These initiatives focus on harnessing data insights from smart technologies such as automation, Internet of Things (IoT), and AI, to improve how products are made and distributed. By unifying this and other data—including siloed data sets—into a single ESG data estate, manufacturing organizations can gain holistic views and granular insights to help them not only meet ESG reporting requirements, but also drive the sustainability of sourcing, making, transporting, and disposing of products—and implement business practices that advance a circular economy.  

To support your organization as you explore options and identify cost-effective steps in this era of industrial transformation, we’ve gathered learnings and recommendations into the Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business Transformation. We’ve also created an ESG data readiness assessment to help you get started quickly. 

A more responsible, competitive path forward 

Manufacturing and mobility organizations that develop smart, automated, and data-driven processes as part of industrial transformation—and incorporate sustainability into those processes—are well positioned to gain a competitive advantage. ESG insights can help manufacturers achieve a range of goals across the value chain, such as:  

• Improved risk management and the protection of critical production processes.
• Engagement with vendors and suppliers to address Scope 3 emissions, reduce exposure to impacts from climate risks, and governance loopholes.
• Reduced costs and improved traceability with streamlined technology resources.
• More responsible capital deployment.  

With advanced solutions, organizations have already begun making these improvements. For example, Sandvik, a leader in mining industry manufacturing, implemented Microsoft AI and cloud technologies to enhance predictive maintenance and lower emissions, allowing them to cut down on waste and optimize resource use. 

ESG data: The input that fuels comprehensive sustainability 

To achieve the full potential of ESG data—from the shop floor to the board room—manufacturing and mobility organizations can benefit from evaluating sustainability comprehensively, in terms of environmental concerns as well as social and governance impacts. This approach uses ESG data insights to improve risk management and protect the value of critical product processes, and to make decisions that improve energy use, labor practices, supply chain transparency, regulatory compliance, and more.  

For example, Outokumpu, a worldwide leader in stainless steel production, tapped into the power of data by developing an industrial digital platform based on Microsoft Azure. The insights this platform provided led to significantly reduced waste (due to fewer defects) and energy usage—contributing to lower CO2 emissions. 

Key ways to maximize the benefits of ESG data in manufacturing and mobility include: 

• Build a data-driven infrastructure: ensure that systems are in place to collect and integrate accurate ESG data seamlessly across all departments.
• Leverage predictive insights: use AI and analytics to forecast and optimize operations, including by using natural language querying to enable all teams to access insights—enabling efficient resource use and proactive risk management.
• Foster a culture of sustainability: from executives to front-line workers, train employees in how ESG data can improve decision-making and drive sustainability outcomes. 

Implementing these ideas can provide the foundation for using ESG data to drive long-term success, and to make significant improvements relatively quickly. For instance, Nordic-based OSTP Group, which specializes in manufacturing stainless steel products and custom equipment, is using Microsoft technologies to track and report CO2 emissions. The data insights they gained led to a 70% reduction in direct CO2 emissions from 2021 to 2023. 

Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and industrial automation, has also reduced carbon emissions and optimized energy use—leveraging Azure OpenAI and other Microsoft AI technologies to boost not only sustainability, but also their engineers’ productivity. 

How Microsoft is powering sustainable transformations  

Microsoft has emerged as a leading partner for manufacturing and mobility organizations on their journey toward sustainability. We’ve designed our solutions to help businesses in three primary ways: 

1. Improve ESG data transparency: We’re continuously innovating to enable our customers to glean consolidated data intelligence from across their operations and value chain.
2. Deliver actionable insights: Microsoft has a deep slate of expertise helping manufacturers maximize operational efficiencies using sensor-enabled data management and automated scenarios powered by the Microsoft Cloud.
3. Create new opportunities: We are a global leader in enabling digital transformation through our data and AI solutions, to help businesses grow while becoming more sustainable. 

We’re delivering for these solution areas by bringing together a growing set of ESG data and AI capabilities from Microsoft and our global ecosystem of partners, in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.  

A core solution in this suite is Microsoft Sustainability Manager, which allows businesses to more easily record, report, and reduce their environmental impact through data connections and powerful AI-powered analytics—and can be integrated with virtually any business system. With this solution, manufacturing and mobility teams advance on carbon, water, and waste management, as well as circularity.  

Businesses can also implement the purpose-built ESG capabilities of Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, to integrate, normalize, and analyze ESG data—and other enterprise data—on a single digital platform. Together, these capabilities help improve ESG data accuracy and transparency, simplify reporting processes, and accelerate progress toward goals.  

Swedish forestry giant Södra is showing what’s possible with these capabilities. Södra utilizes Microsoft Sustainability Manager to improve supply chain transparency and track sustainability data across its entire operation, allowing them to reduce reliance on carbon-intensive materials, displacing 8.8 million tons of CO2 emissions annually. Södra estimates the positive impact of this accomplishment as equivalent to one-fifth of Sweden’s annual reported carbon emissions. 

A sustainable future begins with smarter solutions 

As manufacturing and mobility continues to transform, both smart technologies and ESG data will help companies drive sustainability, meet compliance and reporting requirements, and uncover new opportunities for growth. Microsoft is here to help organizations make the transition with solutions to help reduce their environmental impact, improve operational efficiency, and position themselves for long-term success in a rapidly changing world. To gain a view of your ESG data across key areas, as well as customized guidance on how to drive sustainability progress and add business value, complete our readiness assessment.

Explore ESG readiness for other industries

• Retail and consumer goods: Unlocking business value with data-driven sustainability for retail and consumer goods
• Financial services: ESG data readiness drives value for financial services firms

ESG Data Readiness Assessment

View your data readiness across critical areas

Take the assessment today

The post Data is driving a more sustainable industrial transformation 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

Discover more

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.

During this wave, we’ve invested heavily in the development of copilot templates to enhance capabilities and integration across various industries. These customizable templates offer improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and seamless integration with existing technology, all while supporting a diverse, global customer base. Copilots are valuable assets for Microsoft Industry Clouds customers, helping to drive customer and partner success. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends our offerings, with systems integrators and independent software vendors enabling factory data ingestion from different systems and building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Microsoft Azure AI.

Here’s a look at what’s been delivered since the release plans announcement in January 2024.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is introducing new solutions in preview to optimize factory operations. These include manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and a copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions enable manufacturers to ingest and unify data from diverse sources, standardize and enrich data for seamless interoperability, and utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization by unifying information and operation technology data into an open and secure data platform. The copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI enhances responsiveness and streamlines communication across teams and roles.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

This release of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture includes new copilot templates that can empower organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. These templates provide a powerful tool for organizations to use generative AI and data to optimize their operations and engage better with their customers. Customers are bringing generative AI to life for farmers. ITC, a multi-industry enterprise, has created, Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot, developed using Microsoft copilot templates. With this application, ITC seeks to empower farmers by providing them with timely and relevant information that can boost productivity, increase profitability, and enhance climate resilience.

Copilot templates can support use cases based on tillage, planting, crop protection, harvesting, and other types of farm operations. Users can submit queries such as “show me active fields” or “what is the average yield for my field?”. These use cases can help input providers to plan equipment, seeds, applications, and related services and engage better with the farmer.

Using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and other sources, copilots can provide insights on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts, and harvest windows. Enabling seamless retrieval of data and allowing for plugins, embedded data structures, and subprocesses to be selected as part of the query flow allows organizations to extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a solution that helps public sector organizations use the public cloud and advanced technologies while helping meet security, sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty introduces updates and new features to streamline the configuration and deployment of sovereign environments. Guardrails and codified architectures reduce complexity and make the process of building sovereign environments more predictable and repeatable. New preview tools include assessment, policy compiler, and drift detection analysis tools, as well as a new Azure service that allow users to create and deploy Sovereign Landing Zones (SLZs) within the Microsoft Azure Portal. Guidance includes sample reference architectures for using large language models (LLMs) and Azure OpenAI Service with SLZ, as well as guidance on workload migrations and Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse configurations.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

In February 2024, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability announced new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Fabric, providing new levels of speed and efficiency in processing data to help drive faster progress toward sustainability goals. These new features include sustainability data solutions in Fabric and natural language queries with Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, among other AI-powered features now available in preview.

In March 2024, new features were added to Sustainability Manager, including the ability to create calculation models with Copilot using natural language input, a dedicated energy data model to help track energy usage, activity to emissions traceability to link underlying source activity data to emissions records, and the ability to create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import.

Additional release updates to Cloud for Sustainability include enhancements to environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights with what-if analysis to help organizations build the relationship between forecasting and reduction goal planning. Users can link forecasts to existing goals to track actual progress alongside the projected ones. In addition, forecasts with the same historical data can be layered onto a single view, allowing for faster analysis of optimal reduction opportunities.

Another new feature is the ability to import and calculate with product carbon footprint data. This feature allows you to use product carbon footprint data to calculate and understand value chain emissions in Sustainability Manager more easily. Organizations can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a product family and more easily import and manage this data within Sustainability Manager.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is expanding geo availability, adding the Australia east region. This additional region is enabled for both the standard and developer tiers of Azure Data Manager for Energy. Users can now select “Australia east” as a preferred region when creating an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource using the Azure portal.

External data sources (EDS) (preview) allow data from external data sources aligned with the OSDU® Technical Standard to be shared with an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource. EDS is designed to pull specified data (metadata) from OSDU-compliant data sources through scheduled jobs while leaving associated dataset files (such as LAS and SEG-Y) stored at the external source for retrieval on demand.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail now includes new features in its retail data solutions architecture, an industry-specific workload for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be easily configured. Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized partners are available. These capabilities enable the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can’t be achieved in isolation.

One of the new features is the copilot capabilities in Fabric, which bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Fabric and Microsoft Power BI. Another new feature is the Sitecore OrderCloud data connector, which can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Fabric in real time. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to the retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort and accelerating time to insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The 2024 release wave 1 also brings new features and innovations to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. One of the new features is the ability to improve clinical and operational insights by ensuring health data is accessible across provider, payor, and pharma; and facilitating clinical, operational, and performance analytics using healthcare data solutions in Fabric (preview).

Some other new features in the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include support for additional data storage needs, support for availability zones for Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, FHIRLink Power Platform connector, and the ability to use the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) service with Azure Data Lake integration.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is proud to announce the April 2024 release for Fundraising and Engagement. This release brings significant enhancements, mainly to nonprofit gift processors, including valuable enhancements to Fundraising and Engagement Azure services and new Stripe API (payment intents) integration. Customers who rely on Stripe for their payment processing can now benefit from the latest Stripe APIs, addressing the requests of current customers and the requirements of future customers. It is highly recommended that customers upgrade and use the new Stripe API when creating a payment processor associated to a configuration profile. For more details, read more here.   

Learn more about Microsoft Industry Clouds

• Official Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing documentation
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability documentation
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Retail documentation
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit documentation

Microsoft Industry Clouds

Check out the latest innovations.

Learn more

The post 2024 release wave 1: New copilot features to enhance Microsoft Industry Clouds capabilities 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

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

Discover more

MEDICAL DEVICE DISCLAIMER. Microsoft product(s) and service(s) (1) are not designed, intended or made available as a medical device(s), and (2) are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment.

The post The latest wave of innovation in Microsoft Industry Cloud appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

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.

Learn more

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.

Learn more

The post Explore Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions global availability appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Microsoft’s deep commitment to industry is not new, but in the face of so many changes our commitment has taken on a new urgency. We are committed to helping every organization use technology and tools to accelerate their transformation. That’s why Microsoft Cloud for industries offers powerful, integrated, and uniquely tailored industry solutions and workflows allowing organizations to realize breakthrough value and more easily achieve success; enabling them to unleash value quickly, build for the future, and exceed expectations.  

Industry at Microsoft Ignite 

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, you will learn more about exciting announcements that include new features and updates to our Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions.  

• With our latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, we’ve delivered marketing insights capabilities, resource guides for fundraising and engagement and volunteer management, redesigned donation import functionality, a new first-party installation service to automate deployment of fundraising and engagement, and much more. We want to equip the nonprofit sector with affordable, accessible, and secure technology to meet evolving trends head-on. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit harnesses the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, and LinkedIn all brought together by the Nonprofit Common Data Model and built on a platform that provides best-in-class security and compliance. 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is expanding Sustainability Manager with new Scope 3 emissions calculation models and expanding the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model to ingest water data (in preview). We are releasing Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365 to general availability, enabling customers to track emissions associated with their use of Microsoft 365 cloud services. To improve reliability for environmental claims and credits, Microsoft is introducing Environmental Credit Service, a managed service that increases transparency, time to market, and scalability for environmental assets. We are delivering new sustainability training including technical guidance to help customers optimize their Azure workloads. And our growing, global ecosystem of partners is helping customers unlock new value by extending Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability with dedicated solutions, like those just announced by McKinsey. They announced the creation of an integrated solution that combines sustainability data intelligence from Microsoft Sustainability Manager with decarbonization planning and an execution engine using McKinsey Sustainability’s Catalyst Zero. This technological collaboration will enhance companies’ sustainability transformations by integrating their data from activities that produce emissions with initiatives to abate them. Learn more in our recent blog, Driving innovation for ESG progress with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services announces the general availability of intelligent appointments, which delivers better customer experiences through end-to-end virtual or in-person meeting management; the general availability of Compliance Program for Microsoft Cloud, which provides white glove service for risk, audit, and compliance teams; preview of unified client profile for wealth management and onboarding application; and preview of new data models for insurance, wealth management, and retail banking SMB. Find out more about the latest release. 
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announces the latest release wave update that enables consumer-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare, creating “customers” for life. The updates include missed appointment AI prediction model in Patient Trends (preview), which helps organizations assess the likelihood that patients will miss their next appointment and allows providers to take proactive measures to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment and maintain continuity of care. Additional updates include improved care plan templates (October update), pre-built Patient Journey templates with new out-of-the-box patient outreach campaigns (preview), and a full feature release of Dataverse Healthcare API (generally available) to support bi-directional writeback capabilities to electronic health record (EHR) and other clinical systems. Learn more in our recent blog, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Ease provider burden and help create customers for life.

Additionally, energy businesses alongside our ecosystem partner companies can benefit from an enterprise-grade cloud-based data platform aligned with the OSDU Technical Standard can help minimize the time, risk, and costs of ownership associated with energy exploration and production. Read about how energy companies can enable its data to do more in the cloud. 

Further, to empower the more than 2 billion people in the frontline workforce spanning industries such as retail and healthcare, we are announcing new partnerships with Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) and Honeywell to increase operational efficiency and enhance communications and collaboration. These new integrated solutions will help with digitizing manual processes and enable easier instant communication.

Make the most of your Microsoft Ignite journey  

As you get ready to engage at the event, it’s worth considering what sessions will benefit you on your industry cloud journey. Spanning multiple industries and a broad array of subjects, this Microsoft Ignite event has something for everyone. Here are some key experiences that will provide a deeper view into how industry clouds enable organizations to drive business outcomes. 

• Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Industry clouds—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 1:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT. Join Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Industry, Apps and Data Marketing, as well as Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion Team, for a panel discussion and gain key insights into why industry matters to Microsoft and how it enables organizations to unleash value quickly, build for the future, and exceed expectations. You will also learn ways you can get started on your industry cloud journey. 
• The Industrial Metaverse—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 10:25 AM to 10:45 AM PT. Businesses and technologists around the world are struggling to define the Metaverse and what their role will be in it. In this keynote, Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, will distinguish how Microsoft is thinking about the phenomenon for consumers, businesses, and industries. He will share our vision for the Industrial Metaverse, making the construct real and bringing it to life with customer stories. 

Breakout sessions 

• Healthcare—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:35 PM PT. The Experience Transformation: Free up time to focus on the things that matter with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare​ 
• Financial Services—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:25 PM PT. Unlock innovation and reduce risk with the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 
• Retail—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:35 PM PT.​ Optimize your customer shopping experience with Microsoft Cloud for Retail ​ 
• Nonprofit—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 10:00 AM to 10:35 AM PT. Utilize Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit and other new solutions to enhance the impact of nonprofit and international development orgs​ 
• Manufacturing—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 1:00 PM to 1:20 PM PT.​ Improve factory visibility and decision-making with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing    
• Sustainability—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 2:00 PM to 2:30 PM PT. Accelerate your sustainability progress and business growth with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability​ 
• Industrial Metaverse—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 2:00 PM to 2:30 PM PT. Jumpstart your physical operations transformation with technologies built for the Industrial Metaverse 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM PT. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and the Expansion of Azure Confidential Computing

On-demand sessions 

• Energy​: Transform the energy industry with innovative partnerships and technology solutions for a sustainable future 
• Defense and Intelligence: Digital Engineering for defense and intelligence mission success  
• Government​: Accelerating security innovation for governments with the intelligent cloud​ 
• Sustainability: How to tailor Microsoft Sustainability Manager to fit your business needs

Start your journey

Along with each session, participants can learn more about how to get started on their unique Microsoft Cloud for industries journey. Microsoft Ignite 2022 is both virtual and in-person, offering many opportunities to network with peers or just see old friends. Start now with our Connection Zone to build your profile and make a contact list. 

We at Microsoft are continuously innovating and evolving our industry cloud solutions to meet the needs of our customers and are very excited to showcase the power of having an industry-focused approach at Microsoft Ignite. Microsoft Ignite 2022 is a chance for us to reaffirm our commitment to serving our customers across all industries and demonstrate our commitment to equipping them with the most innovative tools and technologies in the industry.  

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for industries.

The post Industry at Microsoft Ignite 2022—Accelerate growth with Microsoft Cloud for industries appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Our promise to partners

To help our partners benefit from the tremendous growth that we are seeing across industries, we have developed four primary value propositions:

• Build. Our partners build on the Microsoft Cloud for industries (Manufacturing, Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare, Nonprofit) as a platform, using their capabilities to enrich solutions already in the market—either for a specific customer or at scale. The Microsoft Industry Cloud Platform helps industries transform with speed and agility, with solutions that address customer business needs. ​ 
• Enrich. Partners make more of the Microsoft Cloud for Industry by building or updating software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) solutions that take advantage of unmet customer needs. With unified data and analytics, partners can now remove traditional data siloes for customers and extend the core capabilities of the Cloud for Industry.
• Unlock. Partners can unlock new revenue and high-value service opportunities, including adapting the Microsoft Cloud for Industry to each customer’s environment and business processes. Partners are empowered to start new conversations and solve new customer scenarios by leveraging our go-to-market (GTM) offers and incentives.
• Scale. We facilitate strong partner-to-partner connections so they can bring the best value to our customers. They also can work with Microsoft to provide the best solutions for customers, and co-sell with Microsoft to understand customer needs and leverage the Microsoft sales team to advance customer opportunities.

Make the most of your Microsoft Inspire journey

Microsft Inspire has a lot to offer; here are a few recommendations for you:  

• Join Judson Althoff, Microsoft EVP and Chief Commercial Officer, as he kicks off day two of Microsoft Inspire. You will hear about the outsized opportunities partners have as we bring the unique value of the Microsoft Cloud to more customers than ever, together. Judson will also share the importance of digital perseverance in navigating uncertainty and why leaning into innovation is the only path forward. 
• Join Nick Parker, President, Industry and Partner Sales, and Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Industry, Apps and Data Marketing, to discuss how to put Microsoft Industry Clouds and opportunities into perspective. 
• Join us for a panel discussion and gain key insights into Microsoft’s industry innovation and investments. Learn about the opportunity this creates for your business, investments we are making to enable partner solutions, and how we can help you scale through our GTM engines. 
• Through a series of in-depth discussions, you’ll discover details of Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability, the business opportunities that can come from adopting a comprehensive sustainability strategy, and how your organization can partner with Microsoft to implement sustainability solutions. 
• Attend industry-focused sessions:
  • Drive growth and profitability with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 
  • Accelerate your financial services solutions with the industry cloud 
  • Inspiration to action: The partner value in Microsoft Cloud for Retail 
  • Manufacturing a resilient and sustainable future with Microsoft Cloud 
  • Drive innovation and social impact with Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit
• On-demand sessions. We also have a wide array of sessions on-demand, so you can watch when convenient—even after Microsoft Inspire. These include:
  • Accelerate your business in Automotive, Mobility, and Transportation 
  • Modernizing Defense and Intelligence customers through partnerships
  • Accelerating the energy transition through innovative partnerships
  • Engaging with Media & Entertainment and telecommunications worldwide
  • Partner opportunities in the Education industry
  • Delivering Citizen Centric Services Through Digital Government
• Networking with friends. Even though Microsoft Inspire is virtual, there will be plenty of opportunities to network with peers or just see old friends. Start now with our Connection Zone and build your profile and make a contact list.

Time to get inspired!

I hope you’re looking forward to Microsoft Inspire as much as I am. It’s a chance for us to celebrate you, our partners, reaffirm our commitment to serving our customers across all industries, and demonstrate our commitment to equipping our partners with the most innovative tools and technologies in the industry. 

The post Microsoft Inspire 2022: Empowering partners to drive transformation in every industry appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

We’ll be highlighting our industry cloud offerings: Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, and the just-released Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. We believe our differentiating approach to industry-specific clouds brings industry relevance to the Microsoft Cloud and leads the market in its ability to enable customers to transform at their own pace, through a modular, extendable, and scalable architecture. The industry clouds empower every employee to collaborate and make more impact, engage customers, and gain a competitive edge with real-time data, AI-driven insights, and automated workflows.

Here’s how.

Our cloud reimagines manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing transforms core manufacturing processes and requirements. It’s designed to digitally empower the workforce, create safer and more agile factories, build more resilient supply chains, and unlock innovation that leads to new products.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing meets all manufacturers’ needs. It spans application infrastructure; data and AI; developer tools and services; security, compliance, identity, and management; productivity and collaboration; and business process.

It also provides unmatched predictive power, increases data-driven decision-making speed, and expands with analytics that scale across the entire data estate. A business can reshape how teams work and fuel the organization’s next generation of innovation with world-class, industry-leading AI.

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that the fourth industrial revolution is no longer hype. Disruptions stemming from COVID-19 are here to stay, and every manufacturer needs to be on a digital journey. We’re ready to help.

Financial services get a boost when data delivers more

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services manages data that delivers tailored customer experiences, gives employees the power to do more, and combats financial crime—all while improving security, compliance, and interoperability.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services benefits that industry in multiple ways. It creates unified customer profiles with a 360-degree view of data, self-service mobile tools to streamline customer onboarding, financial summaries at one’s fingertips to drive engagement, and workflow automation and intelligent tools to orchestrate processes.

It also helps financial services employees work flexibly; learn, collaborate, and innovate from anywhere; and use tools that enable people closest to the business problem to solve it.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services integrates cloud services across our offerings—Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform—all underpinned by an industry data model with new capabilities and customization. It was also designed for even the most complex control frameworks and regulatory requirements, with multi-layered security, comprehensive compliance, and trust commitments all built-in.

Retailers connect to consumers in a more meaningful way

Retail has seen profound changes in recent years, from the rise of online shopping to disruptions caused by COVID-19. That makes it more important than ever for retailers to connect with customers in meaningful ways.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail makes that possible. It takes data and creates customer insights that lead to deeper connections. It transforms the shopping experience with new technology that builds strong customer relationships. It helps secure supply chains. And it empowers employees to improve customer satisfaction.

Like all our clouds, Microsoft Cloud for Retail protects businesses and customer data with built-in platform capabilities from the leader in cloud-native security and compliance. Microsoft invests $1 billion annually in security, and more than 3,500 full-time security professionals use AI tools to analyze more than eight trillion signals daily and respond to security threats around the world.

Transform the healthcare journey

Few things matter as much to people as their health and wellbeing. Now Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted, integrated capabilities that make it easier to improve the entire healthcare experience. And outcomes-focused AI solutions from Microsoft + Nuance help you innovate for the future.

Healthcare needs tools that create better patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, boost clinician productivity, and more. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare creates opportunities to achieve those goals.

Integrating AI and machine learning into the healthcare frontline processes allows for a variety of benefits, including easing workflows, and analyzing large data sets to deliver better healthcare faster, and at a lower cost. But it also has the power to help significantly reduce the overwhelming burden of administrative tasks that have made it so difficult for healthcare workers to do what inspired them to go into medicine in the first place. 

Accelerate your sustainability journey

Microsoft is committed to operating a more environmentally sustainable cloud. With the recently released Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, a business can measure, report on, and reduce its environmental impact through actionable insights.

Our own sustainability journey began when we set our first carbon goal more than a decade ago. This led us to better organize our data and realign our company’s vision and strategy with our sustainability goals. We continue to build on our commitments to innovate and invest in technologies that address environmental sustainability and to transparently share our achievements and setbacks so that we can all learn together.

That experience has energized us to help our customers accelerate their own progress. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability provides the intelligence and data management capabilities organizations need to respond to changes with agility and confidence.

See you at Cloud Wars

I’m looking forward to meeting customers at the Cloud Wars Expo and talking about both our sustainability initiatives and our industry cloud offerings. Be sure to check out our booth and visit the cloud sessions where we’ll be making our case: Manufacturing, Financial Services, Retail, Healthcare, and Sustainability.

The post Microsoft at Cloud Wars Expo: Redefining what’s possible for Industry appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.