Microsoft Inspire 2023: Major Announcements and Key Takeaways

Microsoft Inspire 2023

Introduction

Microsoft Inspire 2023 has just unveiled the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, a refurbished version of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program. This year's major highlight has been MSCPP, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained.

Here we present key takeaways and rollouts offered by Microsoft focusing on AI advancements and strategic partnerships for the coming year.

AI Capabilities and Sales

"There's no question that we are in the midst of a massive platform shift with the new generation of AI that will affect every sector, every category of computing," said Satya Nadella during the opening keynotes of Inspire.

Generative AI saves approximately five hours of marketing-related tasks per week, as per research. Sales activities manage various situations at various stages of sales. As sales agents jump jobs frequently, they're less experienced than their jobs and clients require.

Also, customers expect instant responses to their queries. AI helps with all of this, and there was a range of announcements in Inspire 2023 regarding sales automation.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights gives AI-enhanced data analysis and prediction for customers. Microsoft Sales Copilot shells out a range of productivity tools for CRM users. With the aid of AI, the new AIM program will assist users in switching from on-premises to cloud-based apps.

Chatbots and Copilot help sales organizations to field AI-driven chatbots with all the capabilities of services like ChatGPT, customized for customer service, containing the unique product and service knowledge customers would require.

Microsoft and Meta’s AI partnership extends with Llama 2

Support for the Llama 2 family of large language models (LLMs) on Azure and Windows was another significant rollout from Meta and Microsoft.

With Llama 2 developers create generative AI-powered tools and experiences. Meta and Microsoft, together commit to facilitate AI and its numerous benefits to users, and Meta takes an open approach with Llama 2.

A choice to choose the type of model to build on is available to developers which supports open and frontier models. The new version of Llama 2 for the commercial customers gets a warm welcome from users.

Now Azure customers can deploy various Llama 2 models more safely on Azure. Not only that but Llama will also be optimized to run on Windows locally. Also, Windows developers will use Llama by targeting the Direct ML execution provider.

Azure’s AI platform is designed from the facility, hardware, and software to support all leading AI organizations to create, train and deploy some of the most demanding AI workloads.

The availability of the Llama 2 models with Azure AI enables developers to leverage Azure AI’s powerful tooling for model training, inference, and using other capabilities that support AI safety.

Llama 2, the latest addition to the expanding Azure AI model catalog, which is currently in public preview, will be a hub of foundation models. It enables developers and ML professionals to evaluate, discover, customize, and deploy pre-built AI models at a scale.

Microsoft Sales Copilot

Dynamics 365 Copilot, the first ever copilot for both CRM and ERP launched in March, got an incredible response with over 63,000 organizations experiencing Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

Copilot assisted employees wherever they were working by delivering business insights to help them focus on more meaningful tasks. And that is where Microsoft sees value for its customers to move to the cloud. Introducing Microsoft Sales Copilot in this Inspire, they gave a role-based copilot designed for sellers to empower them in increasing productivity.

It also helps clients personalize every customer experience to help close more deals. Sales Copilot is assessable from the tools where sellers work. This includes Outlook, Teams, and other CRM systems like Salesforce.

In Microsoft’s own sales organization, over 10,000 sellers use Sales Copilot and early results showed that 85% of surveyed sellers were able to complete one or more tasks faster, and 70% mentioned that Sales Copilot helped them with their productivity.

The new Sales Copilot allows sellers to access auto-generated opportunity summaries such as status, and highlights of changes, progress etc. inside Dynamics 365 Sales.

They can create targeted emails utilizing customer CRM data to pull in information, within Dynamics 365 Sales. Users can also prepare for client meetings with a summary view which includes notes, account information, highlights of any issues, and more within Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales.

Finally, use real-time tips during Teams meetings to stay ahead and tackle objections.

Bing Chat Enterprise – The AI-Powered Chat for Professionals

Employees search for AI tools that help them amplify their creativity and productivity at work. But using AI tools not made for an enterprise may put sensitive business data at risk of security.

Organizations adopting AI are worried about the protection and confidentiality of their data. Bing Chat Enterprise provides commercial data protection to user enterprises. With Bing Chat Enterprise, users and their business data get protected as Microsoft promises that the chat data is not saved anywhere, Microsoft has no access to that data, and the data is not utilized to train the models. So, all your research industry insights and analysis data remain secure.

Offered in the preview, Bing Chat Enterprise is included complimentary with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Premium. For a stand-alone product, it comes at a cost of $5 per user, per month, as planned for future.

Users can access Bing Chat Enterprise with their work account wherever Bing Chat is supported. You may also access it from Windows Copilot in the future.

AI Features and Power Automate Process Mining

Power Automate Process Mining now has new AI tools for mapping sales, finance, and other processes. It will help identify opportunities to drive the AI advantage for every customer. Nadella announced in another keynote during Inspire. This opens new possibilities for all solutions integrated with Power Automate Flows.

The Microsoft CEO wants to enable businesses to showcase how they can produce value from generative AI and help them see ways to use it. The Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Automate Process Mining, offers Copilot AI support.

Charles Lamanna, Corporate VP of business applications and platform at Microsoft, said, Process Mining Copilot can be asked, “What are the top insights it has for me?” to find bottlenecks and what is causing them at work, and suggest other tools to use to automate tasks or track data points closely. Power Automate Process Mining will be available most likely by 1st August this year.

Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

As mentioned initially in this blog, MSCPP has been a major highlight of Inspire this year. Most of the sessions emphasized the importance of partner opportunities this year. Microsoft is completely revamping the incentives of the AI Cloud Partner Program as per Mr. Nadella.

“This AI advantage is not just a Microsoft advantage — it is an advantage for the entire Microsoft partner ecosystem,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft. Althoff also described that sharing AI resources is the next step after moving customers to the cloud and probing a digital transformation across organizations.

Utilizing Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud, the next generation of partner programs allows each partner to provide value to customers.

The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program furnishes partners with a comprehensive envelope of investments for all business models at all stages of maturity.

The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program employs the entire partner lifecycle, right from onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling. Partners will keep getting the benefits of the previous program plus they get access to new offerings and benefits specific to AI.

And partner need not take any action to move to the new program. All existing partners are automatically moved into the new program immediately. All partners will maintain existing benefits and designations by default.

Encouraging Partners to Make their Own AI Assistants

Microsoft is all set to empower partners to make their own AI assistants. These AI assistants help make strategic business decisions or prepare you for a meeting or presentation for clients.

Through Microsoft Copilot, the tech giant is not promoting their own offerings but is offering a new cloud and development platform based on generative AI. It has the network effect to drive more value with increased partner participation.

“Microsoft wants everyone to be building their own copilots on their platform,” said David Wong Senior Researcher at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group (ASG).

Summary

All in all, inspire was an event to look forward to, and it lived up to the expectations of audiences, especially partners who intend to provide technically challenging business solutions to their clients with the help of tools and software offered by Microsoft.

As a Microsoft Partner, Akkomplish is proud to leverage AI and ML technologies to provide unique solutions to public sectors, including manufacturing, sales, healthcare, hospitality, and many more.

Contact us If you are looking for a solution partner that delivers crisp and cutting-edge solutions that are customized just for you.

Revisit the Inspire keynotes recourses to know more about the event.

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