. This platform helps meet regulatory and stakeholder expectations and drives effective sustainability efforts across organizations.

External reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Also in general availability, the new external reporting capabilities in Microsoft Sustainability Manager (formerly Project ESG Reporting) simplifies external reporting across various standards with AI-powered insights and recommendations, making it easier for organizations to prepare and manage disclosure reports. Users can seamlessly connect, organize, review, and report data according to global standards.

Whether used as a standalone solution through the Power Platform gallery or integrated within Microsoft Sustainability Manager, it supports custom frameworks, iXBRL compatibility through partners, and offers a workflow user interface (UI) for editing and approvals. These new capabilities reduce the complexities of compliance, helping businesses stay on top of their sustainability reporting.

Using Copilot Studio with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Copilot Studio is a key part of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability toolkit, helping users create customized agents to meet sustainability and compliance goals. As compliance standards change, Copilot Studio uses large language models (LLM) to help organizations adapt quickly. It offers pre-built connectors for easy data integration, reducing the time and effort needed to manage diverse data sources and focus on actionable insights. Current features include the Sustainability Insights Agent for interacting with sustainability reports, with upcoming agents for estimating European Union Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) costs and setting goals. This tool, combined with our network of partners, helps organizations achieve their ESG goals by unifying data intelligence and streamlining sustainability management.

Shaping the future with AI

Join us on this journey to unlock the potential of AI and pave the way for a more intelligent, connected, and sustainable world. Together, let’s embrace the future of innovation and drive exceptional value for our customers. By leveraging the latest advancements in AI, we can transform industries, enhance productivity, and create meaningful experiences for everyone. Whether it’s through automating routine tasks, optimizing operations, or providing personalized services, the possibilities are endless. Let’s work together to harness the power of AI and make a lasting impact on our businesses and communities. 

Watch the Ignite 2024 sessions

Watch Accelerating industry partner growth in the age of AI with Kathleen Mitford and Satish Thomas and Delivering adapted AI models for industries with partners.

Financial Services

• Accelerate AI Innovation with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 
• Empowering the financial services partner ecosystem with Generative AI

Manufacturing

• Democratize data-driven decision making across factory operations with AI

Retail

• Elevate the retail experience with the Personalized Shopping Agent 
• Empower the retail workforce with the Store Operations Agent 

Public Sector

• Accelerate Cloud Adoption with Software-Defined Sovereignty 
• Collaborating with partners for digital sovereignty in the cloud 
• Deploying AI with Sovereign controls

Sustainability

• Accelerating ESG progress with sustainability data solutions in Fabric 
• Sustainability reduction and calculation compliance simplified with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Sustainability Manager 
• Building solution practices for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 
• Implementation best practices for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 

Microsoft Ignite 2024

Experience the latest innovations for AI transformation

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¹ https://www.isa.org/standards-and-publications/isa-standards/isa-95-standard

The post Unlocking the future: AI and data revolutionize industries at Microsoft Ignite 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Now, we’re sharing additional learnings—from our efforts and those of our global ecosystem of partners and customers, and from advice we’ve received from external sustainability experts—in the Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business Transformation. The guide offers practical tips to help business leaders consider what steps can help their organizations build a culture and infrastructure around ESG data, and provides context for taking the Microsoft ESG Data Readiness Assessment.

For quick examples of industry-specific considerations addressed in the guide, see the chart below.

ESG Data Readiness Assessment

Take the assessment

Leveraging the Leader’s Guide

When we began our own sustainability journey, we learned that to make progress on our ESG goals we had to bring sustainability out of siloed reporting efforts and into the core of our business. The Leader’s Guide discusses approaches to this operational shift, including ways to facilitate cross-functional conversations within your organization around the value of harnessing ESG data.

The guide also shows how Microsoft customers in different industries are using sustainability solutions to transform their operations. For example, international forestry group Södra had been limited to a labor-intensive process—siloed within its sustainability unit—to answer routine inquiries about its environmental data. Since collaborating to adopt Microsoft Sustainability Manager in 2023, Södra’s IT and sustainability teams have been generating significant insights for stakeholders, including the organization’s estimate that its positive climate impact is equal to about one-fifth of Sweden’s reported carbon dioxide emissions.

We’re ready to partner with your organization so you can also use ESG data to uncover operational insights to support your sustainability progress.

How ESG data supports business resilience

As organizations worldwide try to predict and prepare for emerging ESG disclosure requirements, they also need to respond to expanding market expectations. Investors, consumers, and shareholders are tracking companies’ sustainability commitments, and they’re looking for products and solutions that champion those commitments.

Our customer King Steel, a Taiwan-based global shoe manufacturer, faced this situation when major brands like Nike and Adidas began expecting sustainable and recyclable products. To align with its customers, King Steel started collecting and digitizing its ESG data using Dynamics 365 and capabilities within Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. This shift to a digitized data estate not only enabled King Steel to deliver transparent data to demanding customers, it also helped the company uncover insights into materials and operations that resulted in more sustainable production, reduction of waste, and innovation of new customizable products.

By implementing a robust ESG data infrastructure, your organization can also respond to sustainability-driven market demands with speed and insights.

From commitments to solutions

Early in our journey, we quickly realized our environmental commitments necessitated better tools to manage the increasing number, size, and complexity of our ESG datasets. We also needed to unify siloed data and ensure traceability and transparency—to execute our plan to publicly self-disclose our ESG progress, and to prepare for the evolution of sustainability reporting requirements. Simultaneously, we wanted to use our ESG data to identify opportunities to drive sustainability efficiencies and business growth.

This led us to Microsoft Fabric and AI tools built on Microsoft Azure. By adopting these capabilities, we’ve now integrated our ESG, operational, and financial data, empowering our employees to access timely data intelligence so they can contribute ideas and innovate.

But to meet our ambitious sustainability commitments, we must also drive change across our value chain. In 2023, we estimated that 75% or more of our carbon footprint was coming from indirect, or Scope 3 emissions, which organizations accrue from suppliers. To address this, the Microsoft Procurement team needed customized ESG inquiries, granular data, and flexible, collaborative reporting. The team partnered with Microsoft engineers to add new capabilities to our data technologies, including low-code customization and self-service features to help our value-chain partners find ways to reduce their environmental impact.

Then we carried these robust solutions forward to our customers, so organizations like US farming powerhouse Land O’Lakes can access their ESG data for day-to-day decision-making. For example, the company relies on Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to collect and unify data on weather, soil, and irrigation—freeing Land O’Lakes data scientists to help optimize planting decisions. The Azure-based ESG data infrastructure also boosts the Land O’Lakes competitive stance by providing consumers with visibility into the organization’s farming practices and environmental outcomes.

Exploring industry-specific considerations

With the right tools, ESG data can support each industry’s unique set of goals, challenges, and opportunities.

Here’s a look at some of the issues our Leader’s Guide and ESG Assessment can help you start exploring:

Visit the Leader’s Guide for in-depth information and resources.

Next steps

As you rethink operations to support your organization’s sustainability progress, we’re ready to share our learnings and continuous innovation to help advance your ESG priorities, accelerate your growth, and partner for a shared sustainable future.

Dive deeper into ESG data readiness strategies for your industry:

• Retail and consumer goods
• Financial services
• Manufacturing

The post Driving business value with ESG data readiness appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

• Microsoft Cloud for Retail
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

During this wave, we continue to invest in generative AI and copilot solutions—these solutions include customer and partner feedback across industries. Our global partner ecosystem builds and extends our first-party offerings, enabling high-value scenarios for our customers. Read on for a summary of each industry’s release plan and learn about supporting resources. 

Microsoft Industry Clouds

Discover new release plans for capabilities, products, and services

Explore updates

Microsoft Cloud for Retail  

The power of generative AI is transforming the way retailers are managing their businesses, engaging customers, and how they empower frontline workers to work more effectively. Microsoft Cloud for Retail 2024 release wave 1 includes additional capabilities for our retail customers along with considerable improvements to existing in-market solutions.  

The copilot template for personalized shopping on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) enables retailers to build tailored shopping experiences that allow consumers to shop using natural language. Using a retailer’s current systems and data, this copilot template can be embedded into existing experiences—such as a website or app—making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase the products they want. With the copilot template, retailers can offer customers personalized expert advice as well as guide the shopper to find unexpected items and learn more about the retailer. 

Copilot template for store operations on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) has been updated to drive more synergy and integration with modern work frontline worker applications and address customer feedback and requests. This AI-powered copilot template offers store associates on-demand access to store operational policies and tools to learn from customer behavior. Using key data points, employees can quickly and easily make adjustments that improve shopping experiences and drive revenue. 

Lastly, with Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, retailers can plan, architect, and design data solutions for retail data governance, reporting, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. With Sitecore OrderCloud connector, retailers can bring commerce data from the connector into a standardize format and draw actionable insights. And with frequently bought together functionality, organizations can leverage insights and analytics to improve product upselling, shelf optimization, and drive operational efficiencies. 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture 

The agriculture industry is at the heart of human civilization, and as the world’s population increases, so do the demands on farmers across the globe. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture empowers customers and partners to innovate using high-quality data that is no longer siloed, providing industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to unify farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions. With new large language model (LLM) APIs, others can develop copilots that turn data into insights on yield, labor needs, harvest windows and more—bringing generative AI to life in agriculture. The 2024 release wave 1 will provide key enhancements for analytics scenarios to align with leading industry standards. Enhanced ability for data set curation, compatibility with industry leading analytics services, more powerful geospatial scenario support, and repeatable data transformation workflows all work together to provide rich new analytics and AI capabilities. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services  

Built on a foundation of intelligence, security, and compliance, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services provides a powerful and flexible platform that helps unlock business value and deepen customer relationships. Financial services organizations can rely on the broad capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud as well as industry-specific solutions from our global partners to achieve impactful business outcomes quickly. Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services optimizes internal and external business processes through integrated collaboration and omnichannel communications capabilities. It enhances the customer experience through comprehensive customer insights and personalized, intelligence-driven interactions and helps accelerate products to market, removing data silos to turn insights into action, while defending against financial crime and supporting compliance needs. The 2024 release wave 1 plans include release of Meeting Prep for Financial Services—easing the burden of data discovery and curation for investment bankers in managing customer meeting preparations.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers customers and global partners to reach their sustainability goals by providing a digital structure to help enable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence, deliver sustainable information technology (IT) systems, improve ESG performance, unlock operational efficiencies, and unlock sustainable growth. We provide a digital structure to help enable ESG data intelligence, deliver sustainable IT systems, improve ESG performance, and unlock sustainable growth. This wave 1 release reflects our commitment to expanding the depth and breadth of our offering with new and enhanced features in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, including large language model (LLM) based Q&A and qualitative summary for ESG reporting. LLMs provide efficiencies by comprehending intricate queries, extracting relevant data, and offering meaningful, actionable information. Product carbon footprint data exchange, discovery, customization and testing of custom models and factor libraries, and AI-based suggestive labelling on waste data will help organizations measure their carbon or waste to take steps on report and reduce their environmental impact. 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides capabilities to manage health data at scale and makes it easier for healthcare organizations to improve the patient experience, coordinate care, and drive operational efficiency. For the next release wave, our investments are in continuing to improve our data model, supporting additional fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) in Virtual health data tables, and updates to healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.  

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit 

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit Community Training became generally available globally in December 2023. Community Training, an Azure-powered platform, enables organizations to build equity in skilling and deliver training to communities of any size, anywhere in the world through its mobile-optimized and customizable, white-label style platform. Community Training can be used by nonprofits and community programs to empower facilitators, train communities and volunteers, and to deliver education, health, or volunteer services in the field utilizing organizational-created content, with learner tracking and assessments, all while supporting low-bandwidth functionality for offline learning. This solution is part of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, in our “deliver programs in time and at scale” narrative and will be available in both a nonprofit and a commercial version for other sectors. Additionally, Microsoft released new functionality in Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, specifically an AI-powered model called Likelihood, to donate built into Fundraising and Engagement. The AI model utilizes an organization’s donor information to support a nonprofit’s understanding of who is most likely to give to programmatic initiatives based on an array of donor characteristics—including past donations, event interactions, and more. Utilizing the model can support the development of donor segments, helping nonprofits target interactions based on their needs and donor giving patterns currently and into the future. Finally, we will be releasing the French localized version of Fundraising and Engagement allowing for greater functionality and global use. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is now generally available across all Azure regions, we’re also announcing new capabilities moving into preview. These solutions underscore our continued investment in a rapid pace of innovation to advance sovereignty in the hyperscale cloud: 

• Drift analysis capabilities: Ongoing administration and maintenance can potentially introduce changes that don’t comply with policies, resulting in the deployment beginning to drift out of compliance over time. The new drift analysis tool inspects your deployment and generates a list of non-compliant settings, as well as a severity rating, making it easier to identify any discrepancies to remediate and verify the compliance of specific environments.  
• Transparency logs: Gives eligible customers visibility into the instances where Microsoft engineers have accessed customer resources through just-in-time (JIT) access, most commonly in response to a customer support request. With this update, customers can now request access to the preview feature through the Azure portal.  
• New configuration tools in the Azure portal: Allow customers to create a new sovereign landing zone in two simple steps using a guided experience. 

Learn more 

• Stay up-to-date on the latest release plans on Microsoft Learn.
• Follow the Microsoft Industry Blog for industry-specific news.
• Read more about what’s upcoming on our Microsoft Industry Clouds documentation page.

Note: Some of the functionalities described in this release plan have not been released. Delivery timelines may change, and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). 

For a list of the countries or regions where Dynamics 365 business applications are available, go to the International availability guide. For more information about geographic areas and datacenters (regions), go to the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform availability page. 

The post Explore the latest release plans for Microsoft Industry Clouds appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Since launching Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability earlier this year, we have continued to grow and evolve our support for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. The latest updates reflect changes in the product roadmap and feedback from valued partners who have been an integral part of the Well Architected for Industry framework design. We have also added Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. 

Microsoft offers several technical resources. The Well-Architected for Industry framework focuses on broad implementation and architectural guidance reflected in the graphic below. Combining this with the product and feature documentation, customers and partners get unified direction for successful implementations. 

Designing and implementing Microsoft Industry Clouds solutions requires benchmarking against best practices. To address this need we have introduced industry relevant self-assessment tools for Well-Architected for Microsoft Sustainability Manager. These tools help implementers work through a scenario of questions and recommendations that result in a curated guidance report that is actionable and informative, based on the project phase (plan, design, development, deployment, and operations). These self-service evaluations can highlight crucial opportunities for improvement based on specific environments and offer recommendations to improve results and increase reliability and deployment performance.  

Well-Architected for Industry

Guiding principles that you can use to improve the quality of your industry cloud workloads

Explore resources

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

“At KPMG we’re excited to embrace the most recent updates to Well-Architected for Industry, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability content. This framework aligns with our approach of leveraging the latest technology from Microsoft and KPMG knowledge of climate and ESG data to enable successful Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability implementations. Our real-world experience and collaboration with Microsoft have enabled us to provide feedback on this content and is a significant opportunity for us to further assist our clients in their sustainability journeys.“

—Tegan Keele, KPMG Climate Data & Technology Leader.

The Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability resources have been updated with a focus on data management and the Microsoft Sustainability Manager implementation journey, introducing best practices and performance-efficient Sustainability Manager workloads. The latest updates have been codesigned with select systems integrator (SI) partners such PwC, Fellowmind, and KPMG by using their experience in implementing Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, offering guidance to optimize and refine systems cohesively, based on market-tested best practices.  

In addition, revisions to reference architectures for Sustainability Manager and Emissions impact dashboard provide visibility into the building blocks of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability platform. We added guidance for data management, application lifecycle management, and environmental strategy to further help customers and partners. 

The newly released Sustainability Manager Implementation Assessment Tool helps examine workloads through the lens of configuration and extension scenarios and across the Well-Architected pillars. This assessment tool allows implementers to work through one primary assessment across the planning, design, and go-live of the Sustainability Manager implementation journey.  

• Plan and benchmark minimum viable product or the first iteration of Sustainability Manager implementation 
• Benchmark core Sustainability Manager design considerations 
• Benchmark against a checklist of deployment best practices 

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is now generally available and helps implementers create efficient solutions for care management, patient outreach, and patient service center. Setting up the data estate is a critical design component for healthcare. To accomplish this, we’ve provided an extensive reference architecture that helps design the right solution while deftly navigating data management. This resource provides operational and analytics reference materials along with implementation recommendations. 

The following image shows an end-to-end lifecycle of health data. In our reference architecture, we provide a comprehensive and structured approach adopted by organizations to manage their entire health data ecosystem effectively. 

We are excited to include best practices and checklists for design and deployment of the first party solutions. To take this a step further, we also share entity relationship diagrams (ERD) to illuminate the data models for certain solutions. 

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

“As the launch partner and early adopter of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, we recognize that the Well-Architected Framework provides key implementation guidance and reference architectures. These are crucial for designing, deploying, and managing effective solutions in the financial services industry, and they facilitate our development of innovative products built on Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.”

—Gokhan Cakiroglu, Chief Technology Officer, VeriPark.

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services recently launched, giving support to architecture deployments of specific Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services solution components: unified customer profile for retail banking and wealth management, onboarding essentials (preview), and document intelligence (preview). We understand the critical importance of designing the data estate correctly, especially for enabling unified customer profile. This release has operational and analytics reference architectures and step-by-step implementation journeys. 

The framework incorporates best practices and considerations for design, deployment, and monitoring of first-party solutions. We also share ERDs of our data model and have an open-source plan for unified customer profile. Using open source provides flexibility and makes it easier for customers and partners to extend customizations. Deployment guidance for this is also available. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services Assessment Tool (preview) enables implementers to pick the assessment areas (for example, Well-Architected for Industry best practices and industry-specific applications) and the phase of the project (plan, design, development, deploy, and operations) to scope for assessment.  

One assessment, four use cases: 

• Assess workloads across well-architected pillars.
• Review and benchmark against a best practices checklist for design, deploy, and monitor.
• Evaluate extension scenarios. 
• Review data estate strategy and data conversion design.

Using the results, implementers can refine solutions and continue to improve performance and reporting.  

Get started with Microsoft resources

With these frameworks, it’s never been easier to advance Microsoft Industry Clouds solutions and take your organization to the next level. Find resources below and start your journey towards optimization. 

Well Architected for Industry: 

• Well Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 
• Well Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 
• Well Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

Assessment tools: 

• Microsoft Sustainability Manager | Well-Architected Assessment
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services Assessment Tool

The post Well-Architected for Industry: Optimize Microsoft Industry Clouds implementation appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

The Microsoft Industry Clouds deliver the most comprehensive development platform, tools, and solutions to enable our customers and partners to take advantage of AI, driving high-value scenarios for their businesses. Over the last six months, we have delivered Microsoft Copilot across GitHub, Azure Security, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 for each business role in an organization that people can use today. At Microsoft Ignite 2023, from November 15 to 16, 2023, you’ll hear from many of our partners who are building copilots and other solutions on Azure AI to drive innovation across industries and help our customers achieve more.

Our global partner ecosystem plays an invaluable role in bringing this AI potential to life for our customers. Independent software vendors and system integrator partners bring deep domain expertise to build unique, industry-specific AI solutions on the Microsoft Cloud that add tremendous value to customers, while meeting the security, compliance, and regulatory needs of each industry.

Here is a small sample of the hundreds of partners accelerating innovation with AI in financial services, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, retail, sustainability, public sector, education, telecommunications (telco), nonprofit, energy, and line of business partners.

Financial services

LSEG’s (London Stock Exchange Group) leading financial markets data intelligence and analytics ecosystem is being integrated with Microsoft Fabric, enabling customers to discover and analyze trusted data faster than ever before to create differentiated insights. This ecosystem will offer a joined-up data experience for customers through seamless interoperability with LSEG Workspace, simplifying and automating workflows enabled by Copilot and Python-based analytics within Microsoft Teams and Excel.

At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft is showcasing Meeting Prep for financial services, an example of the kind of work we are doing with partners such as LSEG to create value from their data using large language models and generative AI. This solution will automatically generate meeting preparation summaries combining insights from LSEG’s financial data with news, documents, emails, chats, and other relevant content from Microsoft Graph in Microsoft 365. 

Video 1. Meeting Prep for financial services: Application Concept for Microsoft Teams.

Healthcare

Teladoc Health is offering improved care management leveraging the Azure data platform and building a copilot on Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Teladoc is using Azure OpenAI to personalize the “recommended for you” section of its Chronic Care Management weekly newsletter for three specific segments based on acuity and activity. This is to increase the engagement of the program and improve member health outcomes. They are exploring the option of a co-pilot for member engagement through counselors.

Epic and Microsoft have an ongoing strategic collaboration to develop and integrate generative AI into healthcare that can enhance patient care, increase clinician efficiency, and improve the financial integrity of health systems globally. DAX Copilot and Azure OpenAI integrations address many current issues affecting clinicians, including drafting message responses automatically, enabling natural language queries and interactive data analysis, producing clinical summarization, and providing ambient clinical documentation.   

Embedding DAX Copilot directly into existing Epic workflows can reduce the cognitive burden on clinicians, helping them focus on the patient as summarization notes are drafted for them through ambient listening. There are more than 50 Epic customers and thousands of clinicians signed up to use DAX Copilot in their workflows, and this integration will be widely available for increased adoption early next year. 

By using Azure OpenAI, Epic can also deliver generative AI exploration for users through Epic SlicerDicer to fill gaps in clinical evidence using real-world data and to study rare disease and more. Revenue cycle management is another area where generative AI will drive meaningful improved efficiency, providing coding staff with suggestions based on clinical documentation in Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) software. Additionally, Epic is working to aid campaign generation by incorporating generative AI into the Epic Cheers application. This will assist organizations on producing outreach programs to create a personalized experience for patients, nurture current relationships, and reach a wider patient population in a more efficient manner.  

Agriculture

Bayer’s vision, “Health for All, Hunger for None,” drives its commitment to using cutting-edge technologies that can bring new value to customers. In its early stages, Bayer is presenting an agriculture copilot and testing multiple scenarios with internal teams to discover where large language model capabilities can add value through the ability to interact with agronomic data using natural language. These capabilities are powered by Microsoft’s generative AI and Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.

Video 2. Bayer leverages Azure Data Manager for Agriculture large language model APIs to bring actionable insights to farm data.

Learn about the latest updates to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and how Microsoft is expanding support for Bayer’s Climate FieldView as a built-in data source, providing users with tools to leverage autosync planting, application, and harvest activity files from FieldView accounts.

Manufacturing

Siemens introduced Industrial Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that will enable users to rapidly generate, optimize, and debug complex automation code, and significantly shorten simulation times. Siemens is putting the power of product lifecycle management software into the palm of every employee’s hand with the release later this year of the Teamcenter application for Microsoft Teams. With this application, problem reports can be created in Teamcenter using a smartphone to take pictures and interpret spoken descriptions. That helps to close feedback loops and solve problems faster, all without sacrificing quality or reliability.

Sight Machine has introduced Factory CoPilot, that integrates Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform with Azure OpenAI. Using a natural language user interface similar to ChatGPT, Factory CoPilot offers an intuitive, “ask the expert” experience for all manufacturing stakeholders, regardless of data proficiency. In response to a single question, Factory CoPilot can automatically summarize all relevant data and information about production in real-time (such as for daily meetings) and generate user-friendly reports, emails, charts, and other content (in any language) about the performance of any machine, line, or plant across the manufacturing enterprise, based on contextualized data in the Sight Machine platform.

Retail

Sitecore OrderCloud powers custom ecommerce experiences and order management for some of the world’s most well-known brands. Sitecore OrderCloud is redefining the data hosting and online shopping experience by structuring their solution on the Microsoft platform. The Sitecore solution enables faster time to market with enhanced solutions layers providing ready-to-access capabilities utilizing Azure OpenAI.

AiFi, the largest provider of autonomous shopping solutions, is built on Microsoft Cloud technologies and works seamlessly with Microsoft Cloud for Retail. Their solution is enabling retailers like Żabka Group and Choice Market, among others, to offer consumers an autonomous shopping experience with frictionless check-out. The companion Microsoft smart store analytics app is helping retailers gain detailed insights into customer behavior and patterns, allowing them to be more informed and data-driven about store operations and merchandizing decisions. Together, AiFi and Microsoft, through AI technology deployed at the edge and cloud respectively, are helping retailers bridge the gap with ecommerce when it comes to a frictionless shopping experience and optimizing it using actionable analytics.

Video 3. Choice Market illustrates the next wave of convenience using smart store analytics.

Sustainability

Ekimetrics has developed a solution based on Azure OpenAI to automate the data collection process and enhance supplier experience. Typically, enterprises are requiring their supplier to complete lengthy questionnaires to capture environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. Due to the high administrative efforts, they are struggling to get these completed and thus the ability to reduce ESG impact. The solution from Ekimetrics automates the creation of a supplier-relevant questionnaire and the extraction of the relevant answers from common documents. The output is a summary of suppliers’ response and prefill of a regulatory report, including comparisons with previous years.

Video 4. Ekimetrics’ future solution for accurate sustainability data collection is more efficient for companies.

Public sector

Axon is a technology leader in global public safety with a mission to protect life, preserve the truth, and accelerate justice. Since 2017, Axon has been pioneering the design and development of generative AI technology into their products built on top of Microsoft Cloud infrastructure. A few of Axon’s AI innovations include Redaction Assistant, which automates the process of sharing video footage while safeguarding privacy, and Auto-Transcribe, which extracts the audio from body camera to accelerate the process of report writing and evidence search. Axon has also introduced Automated License Plate Recognition in their Fleet3 in-car camera systems, ensuring swift and accurate detection. These initiatives are geared towards streamlining and enhancing the efficiency of public safety operations, allowing responders to focus on the primary task at hand. They persist in advancing their innovation pipeline by developing new AI-enabled applications that not only save time for their customers but also uphold the principles of ethics and fairness.

Education

PowerSchool is using Azure OpenAI to inform and deliver personalized learning pathways for individual students based on their learning goals within a secure platform. Educators are able to quickly create assessment items and formative assessments aligned to a desired grade level, subject, and learning objective or standard. They can then use intuitive reporting to track student progress thanks to the results of these standards-aligned assessment items created by generative AI.

Anthology is empowering instructors to spend more time with students and less time managing content with the AI Design Assistant in their flagship learning management system, Blackboard Learn. They’ve leveraged Azure OpenAI to streamline the course building process and give instructors a head start on creating engaging courses with recommended titles and descriptions, rubrics, questions, and images.

Telecommunications

Amdocs has launched its amAIz Platform to enable communication service providers to accelerate their journey into the generative AI era. Using amAIz, cloud solution providers can benefit from a growing set of out-of-the-box generative AI use cases integrated across different Amdocs applications such as Billing, Catalog, and CPQ (configure, price, quote) to save costs and streamline operations, as well as develop their own use cases on top of the platform. Aligned with the Amdocs and Microsoft collaboration, amAIz provides telco verticalization of the Microsoft capabilities in the Customer Engagement Platform, advancing generative AI use cases across the industry.

Nokia is transforming network security operations by leveraging AI to analyze large volumes of data in real-time to recognize subtle patterns and anomalies that are often missed, improving accuracy, and speeding up detection. Nokia’s flexible software as a service-based, telco-centric extended detection and response solution, NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome, uses AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze and identify potential security threats, enabling real-time detection and response.

Nonprofit

threshold.world has created b.world, the world’s first AI-powered impact measurement and storytelling app for nonprofit and social impact program teams. By unifying program design, impact measurement, project management, and digital storytelling in a single, easy-to-use app, b.world increases capacity to engage communities and drive stakeholders to action. It is based on industry best practice program design and impact measurement, and provides a common data model for nonprofit program operations at scale. See it in action by signing up for a free trial at b.world.

Submittable, powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI, will release a new-to-market set of tools to further the mission of AI for good and improve the application process for grant givers and seekers. These tools include: an AI-powered service that will autofill grant applications based on an applicant’s own prior answers, saving valuable time to focus on critical work; an AI bot that can both create grant application forms and translate them into multiple languages, ensuring best practice adherence for funders while also extending opportunities across language barriers; and an AI-supported tool that extracts information from official documents into Submittable, creating a simpler experience for applicants and reviewers as well as reducing the potential for human error and fraud.

Energy

KADME has enabled a turnkey large language model workflow for ingesting and extracting insights from domain-specific energy documents. With Fabriq, the large language model orchestration platform, domain experts in upstream energy operations can ask domain-specific questions and retrieve multilingual tailored responses powered by these insights. Links to trusted source documents are provided with each response, with support for private repositories such as SharePoint or Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy.  

Line of business partners

In addition to industry solutions, our partners are also building line of business solutions leveraging AI to transform horizontal business processes to further support vertical solutions.

Seismic is the launch partner with Microsoft Sales Copilot and provides content recommendations, collaboration, task automation, and engagement intelligence for Microsoft Sales Copilot users across the meeting experience to help drive deals and relationships forward and making sellers more productive. As the first step in this journey, Seismic for Microsoft Sales Copilot will add AI-powered recommendations and summaries for virtual meetings, the key vehicle for modern sales teams to engage with prospects and customers.

Icertis is leveraging advanced Azure capabilities, including Azure OpenAI, to transform contracts into structured data that companies can analyze and leverage at scale. For example, the newly released Icertis Contract Intelligence Copilots allow companies to harness the power of generative AI to conversationally query contract language about risks and opportunities hidden in commercial agreements. The copilots offer users pre-defined prompts, which can be tailored to a company and its industry, to quickly surface insights relevant to their vertical.

ServiceNow recently introduced the Generative AI Controller that allows organizations to easily connect ServiceNow to Azure OpenAI. It includes built‑in actions so customers can quickly and easily integrate popular generative AI capabilities—like answering questions, summarizing content, and content generation—into custom apps and workflows. 

Typeface.ai has launched a new Typeface app for Microsoft Teams that uses the powerful combination of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI, and Typeface’s brand-personalized AI to create content significantly faster than ever before. This enables companies to scale marketing efforts and produce a range of assets such as creative briefs, email campaigns, multimedia online ads, and more.

The investment continues at Microsoft Ignite

These examples highlight how partners are building copilots and developing custom solutions with Azure AI for every industry.

These solutions also showcase how the key AI patterns like natural language Q&A, summarization, and search are driving this unique moment of transformation for our customers, enabling them to improve employee productivity, enhance customer experience, and increase operational efficiency. You can learn more about these partner solutions and others at Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource.

We’re excited to have you join us at Microsoft Ignite 2023 from November 15 to 16, 2023. Here are some key sessions that will give you an even deeper view into the innovations we are delivering with our partners and the latest updates to our Industry Cloud solutions.

Breakout sessions

• The AI-era of Industrial Transformation, Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 2:45 PM—3:30 PM PT

Learn how organizations are investing to optimize operations by extracting insights from information technology, operational technology, and engineering technology data with cloud-to-edge technologies, democratizing data access for better decision-making with copilots, and empowering frontline workers with enhanced mixed reality applications.

• Get ready for ESG Regulation with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 5:15 PM—6:00 PM PT

Learn how expanded functionality in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, including AI, water, and waste data capabilities, can help address new and emerging reporting regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive—enabling organizations to provide transparency into their ESG sustainability progress.

• Enabling Sovereignty with Microsoft Azure, Friday, November 17, 2023, 9:00 AM—9:45 AM PT

Learn how Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty can help customers meet their digital sovereignty and compliance requirements and still gain the benefits of the public cloud.

On demand sessions

• The future of financial services in the era of AI
• Empowering retail in the era of AI
• The future of data and AI across the entire healthcare journey
• Empowering impact with Cloud for Nonprofit and AI

There’s a lot to take in at Microsoft Ignite 2023! Be sure to also check out the on-demand discussion sessions or go to Microsoft Industry Clouds to learn more.

The post How AI helps Microsoft partners innovate across industries appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Retail is one of the most agile and innovative industries. With ever-evolving consumer demands and shifting supply chains, successful retailers are characteristically adaptable and resilient. Microsoft Cloud for Retail helps retailers accelerate innovation with industry-specific solutions that enable them to maximize the value of their data. Our primary focus of this wave is offering solutions for retailers to provide engaging shopping experiences while empowering store associates to be more productive and customer-focused. In this release, Microsoft Cloud for Retail continues to invest in both Smart Store Analytics and Store Operations with customer-requested features and additional AI and machine learning-based capabilities.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail’s Smart Store Analytics solution provides insights on store performance using anonymized data of store transactions and shoppers’ in-store journeys. Store managers see KPIs, data visualizations, and data science models that help them monitor store performance and make data-driven decisions for optimizing store performance. Working with AiFi, the largest provider of autonomous shopping solutions, we have enabled an end-to-end autonomous store solution. AiFi’s camera-only technology, running on Microsoft Azure, captures anonymized data throughout the shopper’s journey in real-time. Computer vision tracks shopper actions and enables frictionless checkout. In addition to enabling frictionless checkout, this solution helps retailers further improve customer experiences by understanding:

• How customers interact with the products on the shelves.
• How shoppers react to promotions and communications.
• What they choose to take off the shelf and purchase.

With this release, we are adding additional AI and machine learning based insights around product recommendations and foot traffic analysis, to add to existing models and visualizations that are helping store operators optimize store layout, product catalog, and shelf placement for peak performance.

With Store Operations Assist, store associates can be more productive and engage more meaningfully with customers. The application provides employees with the ability to conduct typical business processes such as inventory counts, stock audits, store walks, shift change checks, incident reporting, and safety audits. Associates can also view and use customer insights to schedule follow-up consultations. Store managers can digitally review and provide feedback, support associates, and see their store’s performance. With this release, we are enabling additional features like tablet support, branching logic for survey responses, and enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams front line worker apps.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview)

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview) helps enable a more sustainable future and a more productive agriculture industry by empowering organizations to drive innovation through insights, reduce their environmental impact, optimize agriculture operations, and build trust rooted in transparency. With access to data and insights from the farm, organizations can drive harvest and production efficiency, reduce food waste, create nutrient-dense and high-quality products, automate and improve environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and Scope 3 emissions reporting, and provide transparency to stakeholders.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview) extends the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform with industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to connect farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high-quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions. Instead of devoting resources to managing unstructured data, customers and partners can focus on product innovation with the ability to reason over readily available and abundant data. Furthermore, organizations can use in-house, third-party, or Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform services to speed the path to analytics and business intelligence solutions. With a connected ecosystem of partners building solutions on top of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview), this is another step towards a connected and collaborative agriculture industry.

With the current wave, we are delivering one-step geospatial and temporal indexing capabilities enabling customers and partners to easily integrate non-harmonized farm machinery activity data from different sources. In addition, the Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview) now includes integration of Climate Field View™ by Bayer. Partners like Bayer have used Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to shift from a self-managed data estate to a managed model with Microsoft. The Climate Field View platform harnesses data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture’s satellite and weather pipelines to enable insights on potential yield-limiting factors in growers’ fields. Our strategic partnership, leverages Bayer’s industry knowledge-as well as data connectors, models, transformations, and workflows-to inform how we strengthen Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and empower organizations to address the challenges in agriculture today. Furthermore, we are improving time to value by enhancing the Azure portal experience for developers and system administrators.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare continues the development of features that enable patient-centric operating models to ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare. Our healthcare customers and partners are a key part of our development of solutions for providers and payors. We have landed and continued to iterate on several impactful capabilities in this wave: Patient journeys, care management, and virtual health data tables.

Optimizing each touchpoint in a patient’s experience can help providers improve patient satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, while payors can address efficiencies and the return on investment of their health plans. Patient journeys in Patient Outreach enable health organizations to orchestrate trigger-based workflows across patient touchpoints to automate repetitive tasks and allow patients to get personalized care faster.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare has also developed solutions and data integration capabilities for health organizations to make it easier for them to provide care anywhere. Our aim is to make it easier for caregivers to access and track patients’ vitals and to gain early insights into patient conditions. Device data support for care management (preview) uses the MedTech service in Azure Health Data Services to normalize data from diverse medical devices and convert it into the fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) format in a secure way. 

Additionally, we are improving the time to value with updates to Virtual Health Data Tables (general availability) to include support for the create, update, and delete FHIR operations. Utilizing this functionality, customers can perform updates to FHIR resource data on the remote FHIR service directly from within Microsoft Power Platform. This enables health customers to leverage the Microsoft no-code and low-code Power Platform to build health applications, simplifying the complexities of the FHIR standard. Learn more about our current and upcoming Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare release.

We have also expanded collaboration with Cognizant to integrate Cognizant’s TriZetto healthcare products. With this integration, we aim to improve efficiency and help customers achieve significantly shorter time-to-value with enhanced patient and member engagement, improved data interoperability, and improved insights. Together we will also develop and run Cognizant’s current and future healthcare software as a service (SaaS) solution on Microsoft Azure, migrate new and existing clients from on-premises environments to streamlined functions managed on the Microsoft Cloud, and support future technologies designed to deliver new insights for payers, providers, and consumers

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability continues to empower organizations in their sustainability efforts across our solutions which streamline data ingestion, integration, calculations, reporting, and more. Our offering also includes Environmental Credit Service (preview), bringing efficiency, trust, and transparency to voluntary ecological markets. We continue to extend our data story with the availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API (preview) which allows organizations to get emissions data for extensibility and customization for solutions and reporting.

This also extends our Scope 3 category calculations for the GHG Protocol, including providing reporting on the following Scope 3 categories:

• Scope 3 category 3: Fuel and energy-related activities not included in Scope 1 or Scope 2.
• Scope 3 category 12 (included in a previous release): End-of-life treatment of sold products.

Additionally, our joint solution with Ecolab, a global sustainability leader in water, hygiene, and infection prevention, combines the power of the ECOLAB3D™ digital platform with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. With this solution, organizations are able to monitor and manage water data so they can gain greater visibility into how they are tracking against water and sustainability goals.

Another highlight is our expanded set of emission factors which now includes the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra). Defra emission factors are used by the United Kingdom and other international organizations for reporting greenhouse gas emissions, which help organizations to maintain compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements.

Lastly, data capture (preview) helps organizations train and use optical character recognition (OCR) models for processing and ingesting Scope 2 purchased energy invoices to differentiate between energy providers. Data capture uses Microsoft Power Platform’s AI Builder and document intelligence solutions. With this, organizations can now create a seamless workstream to ingest data from within Microsoft Sustainability Manager to use in calculations and reporting.

We are committed to helping our customers meet the needs of new ESG demands and markets and are actively working to extend reporting and sustainability solutions to do so. More updates are coming soon about expanded data management capabilities.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is a secure, reliable, hyperscale, fully managed cloud-based data platform solution that supports a wide variety of energy solutions compatible with OSDU™ Date Platform. This solution addresses the challenge of data—moving from disparate systems and disconnected applications to a holistic approach. Azure Data Manager for Energy is designed to help organizations get more value from their data by scaling ingestion and data enrichment, providing easy interoperability, and unlocking self-serve data analytics capabilities. The open Microsoft platform enables developers, data managers, and geoscientists alike to innovate the next generation of digital solutions for the energy industry.

Since its preview, the team has addressed multiple customer feedback items that can be seen on the release notes page. Customers can look forward to another heavily requested feature that will allow for scenarios including testing, training, and evaluation of Azure Data Manager for Energy or specific OSDU™ Data Platform features. This will be released as a separate “Developer” Tier in the coming weeks.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services continues to invest in delivering capabilities to manage financial services data at scale and make it easier for financial services institutions to improve customer experience, coordinate engagement, and drive operational efficiency. This wave focuses on strengthening offerings in banking, cross-vertical experiences, and financial services data models. We are prioritizing providing customers and partners with more flexibility in meeting their specific needs through componentization. The components offer individual deployment and configuration capabilities for customer onboarding, document processing, and in how customer financial information is represented. We will enable flexible adaptation of the UI to different scenarios, offer a wealth of tools for document processing and management using AI, and provide various endpoints for partner enablement in the process. We plan to improve the retail banking loan onboarding solution with the new document intelligence feature and offer additional flexibility enhancements as requested by our customers and partners.

In partnership with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, KX has released kdb Insights—a robust, integrated data management and time series streaming analytics solution for optimal real-time decisioning. Leverage the capabilities of kdb Insights running on a virtual machine to build and deploy highly performant, data-intensive applications. Kdb Insights allows developers to build real-time analytics with connectivity, tool, and infrastructure ease.

Global partner ecosystem

Our unique value proposition is our global ecosystem of partners. These partners create tailored solutions for organizations by developing connectors and continuing to build on top of our industry cloud offerings. Independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators, and advisory partners from every industry can extend the capabilities of our Microsoft Cloud for industries to meet the unique needs of customers across the globe. Trusted advisers like Accenture, Avanade, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, and PwC are helping organizations everywhere plan, design, and implement strategies and robust solutions to enable transformation across several industries including Healthcare, Sustainability, and Financial Services. Find a complete list of partners who are developing joint solutions built on our platform that deliver differentiated customer experiences, empower employees, and manage enterprise risk on AppSource and Azure Marketplace.

Learn more

Microsoft Industry Cloud continues to expand our offerings in the industry space. We continue to invest in clouds such as Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.

Follow us on Industry Cloud blogs for industry-specific news and read more about what’s upcoming on our documentation pages.

Adapt and thrive

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The discussions in each episode of Industry Conversations cover how technology can benefit people—their workflows and their efficiency. In the healthcare industry, for example, there’s been a realization that staff needs digital tools to make their lives easier, not be a further burden. 

“Right now, the staff, when they look at technology, I think the current experience has been it’s adding more work.”—Dr. David Rhew, Microsoft Chief Medical Officer, Industry Conversations healthcare episode.  

The series also touches on the implementation of industry clouds, with a discussion in the “Bridging Industries” episode about how partners provide the expertise to make the goals of any business possible.

“Partners can help to digitize manual or redundant processes, connect the distributed hybrid workforce, and reach customers in new and innovative ways.”—Julie Sanford, Vice President, Partner GTM, Programs and Experiences at Microsoft.

One of those partner organizations, Backbase, works with financial services customers to help in their transition to an industry cloud. Jeroen Unger, Backbase Partner Manager, assists banks with their end-to-end digital experience implementations for customers, “rather than a broken process or a customer needing to go into a branch office or submit paperwork,” he says. “Making that digital end-to-end experience is really crucial.” 

Here is an overview of all five episodes: 

1. Bridging Industries: 

Our series launches with two Microsoft leaders—Kees Hertogh, Microsoft General Manager for Global Industry Product Marketing, and Julie Sanford, Vice President, Partner GTM, Programs and Experiences at Microsoft. The two define industry clouds, their benefit for any type of organization, and share some customer and partner stories from several industries. 

“We knew we needed to help our customers to be more agile, get faster time to value, and be future-proofed for their business,”—Kees Hertogh, General Manager for Global Industry Product Marketing, Microsoft.

Listen to Episode 1 Bridging Industries.

2. Sustainability: 

Sustainability is top of mind across all industries. One company, Anglian Water, has adopted the Get River Positive Initiative, a firm commitment to act now to protect and revitalize rivers in the eastern United Kingdom by 2030. As a utility that must keep clean water flowing to more than 6 million customers, Anglian Water is using data and the cloud to develop models to better understand patterns that will save water today and enable planning for the future. Host Rosie Mastrandrea, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft welcomes Dr. Robin Price, Director of Quality and Water at Anglian Water to talk about how that initiative is using data alongside what might be considered radical partnerships—with farmers, landowners, river groups, and other global leaders to lead the change. These partnerships can help with conservation but also provide insights to predict and alleviate risk. 

“Flood risk is not something that is coming. Climate change is something that is here, the impacts will be felt through water.”—Dr. Robin Price, Director of Quality and Water, Anglian Water.

Listen to Episode 2 Sustainability.

3. Financial Services: 

“Customers expect the same level of great digital experiences that they do in their personal lives in terms of entertainment or social media,” says Ashley Nagle Eknaian of Massachusetts-based Eastern Bank in this episode focused on the financial services industry. This roundtable, hosted by Dave Morehouse, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft, also features Ashley’s Eastern Bank colleague Carlo Guerriero and Backbase’s Jeroen Unger. Their discussion provides a deeper view into how technology developed specifically for banking provides tools to improve customer experience, cybersecurity, and communications. 

Listen to Episode 3 Financial Services.

4. Healthcare: 

It’s not just COVID-19 or economic conditions that have forced healthcare workers to do more with less—this is an issue that’s been going on for decades. In this episode, host Jenn Roth, Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft speaks with Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft, on alleviating the burnout that has only grown in recent years. 

“One of the things we saw early on with the use of technology was that we are adding more tasks for clinicians, they were having to enter things into a computer on a keyboard, and they were doing more administrative tasks. What we’re now realizing is that we have to start taking a closer look at how technology, in particular AI, can help streamline some of those processes.”—Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer, Microsoft.

Listen to Episode 4 Healthcare Part 1.

5. Healthcare: 

When Diana Nole joined the team at Nuance Healthcare Solutions three years ago, she saw how technology was actually standing in the way of the doctor-patient relationship. 

“I was astonished when I learned how much time a physician actually has to spend on administrative burden.”—Diana Nole, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Nuance Healthcare Solutions.

In this episode, host Jenn Roth and Diana talk about how Nuance’s Dragon Medical One and DAX ambient listening tools use AI, amplified by the power of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. These tools reduce administrative burdens and empower clinicians to spend more time taking care of patients and less time on paperwork.

Listen to Episode 5 Healthcare Part 2.

Learn more with Microsoft Podcasts

Visit our Microsoft podcast page to listen to all these episodes of the Industry Conversation podcast.

Industry Conversations

Each episode covers how technology can benefit people—their workflows and their efficiency.

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Updated monthly, the release wave 1 plan details features released from April 1, 2023 through September 30, 2023, and is available online or via download as a PDF file. This plan covers features for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. Read on for a summary of each industry’s release plan and learn about supporting resources

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 1 plan

Learn about the latest updates to customers as features are prepared for release.

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Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare focuses on customer feedback across various offerings. During this wave, we are expanding the support in enhancing patient experiences with patient journeys. We will also focus on planning tools to empower health teams to provide better care management. Additionally, to improve the time to value, we are releasing capabilities to support for create/read update and delete procedures and performance improvements for Dataverse Healthcare application programming interfaces (APIs). Keep an eye out for more announcements to follow in April 2023.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services will continue to focus on strengthening offerings in banking, cross-vertical experiences, and financial services data models. For the upcoming releases, we are prioritizing providing customers and partners with more flexibility in meeting their specific needs through componentization. The components offer individual deployment and configuration capabilities for customer onboarding, document processing, and in how customer financial information is represented. We will enable flexible adaptation of the UI to different scenarios, offer a wealth of tools for document processing and management using AI, and provide various end points for partner enablement in the process. We plan to improve the retail banking loan onboarding solution with the new document intelligence feature and offer additional flexibility enhancements as requested by our customers and partners.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail accelerates innovation with industry-specific solutions that help retailers maximize the value of their data by providing an engaging shopping experience for their shoppers, and empowering store associates to be productive and customer focused. With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Retail is continuing its investments in both Store Operations and Smart Store Analytics with customer requested features and additional AI and machine learning based capabilities. With Store Operations Assist, we are enabling features like tablet support, branching logic for survey responses, enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams front line worker apps. For Smart Store Analytics, we are adding additional AI and machine learning based insights around product recommendations and foot traffic analysis. Additionally, we will also enable additional scenarios with Microsoft Could for Retail prioritized partners.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We continue to empower organizations in their sustainability efforts across our solutions which streamline data ingestion, integration, calculations, reporting and more. Our offering also includes an environmental credit service, bringing efficiency, trust and transparency to voluntary ecological markets. We continue to extend our data story with the availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API which allows organization to get emissions data for extensibility and customization for solutions and reporting. This release wave also extends our scope 3 category calculations for the GHG Protocol, including providing reporting on the following scope 3 categories: Scope 3 category 3: Fuel- and energy-related activities not included in scope 1 or scope 2; Scope 3 category 12 (included in a previous release): End-of-life treatment of sold products.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit in 2023 release wave 1, continues to deliver capabilities that enable nonprofits to operate in a holistic and seamless way and empower partners to extend the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. In this release we are focusing on accelerating mission outcomes by improving evidence-based decision-making through connected organization data powered by rich data capabilities and machine learning. We also will help nonprofits extend fundraising and engagement more easily. Know your donors and supporters by inputting and processing donor gifts quickly, viewing actionable donor insights, and integrated reporting with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Key dates for the 2023 release wave 1

These release plans describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (go to Microsoft policy for more information).

Here are the key dates for the 2023 release wave 1.

What’s next

Your feedback is used to make improvements to our solutions as well as our documentation. Share your thoughts in the Microsoft Power Platform community forum.

We look forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2023 release wave 1.

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Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions bring together the breadth of offerings from across Microsoft, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and uniquely tailor them for specific industries. Built on a foundation of trust, these solutions are composable and can be customized, providing a rich platform to enable our customers and partners to quickly drive time-to-value and digitally transform their organizations.

Data sovereignty and residency

Microsoft works to provide tools and resources to give businesses the ability to maintain customer data in both a designated geographic boundary (data residency) as well as customer data that is subject to national jurisdiction (sovereignty). As we continue to expand our solutions, we are proactively working with our customers and partners to help meet the unique needs of their industries by architecting our solutions with options for data residency, compliance, and language localization in each geography. In May 2022, Microsoft announced the availability of two new sovereign sites, Sweden and Belgium, that will be offering local data residency, and country sovereignty for their cloud services. These new sites also provide improved performance and faster access to the cloud. Learn more about data residency, data sovereignty, and compliance in Microsoft Cloud.

Industry compliance in mind

Compliance is a shared responsibility. While it is essential that organizations understand how Microsoft provides the foundation for compliance, ultimately all data stored in a cloud service requires each organization to secure and protect it. Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions supports regional compliance coverage by simplifying the solution adoption. Microsoft has 100 plus compliance offerings including more than 50 of which are specific to regions and countries such as Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and 26 European countries, known as the Schengen area. Microsoft engages with governments, regulators, standards bodies, and nongovernmental organizations to understand emerging requirements and ensure fast and effective enablement of critical compliance needs. In regions such as Europe, the forthcoming EU Data Boundary will expand on our data residency commitment, ensuring Microsoft not only stores but also processes customer data in the European Union.

To help address customer and partner needs to understand regulatory requirements, our industry solutions, including Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, and Microsoft Cloud for Retail, adhere to well-known globally accepted standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018. In addition, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services conforms to SOC1 and SOC2 standards. Learn more about privacy and compliance at the Microsoft Trust Center.

Native languages built-in

Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions is available in multiple languages to serve our customers and partners with ease of use in their native languages. For countries that require products sold to be localized, Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions helps adhere to local regulations. Explore the industry solutions and supported languages by geography.

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Explore the Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions global availability and languages supported.

Our next release wave promises even more opportunities for industries to do more with less. Read more about what’s upcoming on our Dynamics 365 and industry clouds documentation pages.

Microsoft Cloud for industries

Learn how to build resilience and drive innovation with Microsoft Cloud industry solutions.

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