By holistically tracking, analyzing, and sharing information for each facet of their value chain, retail and CG companies can meet this moment while also addressing regulatory requirements—by turning challenges around ESG data infrastructure and organizational culture into an opportunity to build business resilience.  

Starting by understanding your current ESG data management can be a helpful first step: Assess your ESG data readiness.  

New opportunities require holistic, accessible ESG data  

Taking ESG data out of silos and into a unified, accessible system can help retail and CG companies identify and act on opportunities to advance sustainability goals. Eckes-Granini, Europe’s largest fruit juice producer, embraces this strategy by using Microsoft solutions to increase supply chain transparency. By adopting this objective, data-driven supplier management technology, now almost 70% of Eckes-Granini’s juice ingredients come from sustainable sources—putting the company on track to achieving their goal of using 100% sustainable ingredients by 2030.  

Key emerging areas where ESG data insights can help retail and CG companies drive sustainability and efficiencies include: 

• Circularity: Recycling, recommerce, and reusing or repurposing materials help companies reduce reliance on net-new or single-use materials, to help reduce waste and carbon emissions.
• Sustainable material sourcing: Integrating recycled and low carbon materials into operations and final packaged products helps companies minimize overall environmental impact.
• Increased transparency: Companies can improve brand recognition and loyalty by providing greater ESG transparency—which can also help identify new products or lines of business.
• Evolved supply chain: Data and AI-powered technologies can help streamline supply chain, reduce emissions, and minimize waste, while pinpointing ways to boost efficiency and decarbonization.

Today’s roadblocks and tomorrow’s benefits  

As discussed in Driving Business Value with ESG Data Readiness, creating a robust ESG data estate can strengthen business resilience, by enabling teams to make informed decisions as markets shift and opportunities evolve.  

For retail and CG companies, this capability supports decision-making as they explore sustainability improvements, from upgrading equipment to increase energy efficiency, to investing in new low-carbon or recycled materials. It can also help companies advance ESG data tracking in supplier regions where nascent reporting standards can impede transparency, consistency, or granularity of ESG information. 

Retail and CG companies can also collaborate across the value chain to share ESG data that helps unlock shared efficiencies, innovation, and greater trust. For example, by using Microsoft solutions to leverage integrated data analysis, sustainability-driven Radish—a food-delivery startup in Montreal—shares data insights with its restaurant partners to offset supply challenges, reduce food waste, and even access government assistance grants.   

Data that delivers more than reporting compliance  

Leveraging ESG data can also help retail and CG companies explore options such as AI-powered waste reduction, product recommerce services, or innovative, eco-friendly packaging and products. German cosmetics company Beiersdorf took this approach by using Microsoft solutions to build a simulation tool to assess scope 3 emissions for products and packaging, transitioning the company from emissions guesswork to objective insights.  

The power of ESG data insights is also boosting sustainability and improving decision-making for global bakery giant Gruppo Bimbo. The company adopted Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to centralize emissions data across its operations—helping the company advance toward its sustainability targets for 2025, 2030, and 2050. And the Netherlands’ leading supermarket chain, Albert Hejin, developed an AI-powered solution in partnership with Microsoft to reduce food waste by dynamically adjusting prices on near-expiration items.  

Make ESG data work for you

To help unlock the value of ESG data, retailers and CG companies can benefit from setting up strong data collection and management systems:  

• Bridge the data gap: By investing in technologies that integrate ESG data across operations, companies can collect accurate and actionable information from all aspects of the value chain.
• Build trust through governance: Ensuring data accuracy is essential for both regulatory compliance and strategic decision-making, requiring strong governance and control practices around ESG data.
• Embed ESG into the company culture: Training and engagement programs can help integrate sustainability into a company’s daily operations—from executive leadership to frontline workers. And by enriching data with value-added insights from other departments, combined with natural language querying, more teams are empowered to make sustainability-informed business decisions.  

Following these steps—and the framework in the Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business Transformation—can help you use ESG data to drive long-term success beyond reporting requirements, according to your unique business priorities. For example, industry-leading businesses like electronics retailer Kotsovolos-Dixons used Microsoft Solutions to create digital twins of its stores, reducing waste and boosting operational efficiency by 50%. Additionally, one of the United Kingdom’s largest food sellers, Co-op Group, adopted our hybrid cloud services to reduce its datacenter footprint to save £400,000 annually. 

Sustainability creates success

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Data and AI capabilities to help you transform for the future using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence

Start your journey

To stay competitive and in compliance, sustainability has become a necessity for the retail and CG industries. But starting with small steps works: ESG data can serve as the foundation for transformation, and help you advance no matter where you are in your sustainability journey.  

We’re ready to partner with you, to help you use AI-powered data technology and Internet of Things (IoT) to begin to accelerate your progress. The growing set of capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability are designed to help companies leverage ESG insights to report on and reduce environmental impacts while driving growth well into the future.  

To gain a view of your ESG data across key areas, as well as personalized guidance on how to drive sustainability progress and add business value, complete our readiness assessment.

Explore ESG readiness for other industries

• Manufacturing: Data is driving a more sustainable industrial transformation
• Financial services: ESG data readiness drives value for financial services firms

¹ McKinsey & Company, How to prepare for a sustainable future along the value chain, January 20, 2022.

² PWC, Integrated ESG Data in Retail: Why and How.

The post Unlocking business value with data-driven sustainability for retail and consumer goods 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.

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

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

Microsoft Industry Clouds

Discover new release plans for capabilities, products, and services

Explore updates

Microsoft Cloud for Retail  

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

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

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

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

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture 

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

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services  

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

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability  

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

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

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

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit 

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

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty 

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

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

Learn more 

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

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

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

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

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.

New capabilities within the 2023 release wave 2—coming available from October 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024. Partners are critical to the success of our Microsoft Industry Clouds. These innovations represent our collaboration with partners across industries who build and extend these solutions, enabling high-value scenarios for our customers. During this wave, we’re offering richer, more data-driven precision, and new personalized experiences for customers and employees to advance decision making for business growth. You can see the full details about what’s new and planned in our release plans on Microsoft Learn. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for the coming months. 

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 2 plan

Learn about the latest updates for customers

Read the latest updates

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

More than ever, patients expect to be active participants in their health and wellness. Personalized care management solutions help engage patients in care decisions, improve care outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction, while also improving operational efficiency and the bottom line. With the wave 2 release of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we aim to help healthcare providers deliver a real-time, seamless, and personalized experience to patients. Healthcare organizations will be able to more efficiently deliver customized patient outreach developing journeys—from initial awareness through ongoing care management. By enabling data access with a wider range of sources, organizations have more flexibility to drive patient engagement, both directly and with interoperable partner solutions.  

Care management and collaboration are foundational for quality, patient-centric care. To mitigate fragmented communications, siloed data, and incomplete information that can challenge health teams to see the full picture, this release wave now extends to payors. By expanding care management capabilities, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can help healthcare organizations reduce the administrative burden of staying up to date on member health and care delivery—simplifying workflow management, automating tasks, and expediting new member onboarding. This means better cost control while also improving member satisfaction and quality of care. 

To further simplify compliant data sharing across systems and accelerate innovation, we’re focused on making it easier to build Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources^® (FHIR^®) applications. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions are being extended with new functionality for developers at all levels: from low-code, pre-built templates and tooling for citizen developers building Microsoft Power Platform healthcare applications to advanced capabilities unlocking the potential of model-driven applications with data from Microsoft Azure Health Data Services and Virtual Health Data Tables.

Our investment in application integration is further improving virtual health, working with leading independent software vendor (ISV) Teladoc Health to better integrate Microsoft Teams with its virtual health platform, Solo™, for hospitals and health systems, streamlining clinician access to telehealth within existing workflows. We’re making it easy to offer high-quality virtual medical care visits that are compliant with industry standards while having a secure and streamlined platform for seamless communication and collaboration across: chat, video, voice, and even AI health bots and other care management tools. 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail 

Maintaining efficient and resilient store operations is a key part of successful retail. Microsoft Cloud for Retail offers store associates on-demand access to the data, insights, and tools necessary to effectively engage with customers to offer personalized assistance and a seamless shopping experience. Greater information access also means store associates can self-service tasks to stay productive throughout shifts, while allowing district and store managers to direct store operations more effectively.

Improvements to our retail workforce management capabilities within store operations assist can help retailers improve efficiency and their bottom line. Using store operations assist in Microsoft Teams, store associates have a single pane-of-glass experience to manage their day. Store employees can perform inventory checks and act on urgent notifications, such as product recalls. Managers can assign training and learning tasks to employees as well as confidential tasks, such as shift planning and performance reporting. Finally, district leaders can detect anomalies, uncover patterns, and ask questions using natural language AI capabilities to identify root cause and corresponding mitigations to improve store performance.

In the coming months, we’ll further invest in driving data gravity and bringing in rich, new data sources the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform for retailers, bringing in rich, new data sources and applications. We’re also excited to further harness the power of AI and machine learning to help our customers gain a competitive edge, integrating new insights to create a cohesive and efficient experience for retailers. We also continue to work with partners such as AiFi to infuse AI and bring these solutions to market.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions from Microsoft and our global partners help advance ambitious sustainability goals by providing organizations with a digital foundation to help them enable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence, deliver sustainable IT infrastructure, improve ESG performance, and unlock sustainable growth. We know that organizing and integrating the data required to calculate an organization’s environmental footprint can be challenging. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability helps companies overcome complexity by enabling a blend of manual and automated data ingestion methods to collect and centralize their data across the business. Upcoming frameworks for third-party connectors will help customers efficiently import data from their partners and vendors into Microsoft Sustainability Manager. In addition, new calculations and data integration for water and waste will help companies extend their progress beyond carbon.

With Project ESG Lake (preview), organizations gain an expansive ESG data model to better manage and prepare data for faster, more holistic analysis using advanced analytics and insights. Greater visibility into activities across the business helps decision makers improve ESG and business performance while empowering innovation for long-term competitiveness. 

For organizations facing new regulatory requirements like those based on the European Union Compliance Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), new reporting templates can help with ESG reporting readiness. And upcoming AI-driven “what-if” scenario analysis and anomaly detection can help generate new insights to inform strategy—for example, allowing customers to quickly model how transitioning to a renewable energy source or a new energy supplier could impact their overall carbon footprint.

Our new ESG value chain solution helps organizations build a richer view of the upstream and downstream impacts that vendors and partners have on their environmental footprint and simplifies Scope 3 calculations. Using the solution, organizations can simplify the collection and reporting of detailed data about the sustainability activities of value chain partners, track data across carbon, water, and waste factors, and feed approved data directly into Sustainability Manager. With a transparent understanding of each other’s positions, our customers can better collaborate to drive efficiency, reduce emissions, and design out waste.

We continue to build solutions with partners such as Ecovadis and Ecolab. We also continue to work with trusted advisers like Accenture, Avanade, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, and PwC who are helping organizations everywhere plan, design, and implement strategies and robust solutions to enable transformation.  

The Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability resources have been updated with a focus on data management and Sustainability Manager implementation journey, introducing best practices to build reliable, secure, cost-optimized, operationally excellent, and performance-efficient Sustainability Manager workloads. The new updates are aimed at meeting the persistent demand for implementation guidance from customers and partners using a framework to evaluate important design considerations and their tradeoffs.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Upcoming functionality within Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit can help better position nonprofit organizations to take advantage of data analysis and insights at every level: from lightweight Modern Work templates and dashboards to streamline data management and allow customers to get straight to the insights to advanced data quality assessments that can determine whether the organization is ready to integrate AI and machine learning models—and help with remediation suggestions for the most common data quality issues. With upcoming functionality, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit can help unify data across fundraising, programs, finance, operations, and other disparate sources—in the back-office and on the frontline. With this unified view, organizations can build a better understanding of which supporters are most likely to engage through which channels and use AI to predict which constituents are most likely to donate based on different attributes. This can help outreach and marketing engagement teams work most effectively to support their mission.

Nonprofits will also benefit from faster and more secure donation processing. As we continue to invest in leveraging Microsoft platform capabilities, we’re further redesigning the architecture of fundraising and engagement functions to ensure Microsoft Azure is delivering real-time processing and market-leading transaction security. Nonprofit organizations using Dynamics Customer Insights and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit will see new marketing templates to help with data-driven constituent management, personalized engagement and donation, and award management. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

As governments innovate with technology, addressing the rapidly evolving demands of their citizens while protecting sensitive data and delivering promises of trust and security is needed. Modernization of government services without compromising security, digitization of manual processes, and improved user experiences for both citizens and government employees are all benefits of digital transformation. Governments know that the right technology platforms can create even better opportunities for social and economic growth.

Sovereignty can mean many things in different contexts. Within the context of the Microsoft approach to data sovereignty, we give government customers full control over their data. The control may include data residency within regional boundaries and tools to ensure control of who has access to their data.

Data sovereignty is critical for governments to:

• Protect government data from security breaches and malicious activity.
• Maintain government data confidentiality to protect privacy.
• Protect government data against unauthorized access to data.
• Secure government data to prevent negative business and financial impact.

We recently launched Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty (preview) and will continue to iterate toward general availability during this wave. See the latest and learn more at Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.

More innovation to come across industries

Beyond the new capabilities we’ve just previewed, we continue to invest across key verticals, including making generative AI easier with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, as well as industry-specific cloud solutions like Azure Data Manager for Energy and Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Follow us on Industry Cloud blogs for industry-specific news and read more about what’s upcoming on our documentation pages.

Catch us at Microsoft Ignite, from November 14 to 17, 2023 to see some of these capabilities and connect with our team. 

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

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

The post Innovating with Microsoft Industry Clouds next release wave appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

It was great to see industry infused throughout several sessions and news at Microsoft Inspire 2023. Our partner strategy continues to reflect the investments we’re making in our global partner ecosystem. These investments are detailed in our upcoming 2023 wave 2 release plans. 

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 2 plan

Learn about the latest updates for customers.

Read the latest updates

Optimizing for partners 

We continue to invest, build, and expand industry-specific capabilities that accelerate time-to-value for our customers and partners, including lifecycle commitments every wave. In a recent blog, Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Global Industry Marketing discussed in detail, our partner strategy, which aligns to three growth pillars: 

• Accelerate your innovation and reduce time to market.

• Quickly scale your go-to-market by helping partners drive. 

• Win new customers with industry solutions.

We believe the industry cloud solutions will provide customers with simplicity and predictability when engaging with Microsoft. Watch on-demand sessions at Microsoft Inspire 2023 to learn more about our industry-specific investments. 

The latest capabilities  

The release notes cover new features for Microsoft Cloud for Industry releasing from October 2023 through March 2024. The latest plans for Microsoft Cloud for Industry bring new innovations that provide organizations with significant capabilities to transform business. The release contains several new features across Microsoft Cloud for Industry applications, including Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 

Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted and integrated capabilities that make it easier for healthcare organizations to create personalized patient experiences, give health teams connected collaboration tools, and adopt data standards important to healthcare. Together with Nuance, users can access the broadest and deepest set of trusted AI solutions to address some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Organizations can use AI to provide full visibility into data, relieve provider administrative burden, boost clinician productivity, increase workflow automation to improve the quality of care, reduce clinician burnout, and deliver better care faster at a lower cost. 

Key investment areas for wave 2 include: 

Personalized access and outreach  

• Releasing patient journey capabilities in Patient outreach. 

Care management 

• Enabling better support for payor and insurance companies. 

Virtual health  

• Launching virtual consultations both directly from electronic health records (EHRs) and from Teladoc Solo in Microsoft Teams, enabling health systems to maximize their EHR investments while also providing access to virtual care workflows for members of the care team who may not have routine access to the EHR. 

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. 

Retail 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is a comprehensive solution developed to support retailers in using their data, enhancing customer shopping experiences, and empowering store associates to work more efficiently and knowledgeably. In the 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft Cloud for Retail will include investments in retail workforce management, address customer feedback, and improve the Store Operations Assist and Smart Store Analytics features. We will also utilize AI, machine learning, and generative AI models to provide valuable insights into customer engagement, advertising, inventory management, and supply chain management. These insights can seamlessly integrate into relevant applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and other Microsoft solutions, enabling retailers to take actionable steps based on the intelligence gained. 

Read the details on retail workforce management planned for this release wave in the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Retail. 

Sustainability 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We are investing in multiple areas to help your sustainability initiatives and reporting. We’re incorporating new features to enable and simplify the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requirements, including adding a CSRD template into Purview Compliance Manager (in preview). We’re expanding on our improved data ingestion experience, including enhancements to data approval management and more third-party connectors. Our new Project ESG Lake will help you aggregate your ESG data in one place and provide rich analysis and insights. We’re also adding features for recording and reporting on water usage and calculating waste intensity. Environmental Credit Service, which was released in preview in November 2022, continues to expand capabilities that are being validated by customers and partners. Finally, we’re bringing our AI capabilities to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to provide what-if analysis scenarios and other important insights. 

During this wave, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will invest in: 

• Value chain visibility

• Data integration and calculations

• System expansion and enhancement

• Reporting, disclosure, and automated insights

In the 2023 release wave 2, we are also adding more reporting capabilities for the European Union’s CSRD and AI capabilities to provide what-if analyses and other insights. 

Learn more about the new and planned features for Microsoft Industry Clouds, 2023 release wave 2 and watch our sustainability session on demand.

Watch Microsoft Inspire 2023 on demand 

• Microsoft Inspire Keynote 
• Winning customers with industry specific solutions and AI 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty – accelerate government transformation 

The post Empowering your business: The latest from Microsoft Cloud for Industry 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.

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

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 1 plan

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

Get started

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

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

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

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

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

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

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

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

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

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

Key dates for the 2023 release wave 1

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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