Transforming our data culture with AI-ready data

IT organizations—at Microsoft and companies around the world—will never be the same thanks to AI.

For all the benefits that AI and machine learning offer, one element we and companies like ours need to get right is data. After all, data is what’s powering the AI revolution.

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, getting our data to an AI-ready state is a fundamental imperative. As such, we’re focused on four key areas of data management: quality, governance, compliance, and infrastructure.

Understanding AI-ready data

AI-ready data is data that’s available, complete, accurate, and high quality. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization.

Our days of assembling, cleaning, and massaging data each time we launch a data-driven project are gone. Using guidance from our Microsoft Digital Data Council, a multi-disciplinary team that’s responsible for defining data quality standards for Microsoft Digital, and our Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence (CoE), we enhance our data discoverability and documentation before we launch any new AI-powered product or experience.  

“Our customers understand that data is the fuel that powers IT,” says Patrice Pelland, partner engineering manager for Microsoft Digital. “By ensuring our employees have access to data that is complete and accurate and prioritizing good governance, Microsoft is embracing the generational change brought on by AI.”

AI is already having transformative impact globally. In Microsoft Digital, we’re driving internal adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot in every division of the company to increase productivity, enhance creativity, and improve efficiency. The benefits are already being realized, but the fact remains that Copilot and other AI tools are only as good as the data that supports them. The last thing we want our employees to experience is inaccurate or incomplete answers from AI-generated content. Powering tools like Copilot with AI-ready data allows our employees to work confidently, knowing that they can trust the information they’re working with.

{Learn more about how we’re responding to the AI Revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.}

Enhancing data management with AI

Before we truly realized the benefits of tools like Copilot, we needed to incorporate AI-ready data into the same data management and governance tools that many of you use: Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview. For decades, the challenge of data analysts and engineers was maintaining a consistently reliable “source of truth” despite inconsistent data quality, insufficient governance, and years of collecting data in siloes. Fabric and Purview help to resolve these issues.

Fabric is our unified data and AI platform that combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) solution. Part of our AI-ready data strategy includes embracing data-mesh architecture. By using Fabric’s data lake, OneLake, to connect to data from anywhere and work from the same copy across platforms, our data scientists and engineers are executing that strategy. Fabric’s ability to unify data sources provides data professionals with the AI-ready data they need, all in one SaaS experience.

“There is no good AI without a solid, curated data stack,” says Delphine Clement, a principal product manager for the Microsoft Purview product team. “Democratizing data unlocks the power of enterprise data by cataloging, curating, and certifying it, then making it available to employees.”

Purview is our primary tool for data governance and ensures the security and compliance of Microsoft’s data assets. Purview has been reimagined to provide an integrated SaaS solution to the practice of data governance for enterprise-wide users. Delivering AI-ready data is a priority for maximizing the effectiveness of Purview and tools like it.

In addition to providing a unified data catalog that helps us classify and identify defects in our enterprise data, Purview enables Microsoft Digital to safely manage our data estate by applying data sensitivity labels to all the digital assets that comprise our Microsoft 365 content estate. Copilot uses sensitivity labels, file permissions, and rights management services to ensure that private or sensitive data isn’t reasoned over and overexposed. Purview also helps us maintain an effective chain of custody for our digital assets with strong data loss protection (DLP) capabilities to help us catch the 1% case when sensitive data leaks from our environment. An effective data governance strategy powered by Microsoft Purview is essential to enabling Microsoft Digital to support Responsible AI at Microsoft.

Our everyday corporate functions like Microsoft HR and Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) depend on Purview to provide accurate data to complete projects, whether they’re smaller in scope or large-scale initiatives. For example, the accuracy of legal data required to complete a brief for a court filing is essential. With Purview, our CELA teams know the information they’re working with is high quality, accurate, and complete.

{Learn more on how we’re transforming our data governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric.}

Accelerating time to value with powerful AI models

AI-ready data can fast-track value realization by leveraging powerful AI models. On Microsoft platforms, AI data model options for information retrieval and custom engine agents offer varying levels of flexibility and control.

Agents focused on knowledge or information retrieval are built using tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio and operate on Microsoft’s pre-configured AI models and orchestrators, which are the software layers that manage and coordinate the execution of tasks and services across multiple systems. This approach simplifies development by eliminating the need for organizations to manage their own AI infrastructure, as these agents utilize the Copilot engine to handle prompts and leverage foundational models. Additionally, retrieval agents have native access to indexed Microsoft Graph data, such as SharePoint and OneDrive files, enhancing their integration capabilities.

{Find out how we’re unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.}

In contrast, custom agents provide organizations with the ability to integrate their own AI models including models from Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry, offering a higher degree of customization. These agents can be tailored to specific domains or workflows and are built using tools like the Teams Toolkit, Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot Studio. This approach allows for the use of custom foundational models and orchestrators, enabling specialized experiences that align closely with their unique requirements. However, this increased flexibility necessitates a greater level of security and compliance oversight, as organizations are responsible for managing and maintaining their custom AI infrastructure. 

{Learn how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.}

AI-ready data + Copilot

Microsoft Dynamics for Sales (MSX) and Microsoft Sales are our principal platforms for managing customer and sales data. MSX is the pipeline through which we manage the sales of Microsoft products. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is already being used to improve the data quality and hygiene of MSX. Instead of sellers needing to manually update sales each month or clean up duplicate data, Copilot for Sales can do the work automatically, freeing employees to focus their time more strategically.

“There is a great opportunity for AI-ready data to help with data hygiene in tools like MSX and Microsoft Sales. It can quickly organize account data to reflect the correct hierarchies and account parenting,” says Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager, for Employee Experience Success.

Microsoft Sales is the database of all purchases from Microsoft. The amount of information is massive, and data quality is critical. Thanks to AI-ready data, in the future Copilot will assist with organizing the data associated with thousands of accounts, updating hierarchies, and maintaining account contact information.

{See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.}

Accelerating corporate functions growth

All corporate functions are being asked to do more with less because they can no longer afford to grow operational costs linearly with top-line revenue or employee count. AI tools, powered by AI-ready data, will play a fundamental role in transforming corporate functions’ workflows while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making.

Human Resources agents will be empowered to summarize support cases, find answers to user inquiries, and craft email responses faster and more effectively using AI tools backed by AI ready data. Legal professionals in CELA will exploit AI-ready data within CELA’s workflows to provide swift access to legal findings by consolidating trusted knowledge assets across diverse data sources. Global Workplace Services (GWS), our facilities management team, will use AI-ready data to forecast occupancy and make real-estate portfolio recommendations based on complete and accurate information.

{Learn how AI is revolutionizing the way we support Corporate Functions at Microsoft.}