We at Core, along with tech enthusiasts and industry insiders were excited yesterday as Microsoft Inspire 2023, the year's most significant partner event, kicked off with a flurry of stimulating announcements delivered by Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella.
The crux of the event revolved around the paradigm shift catalysed by generative AI, which Satya dubbed as a game-changer in two dimensions - User Interface and Information Management. These areas are now undergoing a revolutionary transformation, thanks to the integration of natural language and a new AI-driven reasoning engine.
Among the highlights, AI's profound impact on customer service organisations stole the limelight. Microsoft unveiled a series of AI advancements that promise to elevate service delivery and enhance customer experiences. Some of the key announcements included:
Bing Chat Enterprise
A highly anticipated AI-powered chat tool that empowers individuals within organisations to harness the capabilities of ChatGPT securely, Bing Chat Enterprise was launched into general availability. Concerns over data protection have been adequately addressed, ensuring that sensitive information remains safeguarded while providing users with better answers, improved efficiency, and newfound creative potential.
Bing Chat Enterprise enables you to turn your ideas into images, refine your search, get accurate summarised answers, and faster drafts and inspiration than before. Whether researching industry insights, analysing data, or looking for inspiration, Bing Chat Enterprise gives people access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative.
Just like Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded in web data and provides complete, verifiable answers with citations, along with visual answers that include graphs and charts.
Bing Chat Enterprise started rolling out yesterday in preview to organisations licensed for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium and Business Standard, at no additional cost. Bing Chat Enterprise will also be available as a stand-alone subscription in the future.
Microsoft Sales Copilot
A role-based copilot designed to revolutionise the lives of sellers, enabling them to personalise customer interactions and boost productivity. This AI companion integrates seamlessly with various tools like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales, while also offering compatibility with other CRM systems like Salesforce. With CRM task automation, auto-generated email and meeting summaries, and real-time insights on top opportunities and customer data, Sales Copilot equips sellers to close more deals with confidence.
Yesterday, new Sales Copilot capabilities were announced, including:
- Auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
- The ability to create contextual emails that utilise customer CRM data to pull in product, customer, and opportunity information, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
- The opportunity to better prepare for customer meetings with a summary view including account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news, and more—directly within Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales.
- The ability to get real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings, prompted by competitor or brand mentions by the customers to stay ready to handle objections.
Microsoft Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, kick-started Microsoft’s work of transforming seller experiences, and these capabilities are now part of Sales Copilot. In Microsoft’s own organisation, more than 10,000 sellers have been using Sales Copilot. Early results show that 85 percent of surveyed sellers reported completing one or more tasks faster, and 70 percent stated that Sales Copilot helped them improve productivity.
Sales Copilot is now generally available, both as a standalone subscription and included as part of your existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses at no additional cost, with the new capabilities above rolling out this month.
Power Automate Process Mining
This cutting-edge technology enables businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their operational processes, paving the way for enhancements, automation, and digitisation, and ultimately, to identify and enable improvements to processes. By visualising the end-to-end processes and extracting event data from existing systems, businesses can customise process mining reports, identify inefficiencies, and monitor KPIs to make informed decisions that drive operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Microsoft describes the benefits to businesses to include:
- Improved operational efficiency: Process mining can help identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in processes, allowing organisations to streamline their operations and improve productivity.
- Enhanced customer experience: By identifying process pain points and eliminating them, organisations can improve the customer experience and increase satisfaction.
- Optimised resources: Process mining enables businesses to identify opportunities for automation, reducing the need for manual intervention and allowing resources to be allocated more effectively.
- Guaranteed compliance: Process mining can help organisations to identify non-compliant processes and take corrective action to avoid legal and financial risks.
- Better supply chain management processes: Create processes that help warehouse and operations managers gain insights into the material flow in the warehouse. This can help improve the performance of the warehouse.
Microsoft Meta's Llama 2 Integration
A momentous collaboration between Microsoft and Meta brings Llama 2's large language models (LLMs) to the Azure and Windows ecosystem. Developers and organisations can now leverage the power of generative AI to create transformative experiences, with a focus on democratising AI's benefits to enhance the way we work and reshape industries.
Azure Migrate
In response to soaring demands for analytics and AI, Microsoft is investing extensively in Azure Migrate and Modernise, with the addition of Azure Innovate. This suite of offerings covers a wide range of scenarios, facilitating smooth migrations, frictionless deployments of AI-powered applications, and providing incentives and support to enhance deal velocity and value for partners like Core.
An exciting aspect of the event is Microsoft's AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move) program, tailored to help businesses transition from legacy on-premises solutions to cloud-first Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications. AIM will unlock the potential of AI capabilities for businesses, offering tailored assessments, implementation using the Success by Design methodology, and the agility to scale with growth.
All in all, Microsoft Inspire 2023 left tech enthusiasts AIMing for the future, and brimming with anticipation about the endless possibilities that AI and technology advancements hold for businesses and individuals alike. As the event continues to unfold, more insights into the above programs and new product developments are expected to surface, adding further excitement to the tech landscape and the rest of 2023 and beyond for Microsoft partners like Core, and our customers.