Microsoft Inspire 2023 unsurprisingly, focused heavily on AI.

Microsoft’s goal continues to be to make AI a transformative tool for its users within its technologies. And so, Inspire 2023 bought us all kinds of AI innovations that can be applied to organisations in a variety of ways. From expansion of AI skilling to new products and services that drive customer success, Microsoft is shaping the future with AI-powered capabilities, new product launches, and new partnerships.

During the keynote session, CEO Satya Nadella attributed that the focus lies on enhancing the speed and efficiency with which users can utilise AI to accomplish tasks. Notably, generative AI is continually advancing in intelligence and adaptability, and its language models and interfaces are increasingly natural and user-friendly. Consequently, users can effortlessly navigate AI and meaningfully integrate it into their daily work routines, like never before.

With so many announcements shared last week at Inspire, we’ve organised our top takeaways from the annual event.

Azure Back Up and Azure Archive.

Experience the swiftness of recovery with Microsoft 365 Backup, designed to promptly restore your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange data. Moreover, benefit from a comprehensive restore service level agreement (SLA) catering to extensive data volumes. Complementing this, Microsoft 365 Archive presents a budget-friendly solution for cold data storage within SharePoint. This enables you to preserve inactive or ageing data that aligns with its corresponding lifecycle stage and value.

Introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing

It’s not cheap. For a cost of $30 USD per user per month, commercial customers will have access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. This service will be widely available for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers.

Microsoft 365 Copilot, embeds a ChatGPT-based conversational AI into 365 applications enabling a wide array of AI capabilities integrated into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams.

Bing Chat Enterprise Rolled Out.

A new offering accessible from within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem starting July 18, is Bing Chat Enterprise. It addresses privacy concerns, ensuring commercial data protection for enterprise user data. Included at no cost with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium plans. Future integration with Windows Copilot and available as a stand-alone application for $5 per user per month.

AI Features Added to Power Automate Process Mining.

Microsoft’s Power Automate Process Mining will now incorporate AI features, allowing businesses to map out various processes such as sales, finance, and HR. Microsoft’s CEO, Nadella, commented that the goal is to help customers harness the potential of generative AI to its fullest.

By integrating Copilot AI assistance throughout the Power Platform, including Power Automate Process Mining, users can easily identify valuable insights, detect work bottlenecks, and receive suggestions for automating tasks or tracking data points more effectively.

This enhanced functionality will be generally available on August 1st.

2023 Release Wave 2 Plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

Microsoft’s 2023 Wave Release 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform has been announced, bringing a wealth of exciting new capabilities to users. The release is scheduled between October 2023 and March 2024 and includes numerous AI capabilities and enhancements among hundreds of fresh features. This reaffirms Microsoft’s dedication to fostering digital transformation for its esteemed customers and partners.

Introduction of Sales Copilot.

Microsoft has unveiled Sales Copilot, a role-based assistant, packed with a range of powerful capabilities. It can generate contextual emails utilising Dynamics 365 Sales data, deliver summaries by consolidating customer information from Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 before sales meetings, and offer real-time tips during Teams meetings.

Starting next month, these exciting new Copilot features will be available for preview, and they are set to launch officially in September this year.

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