Technology

Innovation isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the heartbeat of thought leadership and a catalyst for growth. And in the past year, no innovation has changed the business landscape quite like AI. At Microsoft, we’re always looking for ways to harness emerging technology for the greater good, and it’s that desire that led to the creation of the Microsoft AI Tour.
Last year’s AI Tour gave senior business leaders and technical practitioners a platform to come together and explore the transformative potential of AI, and we couldn’t be happier with the response it received. That’s why we’re hitting the road again, and this time we’ve tripled the cities on the itinerary to ensure we can reach more of our customers and partners around the world. We hope you’ll join us.
A global movement
The Microsoft AI Tour is more than an event; it’s a global movement that will begin September 24, 2024, and span over 60 cities around the world, from Mexico City to Johannesburg, Mumbai to Sydney, Seoul to Berlin, and many more. This free, one-day and in-person experience offers AI thought leadership, sessions to help build AI skills, hands-on workshops and connection opportunities designed to inspire attendees, while providing practical approaches for using the power of AI to improve productivity and deliver solutions that drive real impact for businesses. We’ll also showcase local customer and partner stories at each stop, which makes the AI Tour a great chance for attendees to deepen their connections with local peers.
Something for everyone
Whether you’re a senior business leader or a technical practitioner, you’ll find valuable insights and actionable solutions at these events. We’ve built the Microsoft AI Tour from the ground up to be a comprehensive AI experience at no cost to you.
For technical practitioners, the Microsoft AI Tour is a platform for learning, collaborating and staying ahead of AI trends. It offers immersive workshops on the latest AI technologies, hands-on experience with Microsoft and partner experts and a vibrant community ready to exchange ideas. We’ll also provide insight into the future of AI, helping attendees stay updated on the rapidly evolving tech landscape.
For senior business leaders, the AI Tour is a unique opportunity to understand how AI can drive growth and innovation for their organizations. Through expert-led presentations, attendees will gain insights into how to best leverage AI to solve complex problems and create lasting value. Plus, dive deep into how AI fits into the Microsoft roadmap, which will help those present align their AI strategies with the latest technologies and best practices.
Learn from Microsoft leadership
During the event, attendees will have the opportunity to engage with industry-leading experts, partners and members of Microsoft’s senior leadership team. Leaders such as Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, and Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, will join us at select stops on the tour, where they’ll share how this new generation of AI is reshaping how people live and work.
We can’t wait for you to join us
AI innovation continues to grow, and how we conduct business and develop solutions will never be the same because of it. By joining us at the Microsoft AI Tour, you can position yourself at the forefront of that innovation and ensure you are prepared for whatever’s next on the horizon.
Ready to join this innovation revolution? Visit the Microsoft AI Tour website and request to attend the Tour when it comes to your city.
The post Unlocking the future of innovation: The Microsoft AI Tour appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
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A year ago in July, Microsoft coined the term AI Transformation. It is almost hard to imagine at that time Copilots were not generally available and Azure OpenAI Service had only been available for six months. As Satya Nadella, our Chairman and CEO, stated in last quarter’s earnings: 60% of the Fortune 500 have adopted Copilots and 65% use Azure OpenAI Service. Today, Copilots define how AI is empowering human achievement.
Together with our customers and partners, we have established how AI Transformation enriches employee experiences, reinvents customer engagement, reshapes business processes and bends the curve on pragmatic innovation. Our approach to put a Copilot on every desk for every role, identify AI design patterns and build a strong cybersecurity foundation is helping organizations harness AI responsibly, securely and with purpose.
As I looked back on the year, I enjoyed reviewing hundreds of customer and partner examples from around the world that demonstrated how AI Transformation delivered tangible business outcomes and value for their organizations. I am pleased to highlight 20 of those stories that I found to be the most inspirational and illustrative of what we can achieve together.
Audi is taking in-car voice control to the next level by integrating ChatGPT into its MIB 3 infotainment system using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, making driving safer and more enjoyable. With this update, Audi’s voice assistant will become even more intuitive, handling complex questions and offering a truly conversational experience for drivers and passengers using natural language. Starting this month, nearly two million Audi models made since 2021 are being upgraded with this generative AI-powered experience, allowing drivers to more easily control infotainment, navigation and air-conditioning systems, as well as ask general knowledge questions.
To help address Taiwan’s chronic shortage of health care workers, Chi Mei Medical Center developed AI copilots built with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to help overworked staff lighten their workloads while ensuring patient safety. With copilots implemented throughout its operations and at multiple patient touchpoints, medical center staff are seeing impressive results. Doctors now spend 15 minutes instead of an hour writing medical reports, and nurses can document patient information in under 5 minutes per patient instead of 10 to 20 minutes. Pharmacists are now able to double the number of patients they see per day — from 15 to 30 — by leveraging a copilot for comprehensive clinical summaries across multiple databases. By bending the curve on innovation and deploying these copilots, staff have more time to focus on patient care and outcomes, while reducing burnout and stress.
Coles, a leading Australian supermarket chain, is transforming the retail experience by leveraging AI to deepen its relationships with shoppers and improve efficiency in its stores. Coles has deployed AI models that predict the flow of 20,000 stock keeping units to 850 stores with remarkable accuracy. They are now generating 1.6 billion predictions daily, ensuring every shopper finds exactly what they are looking for when they need it. Using an AI model, Coles is also reinventing customer engagement by identifying customer patterns to provide its more than 4 million loyalty club customers with bespoke product recommendations weekly. The company is also utilizing Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and NVIDIA’s A16 GPUs to streamline checkout processes, enhance queue monitoring and elevate customer satisfaction by significantly reducing wait times.
In its quest to transform aquaculture in Indonesia, eFishery harnessed the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create Mas Ahya, a generative AI assistant available through a mobile application. Mas Ahya equips farmers with aquaculture expertise right at their fingertips, enabling them to monitor water quality, estimate market prices and manage feeding schedules effectively. It also offers real-time insights and recommendations to maintain ideal pond conditions for more precise feeding — shortening the time from fry to market size fish from four to three-and-a-half months. By utilizing this AI assistant for queries on a range of topics — from plankton levels to remedies for diseases or bacteria affecting their stock — farmers have seen shrimp survival rates soar from 60% to 90%, further boosting their shrimp export capacity.
EY is using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to help clients adopt an AI-powered approach to tackle their unique tax, finance and operational challenges; boost efficiency; and get more value from their data. Reconciling and combining large amounts of data faster and more accurately is a game changer for Finance and Tax, driving a differentiated experience and opportunity to deliver these capabilities through EY’s core platforms and solutions. The ability to apply Copilot to vast swaths of data to develop insights helps drive smarter decision-making across the business. For example, EY professionals are seeing productivity gains of up to 14 hours per week using an AI digital assistant to automate routine tasks, freeing up time for more strategic work. The initial rollout of Copilot was so positive that EY is now scaling it to 150,000 of its employees and helping clients drive their own transformations using EY’s Customer Zero copilot accelerators.
Global design, engineering and environmental services leader GHD is leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enrich the employee experience and transform its operations to help tackle some of the world’s most complex design and engineering challenges for its clients. GHD employees can now respond to client requests more quickly by using Copilot, reducing the time spent reviewing new requests for proposals from hours to just 15 minutes. More broadly, a recent survey of Copilot users at GHD revealed that 41% are saving time in their workday, with 29% saving more than 30 minutes and 12% saving more than an hour. Additionally, 75% of users feel more efficient and 45% find their work more rewarding when using Copilot.
Hanover Research faced the challenge of efficiently processing vast amounts of data to deliver timely insights to its clients. To tackle this, the custom market research and analytics provider partnered with Neudesic to create the Hanover Intelligent Virtual Engine (HIVE), a customized AI-powered research tool using Azure OpenAI Service that eliminates the need for analysts to manually comb through its vast repository of documents. HIVE helps analysts identify insights up to 10 times faster and creates more opportunities to provide clients with information that would otherwise be buried in data and unavailable. By leveraging Azure AI capabilities to reshape business processes, Hanover has significantly boosted its research efficiency, enabling it to provide more accurate and timely data-driven insights to its clients.
Lumen Technologies was among the first companies to invest broadly in Copilot, making Copilot for Microsoft 365 available last August. Since then, the company has expanded its use of Microsoft Copilot across its organization to empower its people by simplifying workflows and inspiring a forward-thinking mindset. Today, Copilot for Sales is saving its 3,000-plus sellers an average of four hours a week, equating to $50 million annually. Sellers can now spend more time with customers, improve their work-life balance and fundamentally change the way they work.
As an integrated risk assessment firm operating globally, Moody’s Corporation has harnessed the power of AI through Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Teams to significantly enhance productivity and insights. Through our co-innovation efforts, we built an internal tool — Moody’s Copilot — that enables employees to quickly synthesize vast amounts of research and data, and 94% of users reported increased productivity. Additionally, the launch of Moody’s Research Assistant allows customers to generate new insights from extensive credit research, data and analytics, potentially saving users over 25% of their time on typical financial analyst tasks.
OCBC bank is empowering its global workforce with generative AI-powered solutions to boost productivity and enhance customer engagement. Built upon Azure OpenAI, the bank developed a digital assistant for use within a secure and controlled Microsoft Teams environment to help employees in their daily work across customer service, research, product management and marketing roles. Since using the tool, employees have reduced time spent on tasks such as writing, research, translation and ideation by approximately 50%, with 72% of team members reporting significant improvements in their day-to-day productivity and more time to focus on customers.
As one of the largest combined natural gas and electric companies in the U.S., Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) had an ambitious goal to reshape its business processes by automating low-value tasks and rededicating employees to focus on high-value work. By implementing Microsoft Power Platform solutions, its Digital Creators and citizen developers created new business solutions, saving nearly 527,000 hours and generating approximately $75 million in savings annually. Using Microsoft Copilot Studio, the company also built a digital assistant that fulfills 25% to 40% of help desk demands, significantly optimizing agent workloads and providing sizeable labor savings and service-level improvements — saving teams 840 hours and the company more than $1.1 million per year.
As a leading insurance and reinsurance company in Peru — and one of the largest in Latin America — Pacífico Seguros partnered with TC1 Labs and leveraged Microsoft AI, Microsoft 365 and Azure AI solutions to reshape business processes, improve data management and enhance customer interactions. Pacífico Seguros reported a 40% increase in operational efficiency and a 30% reduction in response times to customer inquiries. It also implemented Microsoft Copilot for Security with a Zero Trust approach, drastically boosting responses to cyber threats and delivering ongoing protection of critical systems and data. This AI Transformation has improved service quality and enhanced security across its business.
Paysafe, a leader in specialized payments, supports 260 payment types in more than 40 currencies and enables seamless transactions for businesses and consumers worldwide. By leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 the company has transformed its operations to ensure secure and efficient processing across different payment methods. Paysafe uses Copilot to address the challenges of a diverse and multilingual global workforce, using it to translate everything into various languages — document policies, standard operating procedures and meetings — to save both time and money. Compared to preparing documentation from scratch or searching for information manually, Paysafe’s IT team saves between 10% and 50% of their time with Copilot.
Fintech company Saphyre creates real-time client account reconciliation and management solutions for institutional parties involved in financial trading. The company is using Microsoft Azure to provide intelligent, cloud-based solutions that automate and streamline complex financial trading workflows and modernize time-consuming processes efficiently and securely. Using Azure AI, Saphyre built a solution that helped clients reduce manual paperwork by 75%. It is also sharing data more securely using Microsoft security products so clients can be ready to trade three to five times faster compared to manual onboarding. This results in increased revenue opportunities for clients by completing trades more quickly and at better prices.
Softchoice has partnered with Microsoft to help companies drive efficiencies, reinvent customer engagement and address cybersecurity threats. By implementing Copilot for Microsoft 365, Softchoice has achieved significant productivity gains, reducing time spent summarizing technical meetings by 97%, creating internal training modules by 70% and developing customer-facing technical content by 62% to 67%. With Microsoft Copilot for Security built into daily dashboards, the company’s analysts are saving 20% to 30% of their time summarizing pertinent information needed to execute tasks. Analysts can more quickly determine if failed sign-ins are routine or accidental, saving 20-30 minutes each morning and freeing up time to focus on those that require more in-depth analysis. Security incidents can now be audited faster, reducing the time and resources needed to manually review by 50% and improving efficiency by 30% to 40%.
TomTom, a global leader in mapping and navigation technology, faced the challenge of a fragmented development process with too much time spent navigating multiple tools. By centralizing on the GitHub platform and integrating GitHub Copilot into its development processes, TomTom has streamlined workflows to deliver products to customers more quickly than ever. Additionally, 85% of developers report feeling more productive and 70% feel they can focus on more satisfying work by reducing cognitive workloads and enhancing collaboration among development teams.
Australia’s Torrens University set a goal to transform its digital learning environment to deliver a superior online student experience. It developed MyLearn — a modern online platform built with Azure OpenAI Service — to provide a consistent and convenient learning environment for students anytime, anywhere. By leveraging generative AI, the university has standardized and improved course curriculums, saving an impressive 20,000 hours and $2.4 million Australian dollars in time and resources. This AI-driven approach not only streamlined its digital learning environment but also set the stage for future savings and agile curriculum updates, creating a more engaging and efficient educational experience for students.
Unilever, a global leader in consumer products across over 190 countries, is working with Microsoft to revolutionize scientific discovery and positively impact the 3.4 billion people it serves daily. With Copilot and the advanced simulation capabilities of Azure Quantum Elements, Unilever can query scientific information using natural language, performing thousands of computational simulations in the time it would take to run tens of laboratory experiments. This technological leap, combined with its vast repository of proprietary data and a century of expertise in personal and household care, enables Unilever’s scientists to lead the industry in developing the next generation of eco-friendly household and personal products through sustainable product development.
As a leading provider of workplace benefits and services, Unum Group set out to enrich the employee experience by modernizing the manual and time-consuming process of retrieving policy information for inquiries from its client support center. With Azure OpenAI Service, the company developed an application that searches 1.3 terabytes of data with 95% accuracy, cutting response times to four to five seconds and significantly improving efficiency and customer satisfaction. The AI-generated results address 75% of contract-related questions, freeing up employee time for personalized solutions and interactions with clients. Employees trust the tool and feel it has improved their jobs, and now more than 90% of support center employees are using it.
Visma develops and tests software for over 1.8 million customers across Europe and Latin America through its 188 individual companies. Facing high inflation and tight labor markets, it turned to Microsoft AI technologies such as Azure OpenAI Service, Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Search to securely boost efficiency and customer satisfaction across its companies — each with their own customers and domain. Visma developers are using GitHub Copilot to streamline development processes, automate workflows and enhance collaboration. As a result, it has reported up to 50% reduction in development times. GitHub Copilot has also helped Visma developers unleash their creativity and bend the curve on innovation; the company has seen a marked increase in innovation since adopting the solution, even among those who have been working on the same code for 30 years.
Our mission has never been clearer: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We remain committed to democratizing intelligence and unlocking AI opportunities industry by industry in the year ahead by bringing Copilot to life on every device and across every role. We are focused on our co-innovation efforts to identify AI design patterns that will enable our customers and partners to build out their AI innovation environments. We are committed to helping you fortify your cybersecurity foundation by prioritizing security above all else — securing our products by design, by default and within our own operations as part of our Secure Future Initiative. As we continue leading in AI Transformation, we remain rooted in the fact we are at our best when we serve others, and I look forward to what we will accomplish together in the year ahead as your trusted cloud and AI partner.
The post Looking back on FY24: from Copilots empowering human achievement to leading AI Transformation appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
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