The AI revolution is here, so what are you going to do about it?

This question is for IT leaders, IT practitioners, and others out there who need to decide how your companies will respond to the onslaught of AI products and solutions that are coming your way!

We had the same question here at Microsoft, and to make sure we responded in the right way, we—Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization—created an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to guide us.

Here’s the story of how we did that and how our CoE is now helping us navigate the AI revolution and figure out how to deploy it internally across Microsoft.  

Evaluating AI for Microsoft

For us, it started with evaluating what our people want from AI.

Next-generation AI is transformative, and as it does for all enterprises, it presents a huge opportunity for us at Microsoft. One of the fundamental steps our CoE is taking is to accept this and not get in the way. We’re encouraging a culture of disruption while also living up to our obligation to do so responsibly.

We know that integrating AI into everything we do will never be a matter of stitching AI features or capabilities into our existing systems and processes, but rather a process of reexamining how we do things. We want it to do three important things—amplify human ingenuity, deliver transformative experiences, and safeguard our people, business, and data.

Our CoE encourages our teams to think about how AI can help their work and to rethink their work with AI in mind. To respond adequately to this AI revolution, we took a holistic view of how each of our employees can achieve their full potential and how each team, department, and the entire organization can benefit from AI.

“Getting AI right is about empowering your people to do their best work,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal program manager architect in Microsoft Digital and one of the leaders of our CoE. “We’re off to a good start—now that we’re underway, we’re laser focused on making sure everything that we do empowers our employees be their best, most creative, selves while also protecting them and the company as well.”

Meeting needs and answering important questions

We’re using feedback from our employees and leaders to guide how we invest in AI.

Our employees are telling us they want to simplify and offload mundane tasks and focus on productive, creative work. They view AI as a tool to find information and answers, summarize meetings and action items, perform administrative tasks, and plan their day. However, their focus is on more than administration and tedium. Employees also want to use AI to improve and inform their creative work and enable them to produce deeper and more insightful analytical work.

Drilling down, we asked our employees for specifics on what they want out of AI to improve the experience they have at work.

What employees want from AI

Our leaders want AI to empower employees, not replace them.

Leaders want AI to create an environment for employees that increases their productivity, improves their well-being, decreases the time they spend on low-value activities, and improves their skills.

“We want to empower employees to find time for more innovative and rewarding work,” Krishnamurthy says.

What leaders want from AI

Transforming Microsoft with the AI Center of Excellence

Now that we’ve shared how our CoE is listening to our employees and leaders, we’ll share more detail on the CoE itself.

Our AI CoE team is comprised of experts across Microsoft in various fields, including data science, machine learning, business intelligence development, product development, experience design and research, accessibility, and program management.

Working under the AI 4 ALL (Accelerate, Learn, and Land) tagline, the team is responsible for planning, designing, implementing, and championing how we use AI internally at Microsoft.

Our CoE uses these pillars to guide their work:

• Strategy. They work with product and feature teams to determine what we want to achieve with AI. They define business goals and prioritize the most important implementations and investments.
• Architecture. They enable infrastructure, data, services, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for all our AI use cases.
• Roadmap. They build and manage implementation plans for all our AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and performance measurement.
• Culture. They foster collaboration, innovation, education, and responsible AI among our stakeholders.

“These pillars are helping us stay focused on the right things,” Krishnamurthy says. “It’s about using AI to grow and nourish a culture of innovation and excellence across the company.”

Strategy

Our CoE Strategy team evaluates what we’re doing with AI at Microsoft. The most fundamental perspective for the strategy pillar is examining AI as a catalyst for transforming our tools and processes, not as an addition or augmentation to existing tools and processes. While AI is designed to augment and improve human capabilities, it can’t be approached as only an augmentation or improvement to the tools and processes we use. We must be willing to start over if that achieves the best outcome for our employees and business.

From the beginning, the strategy team examined the projects and business goals through positive disruption—a willingness to refine each idea to its core. To capture the full value of AI in our organization, we knocked down boundaries. We examined every one of our business processes, reimagining them and how AI could improve them, often in revolutionary ways.

Our strategy is driven from the organization’s top level, and executive sponsorship is crucial to executing our implementation well. When our transformation mandate comes from the organization’s leader, it resonates in every corner of the organization, every piece of work, and every task that could be changed.  Simultaneously, we have encouraged and welcomed ideas from every level of the organization, empowering individuals from across our organization to contribute their AI insights.

We’re moving quickly, thanks to our digital transformation. David Finney, director of IT Service Management, is excited about the rapid progress the CoE is making.

“The pace of AI technology is incredibly fast,” Finney says. “We’re moving into implementations quickly to capture value and stay relevant to developments in AI technology. Our digital transformation has made this possible in many ways.  At the same time, governance and control have to be at the forefront of our strategy and consider and respect responsible AI tenets in everything we do.”

Capturing strategy with an idea pipeline

The strategy pillar captures all the ideas and all the ongoing work that’s happening within AI at Microsoft. Idea capture involves the entire organization, and every employee is invited to contribute ideas for how AI can transform how we work, from the most straightforward task to the broadest organizational policies and processes. No element of our business processes is off-limits. Our pipeline contains ideas for the next year or so range from AI-powered career planning, to intelligent helpdesk and troubleshooting tools, to fully automated issue detection and remediation, to AI-powered codebase migration.

One of the CoE Strategy team’s most significant responsibilities is prioritizing the idea pipeline for AI solutions. All employees can feed the pipeline through a form that records important pipeline details. The strategy team evaluates each idea in the pipeline, analyzing two primary metrics: business value and implementation effort.

• Business value. How important is the solution to our business? Potential cost reduction, market opportunity, and user impact all factor into business value. As our business value increases, so does the idea’s position in the pipeline priority queue.
• Implementation effort. How much effort is required to implement the idea? We evaluate the implementation effort based on data gaps for modeling, the complexity of the solution, and the resources required. Low-effort ideas can result in quick wins, while ideas requiring more significant effort must be further evaluated.

Activating AI here at Microsoft

Business value and implementation effort supply the two axes for the simple four-quadrant matrix we use to determine the overall priority for the ideas and their order in the pipeline. High-value, low-effort ideas are at the start of the pipeline and our highest priority. Low-value, high-effort projects are sent to the back of the pipeline. High-value ideas are all essential and deserve focus, and our strategy team used this evaluation matrix to determine which projects should be started and when.

Architecture

Our architecture pillar focuses on the readiness and design of the infrastructure and services that support AI at Microsoft. It also encompasses data readiness and the reusability of enterprise assets used for AI capabilities.

The CoE’s Architecture team manages these systems’ supporting infrastructure and ensures that our environment adheres to best practices for standards and governance. Architecture dependencies and interactions are critical to establishing sound architecture practices.

When a product team is developing a service within the architecture, like storage, compute, or an API, decisions about design and architecture are influenced by the dependencies across these services.

The architecture we build is focused on open and liberal architecture standards. We know that if our engineers and developers use the tools they’re most comfortable and fluent with, they’ll be able to create quickly with competency and confidence. With more than hundreds of potential projects in the pipeline, rapid iteration and agility are critical.

We’ve made our teams aware of AI playgrounds and aggregators that they can use to explore supported AI tools and machine-learning models to test their scenarios and validate data-handling practices. Standardizing these playgrounds and aggregators provides freedom for our developers to experiment and innovate while staying within the bounds of our AI best practices and approved technologies.

We’re also enabling our architecture communities to collaborate and share ideas about developing the most optimal microservice architecture, cloud service-based architecture, or hybrid infrastructure architecture. We have presentations, on-demand engagements, and groups that use Microsoft Viva and Microsoft Teams to encourage and facilitate collaboration. This enables our architecture teams to move quickly and in concert with each other, which is necessary with the rapid pace of AI technology advancement.

A comprehensive architectural view involves understanding the nuances of the infrastructure and how new infrastructure will affect the current architectural state. We achieve this view by gathering data on systems and dependencies across the existing architecture and super-imposing new ideas or new architecture on top of it.

“We ask questions,” says Faisal Nasir, a principal architect on the CoE Architecture team. He stresses the importance of continual self-examination. “What are the touch points? What is the impact? How do we achieve cost and performance balance? Where are we going to invest? Which of these services is going to get the capabilities? How are we organizing services? What platform-level capability will all services use, and what will be native to a particular area or service within a smaller group?”

The answers help us make sure we take the right approach.

“Determining dependencies and working through the implications has to be done, and it has to be continually evaluated,” Nasir says.

Roadmap

The CoE Roadmap team examines our employee experience in the context of our AI solutions and governs how we achieve the optimal experience in and throughout AI projects. One of the most critical aspects of implementing AI is how our employees will interact with it. Getting the roadmap right ensures these user experiences are cohesive and align with our broader employee experience goals.

The Roadmap team leans heavily on research to confirm and test capabilities and the potential for AI-based services and processes. The user experience involves many considerations, including how employees interact with a service, ordinary use case scenarios, accessibility needs, etc.

We’ve recognized AI’s potential to impact how our employees get their work done and what level of satisfaction and positive experience comes from the interactions with AI services and tools. The roadmap pillar is designed to encourage experiences across all these services and tools that are complementary and cohesive.

“AI isn’t a traditional product, so there isn’t a traditional path for user experience,” says Aria Fredman, a senior user experience researcher on the CoE Roadmap team. “We’re using AI to level the playing field for all Microsoft employees.”

AI is an excellent tool for leveling the playing field for everyone.

“We’re using next-generation AI to transform how everyone interacts with the products we’re building,” Fredman says. “Natural language interfaces and predictive interactions remove the barriers of traditional input and user interface design. Accessibility becomes not something that we build into a user interface but something that the interface natively is. Our goal is universal accessibility, to use AI to empower and include everyone.”

We’re focusing on the open nature of AI interaction. We’re surfacing AI capabilities and information when the user needs them, according to their context. It makes the user experience and user interface for an AI service less important than how the service allows other applications or user interfaces to interact with it and harness its power.

“We’re moving away from the legacy models of interaction and navigation of static product topologies,” says Yannis Paniaras, a principal designer at the Microsoft Digital Studio who collaborates with other designers to create entirely new user experiences with AI and ML. “We’re transforming the user experience through AI and copilot-based experiences and creating new paradigms of interaction and navigation across a complex topology of services and products.”

Meet the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence team

It’s about design that simplifies employee workflows for speed and efficiency.

“Our goal is to enable instant point-to-point access to all employee services with minimal or no navigation,” Paniaras says. “It’s like experiencing UX-teleportation, where accessing a service becomes instantaneous.”

This concept is what we call “Just-In-Time UX.” Furthermore, we use AI to facilitate continuous relationships between our employees and the various services that they use, which ensures that the experiences are always on and available to them.

“In our studio, the designers are also reinventing how we design for the era of AI,” Paniaras says. “We are transforming our discipline as much as the experiences and products we create for everyone at Microsoft.”

Culture

Our long-running focus on fostering a culture of innovation within our organization is now helping us embrace this new opportunity with AI. It’s enabling us to empower our employees to learn the skills they need to lead us through this transformation and to help us build a vision for what we can do with it as a group.

Our CoE Culture team focuses on two key areas of our AI implementation: responsibility and education. Culture moves into and influences the other pillars more than any other pillar. Culture underpins everything we do in the AI space. Ensuring our employees can increase their AI skillsets and access guidance for using AI responsibly are critical to AI at Microsoft.

AI’s opportunities are immense, and our implementation must be carried out with a growth mindset and responsible approach.

The Culture team has published training, recommended practices, and our shared learnings on next-generation AI capabilities and worked with individual business groups at Microsoft to determine the needs of all the disciplines across the organization, including groups as diverse as engineering, facilities and real estate, human resources, legal, sales, and marketing, among many. A telling example of how we’re rallying around AI is how quickly we created a Data and AI curriculum that everyone in our larger organization can take—employees of all roles are using it learn about and roll AI into their individual work.

We’re weaving responsible AI into the fabric of everything we do with AI, so our employees understand the importance and implications of responsible AI for their work, their teams, and the organization. We’re continually asking questions about our AI practices and evaluating the answers through diverse lenses to ensure our AI capabilities are fair and unbiased.

Urvi Sengar is a leading voice on the cultural team. She highlights the critical role responsible AI plays in developing AI at Microsoft.

“AI provides so many potential capabilities, but we must always ask, ‘are we using it in the right way?’” says Sengar, a software engineer on the CoE and in Microsoft Digital. “We’re building governance and guardrails around our systems to ensure we don’t misuse it. Our mandate to use AI responsibly underpins everything we do in this space.”

Our aim is to weave AI and education together in ways that enhance but don’t overrun our company culture. Our aim is to show our employees how they can transform the work they do while also making sure they protect the social and cultural considerations of the rest of our employees, our partners, our customers, and our larger organization. To do this important work, we’re implementing listening systems throughout our organization that are enabling us to adjust and adapt our approach to make sure we stay focused on the right things.

Moving forward

We’re at the beginning of our journey toward harnessing the transformative power of AI at Microsoft. Our AI CoE will provide the guidance and governance we need to foster innovation and encourage positive disruption in all lines of business. We’re ushering in a new vision for creativity, productivity, and personal growth for each of our employees, and we’re excited to capture those benefits within our organization and share them with our customers.

“Whatever applications we produce, whatever experiences we create, whatever productivity and efficiency we want to bring to our employees, we always ask the question: ‘How will this contribute to their engagement and involvement and enable them to thrive within the company,’” Krishnamurthy says. “The answer to this question is found in the moments that matter to our employees, in which they meaningfully contribute to the teams around them and move forward toward our collective vision, from the beginning of their time with Microsoft and all the way through their journey.”

Here are some tips for getting started with a AI Center of Excellence at your company:

• Use AI to fuel organizational transformation and to improve your employee experience.
• Approach AI as a tool that can help your employees boost their creativity, enhance their productivity, and grow their skills.
• Provide personalized and contextualized information to increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
• Use AI to improve both the on-site and remote experiences for your employees—it can help you get hybrid work right.
• Use AI to improve your infrastructure management, compliance monitoring, governance, and real estate and space planning.
• Give your employees good guardrails—take a responsible and responsive approach in each area where you use AI.
• Encourage your employees to contribute ideas on how AI can improve their work processes and evaluate ideas that are most valuable and feasible.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability around AI and data, where failures become steppingstones, and cross-functional collaboration drives innovation.

Learn about the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access program and new capabilities in Copilot.

• Explore ChatGPT & AI: 6 Tips for Managing Support Content.
• Unpack a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
• Discover transforming modern engineering at Microsoft.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post The AI Revolution: How Microsoft Digital (IT) is responding with an AI Center of Excellence appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT journey at Microsoft

The rapid advance of AI is enabling us to rethink every dimension of IT. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience, to the network, infrastructure and devices that power our employee productivity, everything is evolving quickly.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.”

In this article, we describe some of the ways we’re already using AI, as well as new investments we’re making to accelerate our own AI-powered transformation—and to inspire yours.

{Learn how we’re reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.Discover how we’re improving our Employee Experience as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.}

Resilient and secure infrastructure powered by AI

Reliable and secure access to corporate resources is paramount—especially at a company that has fully embraced flexible work. Our employees depend on a foundation of network connectivity to seamlessly access the tools and services they rely on every day. Harnessing the power of AI to ensure our employees stay productive and our network remains resilient and secure is one of our top investment areas in Microsoft Digital.

“AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our enterprise infrastructure,” says Heather Pfluger, general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in Microsoft Digital. “It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader at Microsoft as we consider all the ways IT can make our services more efficient, secure, and reliable.”

One way we’ll do that is by infusing data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure, engineering, and operations to eliminate configuration drift, comply with standards and security policy, reduce operator effort and errors, and efficiently respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Investments in software defined networking and infrastructure-as-code are already improving reliability and network adaptability. AI is helping us automate workflows that deliver network services, detect anomalies, and manage compliance. We’re using real-time streaming telemetry from network devices to drive continuous operational improvements. We’ve used data from past incidents to train an AI model that will help our network engineers to reduce the time needed to mitigate infrastructure incidents with the goal of reducing or eliminating network outages and increasing employee productivity.

Securing the Microsoft network and other endpoints is critical to AI and Machine Learning (ML) are among our best tools to enhance the security and compliance of our cloud and on-premises network and hosting environments.

While Microsoft already benefits from a Zero Trust security posture, we’ll use AI and ML to further strengthen our network by automatically assigning devices to the right network, removing the burden on IT admins to classify and assign networks manually. We’ve implemented consistent access controls for wireless and wired networks to further improve security and reduce legacy VPN usage. We’re also building AI and ML capabilities to automate our security workflows, including analyzing device vulnerabilities, detecting anomalous firewall traffic flows, and managing incident diagnosis and remediation.

A vast network of interconnected devices running many different operating systems relies on our network for seamless connectivity. Managing these devices requires significant time and resources. To better manage them, we’re investing in a range of new AI-powered device capabilities spanning the entire device lifecycle.

AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting is a key investment area. We’ll use AI and ML to schedule essential maintenance tasks and autonomously fix errors and performance issues. This will reduce downtime, prolong device lifespans, and ensure employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors. We’ll also use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems. We aim to help IT administrators be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios.

{Learn how we’re moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Discover How AI will impact the future of security.}

Employee experiences enhanced with AI

AI enables possibilities to simplify the employee experience in unprecedented ways. Our vision in Microsoft Digital is to use AI to simplify the employee experience by providing a single endpoint for most common tasks. We envision a workplace where AI seamlessly integrates into our employees’ workflows and simplifies the number of systems they must learn and navigate. We’re working to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where our employees can access critical data, tools, and insights, all from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of Employee Productivity in Microsoft Digital. “AI enables us to deliver personalized experiences that empower our employees to work smarter, faster and happier.”

With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as a central engagement hub, we’ll redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric, to meet people in the flow of their work.

Navigating with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Our employees will discover information and services through natural language Q&A to complete tasks more smoothly. Copilot Chat will support a range of different employee experiences like diving into employee benefits, facilitating career planning, processing expenses, finding information, exploring workplace amenities, purchasing devices, or upskilling for a new role. We’ll connect different Copilot features and our internal data to Copilot Chat and reduce the time to get answers or insights by more than half. Our employees can still use web or app experiences if they prefer, but Copilot Chat will become a primary entry point for many workflows.

Generative AI will also change how our employees experience support services. We aim to increase employee productivity by addressing IT issues automatically or remotely through AI-powered chats that often don’t require an agent.

{Learn more about how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft. Discover how Microsoft Digital is reinventing employee productivity in the hybrid workplace.}

AI-powered transformation powered by good governance

We’re working to strike the right balance with AI—we want to use it to transform the way we work and to empower our employees while also protecting the company. To get this right, we’re laser focused on adopting the right governance measures.

“We’re going to be one of the first organizations to really get our hands on the whole breadth of AI capabilities,” says Matt Hempey, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It will be our job to ensure we have good, sensible policies for eliminating unnecessary risks and compliance issues.”

Our team in Microsoft Digital manages some of the most complex Microsoft productivity tenants in the world, and the governance of those tenants can be a challenge. Unmanaged assets like Power BI workspaces, Power Apps, or even Microsoft Teams groups increase the risk of oversharing sensitive data and can compromise the health and security of the environment. AI will be instrumental in helping us manage our tenants more effectively by helping us to detect issues and by automating time-consuming compliance tasks.

High-quality enterprise data with strong data governance is another key to our AI-led transformation. We’re establishing processes and frameworks to ensure data quality, with assigned data owners to supervise them. We’re using tools to measure data quality and produce a quality score, enhancing confidence and trust among users so they can be confident using the data in AI scenarios.

However, high-quality data is useless without ongoing governance.We have years of experience managing Microsoft’s vital tenants, and we’ve experienced the complexities of governance at global enterprise scale. AI raises issues around privacy, reputation, and copyright. Responsible and ethical applications of AI, powered by effective data governance, are our priority, so that we as a company can keep innovating without risking security or reputational damage. Using tools like Microsoft Purview, we’ll pay attention to the source, sensitivity, and lifecycle of data for AI, focusing on discovery, classification, and protection. Our goal is to safely handle sensitive data, ensuring ethical uses to achieve the right business outcomes.

{Discover how Microsoft Digital is governing its key productivity tenants to support AI. Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.}

Transforming our approach to IT

In Microsoft Digital, we’re committed to innovating with AI to revolutionize our employee experience and to rethink IT management, work that we’ll power through consistent governance practices and high-quality enterprise data.

“From making our employees more productive to improving their experience in the hybrid workplace, to preemptively anticipating issues with our services, infrastructure, and devices, AI is fundamentally changing how we manage information technology at Microsoft,” D’Hers says.

As we’ve done since the early days of IT at Microsoft, we’ll push boundaries to become a catalyst for AI innovation for our employees and for our customers. Just as we helped shape the past three decades of enterprise IT innovation, the next steps we take on our IT journey here at Microsoft will help shape this new era of AI. We’re excited to continue sharing our insights from our journey of AI-powered transformation with our customers and partners.

Here are some learnings that we hope will help you in your journey to transform your approach to IT with AI:

• AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of IT administration and the employee experience. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat can increase employee productivity by making information easier to find and by reducing or eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks, which will enable your employees to focus on higher value work.
• Enterprise data is your most valuable asset in the era of AI. Invest in data and tenant governance so you can use your data to support AI-powered productivity and collaboration workloads using Azure OpenAI and other services. Microsoft Purview offers a great solution to protect your sensitive enterprise data.
• We’ll be using the power of AI to rethink our entire IT portfolio here in Microsoft Digital. As Customer Zero for some of Microsoft’s most important products for IT professionals, our insights and product enhancements will improve the experience for our customers as well.

Get started with Azure AI.

• What is Azure OpenAI Service?
• Learn about Azure OpenAI Service.
• Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
• Learn how we’re reinventing our employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our employee experience as the company’s Customer Zero.
• Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

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