Microsoft Ignite 2024 - Opening Keynote Highlights

If you wernt able to catch Satya Nadella's keynote at Microsoft Ignite 2024, here are a couple of Highlights that caught our eye.  

The Microsoft Mission 

Satya kicked off by reiterating the company mission, which aligns to the Copilot narrative.  

The keynote underpinned the mission and focussed on the 3 data and AI platforms that are driving innovation and there were a number of insights and announcements within each platform.  

1. Copilot 
2. Copilot for Devices 
3. Copilot & AI Stack 

Here are a few that really caught our eye.  

Ongoing investment in Security

Before getting to the announcements within Copilot, Satya fronted his keynote by saying that Microsofts interest and invesment in security had never been more important, security is a team sport and shared details of the Security Future Initiative.

The SFI is a multi-year commitment to advance cybersecurity protection. It focuses on AI-based cyber defenses, fundamental software engineering, and advocating for stronger application of international norms. 

Purview was specifically called out as being pivotal to providing correct governance and the largest ever hacking event was announced - Zero Day Quest.  This new program provides new opportunities for the security community to work hand in hand with Microsoft engineers and security researchers to share, learn, and build community in order to keep everyone safe.

Onto the key Announcements:- 

Copilot Actions, Agents and Analytics:- 

The first platform (The UI for UI - Copilot) includes Copilot, Copilot Studio and Agents.  

A number of organisations have now invested in Copilot and the use cases have been well documented online https://aka.ms/MicrosoftAIStories.

Copilot Pages, a multiplayer canvas that enables you to ideate and collaborate was showcased as well as developments within the Copilot for M365 suite.  Much of the capability has already been well publicised, but the leap in capability with Excel was highlighted.  Satya stated that what Copilit with Github did for developers, Copilot woll do the same for Data Analysts.    

The main announcements were around actions, agents and analytics. 

Announcing Copilot Actions

Copilot Actions looks like a great addition to the existing Copilot capabilities.  Think Outlook rules in the age of AI.  It can automate everything from Scheduling emails to requesting feedback on a document.  Its a very simple way to scale your day to day capacity and productivity. 

https://aka.ms/RichArtifactsinPages   

Introducing New Copilot Agent Templates

You can use agents within the context of your team, scoped with specific roles with specific permissions that can act as an extension to your team.  For example a facilitator agent will chair, minute and follow up on meetings for you.   

Its a s simple but powerful way to simplify and improve productivity across personal and business processes. These agents supercharge Copilot adding specialized skills and knowledge while automating specific tasks  A number of prebuilt agents already exist -  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/template-fundamentals.

• Self Service Agents:- helps employees to get real-time answers and take action on key HR and IT topics such as logging PTO hours or opening an IT helpdesk ticket.
• Sharepoint Agents:- Every Sharepoint site will have a Sharepoint Agent.   With a single click, users can create and share a custom agent that accesses only the information they select. Whether employees use these prebuilt agents or create their own, they are empowered to receive precise, relevant responses that drive effective decision-making.
• Make your own in Copilot Studio - not difficult to do, creating an agent should be as easy as creating a Microsoft Word Document.
• Autonomous Agents - Can automatically respond to signals across your business and initiate tasks. They can be configured to react to events or triggers without human input that instead originate from various tools, systems, and databases, or are even scheduled to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/copilot-studio/unlocking-autonomous-agent-capabilities-with-microsoft-copilot-studio/?msockid=22565ebaba6d68722adc4d2bbb0d695b 

Copilot will empower every employee and Copilot studio agents will transform every business process.  

ROI & Measurements with Copilot Analytics 

Copilot Anaytics was announced allowing businesses to get better insight on Copilot usage, enabling businesses to map copilot usage to specific business outcomes. 

Copilot for Devices

Microsofts goal is to create a distributed computing fabric and have already launched the copilot plus PCs into the market as well as Windows365 in the Cloud PC category, allowing you to stream PC's to any device.  W365 is growing rapidly (triple figure growth annually). 

The next big step and announcement involved Windows 365 Link.  Simple, Secure, purpose built device for W365.  Adminless, passwordless, expands PC category to connecting you directly to your cloud PC without any data residing on the device.  These devices will be available in April next year.   

Copilot and AI Stack 

The final platform was Copilot & AI stack, exposing every layer of the tech stack to customers to enable them to build their own Copilots, sharing examples of Nasa, who have built their own earth copilot.

Toyota have also building their own Copilot, enabling engineers to ask copilot any question 24/7. 

The main announcements were:- 

• Azure Local: Bringing Azure Arc all the way to the edge.  A single control plane for cloud, hybrid and edge workloads. 

• Azure Integrated HSM - Microsoft's first in house security chip, a dedicated hardware security module to manage key management, encryption and improve security.  From next year part of every new server deployment not just for confidential compute for all general purpose machines and containers. 
• Microsoft Fabric - brings together all your data regardless of source into a single location, OneLake, providing a data layer for AI workloads in one place.   There has already been huge adoption with 16000 Fabric customers already onboarded.  

• Fabric Databases - bringing the capabilites of SQL Databases to Fabric and provides a new, simple, secure and optimised for AI service to help facilitate the building of AI apps faster than ever.  

Commitment to Sustainability

Microsoft now 60+ Data Centre regions, more than other provider.  Their commitment to building these sustainably continues as they aim for their carbon negative objectives.   Satya announced that they had build 2 new data centres, built from low carbon timber which reduces the carbon footprint by 35% when compared to a steel DC construction.