Microsoft’s annual Inspire conference is a pivotal event for technology enthusiasts and business leaders alike. In 2023, the conference brought forth an exciting array of announcements, particularly in the realms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and strategic partnerships. In this blog post, we’ll highlight top key AI and partnership announcements that will undoubtedly shape the future of technology and business landscapes.

Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new AI-powered writing assistant that can help you with tasks such as writing emails, creating presentations, and drafting documents. Copilot is still in preview, but it has the potential to be a major productivity booster for Microsoft 365 users. The general availability date has not been announced.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is priced at $30 per user per month. This is an additional charge on top of the existing Microsoft 365 subscription. For example, if you are a Microsoft 365 E3 customer, you would pay an additional $30 per user per month for Copilot.

Copilot is not available to Microsoft 365 Business Basic or Home customers. It is also not available to users of the free Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plans.

Introducing Bing Chat Enterprise

Bing Chat Enterprise is a new AI-powered chat tool that is designed for businesses. It is built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI technology and offers several features that can help businesses improve their productivity and collaboration.

Bing Chat Enterprise is currently in preview and is available to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers. It will be available to other customers in the future.

Bing Chat Enterprise offers a diverse range of capabilities:

Answering questions on various topics, including business processes, products, and services.
Generating content like emails, presentations, and documents.
Providing language translation services.
Facilitating collaboration with colleagues on projects.
Accessing corporate data such as employee directories and customer records.

Advantages of leveraging Bing Chat Enterprise:

Increased productivity: Bing Chat Enterprise can help businesses increase their productivity by automating tasks and providing access to information.
Improved collaboration: Bing Chat Enterprise can help businesses improve their collaboration by making it easy to share information and work on projects together.
Enhanced security: Bing Chat Enterprise is designed to protect corporate data from unauthorized access.

For more information Bing Chat Enterprise

Process Mining in Power Automate

Process mining is a technique that uses data to analyze and improve business processes. It can be used to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement.

Power Automate Process Mining is a new feature in Power Automate that makes it easy to implement process mining. It provides several tools that can be used to collect data, analyze processes, and identify opportunities for improvement.

It is affordable: Power Automate Process Mining is a relatively affordable tool. It is available as part of the Power Automate subscription, which starts at $20 per user per month.
It is integrated with Power Automate: Power Automate Process Mining is integrated with Power Automate, which means that it can be used to automate tasks and workflows. This can help to further improve business processes.

Consider leveraging Power Automate Process Mining to enhance your business processes. This user-friendly and cost-effective tool is accessible through the Power Automate subscription, starting at $20 per user per month. With its capabilities, you can identify inefficiencies and pinpoint areas for improvement, making it a valuable option to consider for optimizing your operations.

For more information Power Automate Process Mining

Empowering sellers and customer service agents with AI

Microsoft Sales Copilot is being enhanced with new features that will help sellers improve productivity and close more deals. These features include AI-generated opportunity summary, contextualized email drafts, and meeting preparations. Sales Copilot also integrates with CRM task automation and provides real-time insights and AI-assisted content and recommendations to help sellers personalize customer interactions.

Microsoft is also highlighting how customers like Virgin Money are using Copilot to build chatbots for their customer service departments. These chatbots can be trained in minutes to reference internal and external knowledge sources, customer service applications, and web data via Bing Search. Virgin Money’s chatbot addresses more than 195,000 customer interactions a month, freeing up service agents to focus on more complex customer inquiries.

These new features and capabilities are part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to transform seller and customer experiences. By providing sellers with the tools they need to be more productive and deliver better customer service, Microsoft is helping businesses of all sizes succeed in the digital age.

Meta and Microsoft Partner to Bring Llama 2 to Azure and Windows

Meta and Microsoft have announced a partnership to bring the Llama family of large language models (LLMs) to Azure and Windows. This partnership will make it easier for developers to use Llama 2 models to build a wide range of applications, including chatbots, virtual assistants, NLP applications, machine translation, text summarization, and question answering.

The partnership will also help to democratize access to large language models, making them more affordable and accessible to a wider range of developers.

What This Means for Developers

This partnership is a significant step forward for developers who want to use large language models to build innovative applications. With the support of Azure and Windows, developers will be able to easily and affordably deploy Llama 2 models in their applications. This will open up a world of possibilities for developers who want to use the power of AI to build better applications.

For more information llama-2

Empowering partners to make their own AI assistants

One of the most interesting aspects of the Microsoft Inspire keynote presentation was the focus on empowering partners to make their own AI assistants. Throughout the presentation, partners demonstrated how they made their own AI assistants to prepare for meetings and make strategic business decisions.

This is a significant development, as it shows that Microsoft is committed to making AI accessible to partners of all sizes. It also shows that Microsoft believes that AI assistants have the potential to transform the way businesses operate.

The new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

The AI Cloud Partner Program is a comprehensive program that provides partners with the resources and support they need to build and sell AI solutions. The program includes:

Access to Microsoft’s AI expertise: Partners can get help from Microsoft’s AI experts to build and sell AI solutions.
Marketing and sales support: Partners can get help from Microsoft to market and sell their AI solutions.
Financial incentives: Partners can earn financial incentives for selling AI solutions.

Nadella said that the revamped AI Cloud Partner Program is designed to “empower partners to build and sell AI solutions that transform businesses.” He also said that the program is “a significant step forward in our commitment to help partners succeed in the AI economy.”

In addition to the AI Cloud Partner Program, Microsoft also announced a number of other initiatives to help partners build and sell AI solutions. These initiatives include:

The launch of the AI for Business Toolkit: The AI for Business Toolkit is a collection of resources that help partners build and sell AI solutions.
The creation of the AI Partner Community: The AI Partner Community is a forum where partners can collaborate and share ideas.
The launch of the AI Partner Academy: The AI Partner Academy is a training program that helps partners learn about AI and how to build and sell AI solutions.

 

These initiatives are a significant investment by Microsoft in the AI partner ecosystem. They show Microsoft’s commitment to helping partners succeed in the AI economy.

The announcements made at Microsoft Inspire 2023 have the potential to impact businesses in a number of ways. For example, Microsoft 365 Copilot can help businesses improve productivity by automating tasks and providing users with insights into their work. Bing Chat Enterprise can help businesses improve collaboration by providing a platform for employees to communicate and share information. Process Mining in Power Automate can help businesses identify and improve inefficient processes. And the partnership between Meta and Microsoft to bring Llama 2 to Azure and Windows can help businesses build new and innovative applications.

Overall, the announcements made at Microsoft Inspire 2023 show that Microsoft is committed to helping businesses use AI to improve their operations and achieve their goals.

Perficient + Microsoft

Perficient is committed to meeting the demands of customers’ cloud needs with highly skilled and specialized partnerships. Keeping security top of mind, our strong relationship with Microsoft and 20+ years of experience allow us to deliver strategic modern workplace solutions across the Microsoft Cloud.