8 Microsoft Build AI Announcements that Business Executives Need to Know

It seems like all the major platform players are having big conferences and slews of AI announcements one right after the other. Following on the heels of Google IO’s 100 AI announcements in mid-May, Microsoft Build 2024 followed only a week later with a measly 59 announcements. (yes, I counted them, but my accuracy might be on the scale of LLM’s…) At a high-level, the announcements are actually developer focused, a lot of models, API’s, extensions, tools, and features for AI application developers. I want to say that Microsoft is doing a better job with AI develop tools but my direct experience is that it’s still a mess to navigate. There’s a lot of functionality but it’s a bit all over the place and not consolidated yet. Seems like a case of every team being told they need to add AI features, and AI development support, but no one bothered to actually consolidate the full developer workflow.

Despite all that, these tools and capabilities can have significant impact on the enterprise for the business leader to care. Here’s my list and take on what you should care about and why:

1. Azure AI Search: expanding supported sources for RAG to connect directly to Microsoft Fabric data through OneLake.
2. Azure AI Studio: full developer flow supported to create AI applications. Why would you care? You don’t need AI and data science team to create AI applications anymore, any devs in the IT team can do it. I did it without writing a line of code.
3. Azure AI Speech: Yes, you can do sentiment analysis of the audio of your sales calls, customer service calls, and also dub your audio content into any language you want. I’m personally waiting for the functionality to add real-time video dubbing that matches the speech though.
4. Real-time Intelligence: I desperately want this to be the business executive answer to can I just ask questions on how my business is doing and can drill down to why with live-data without a data analyst ever being involved, but it’s not there yet. This is the start of that journey, but we have not yet arrived.
5. Copilot Extensions, Copilot Connectors, and Copilot Studio: This is what will actually make Copilots useful for your organization, because you can customize them for your workflow, with your internal data. If you haven’t reconsidered your enterprise IT team’s organization and roadmap to include a full slate of custom copilots and internal AI chatbots, now is the time. This functionality is already in preview, and support for mobile Copilot custom applications on the way.
6. Team Copilot: You don’t need project managers anymore, the Team Copilot will do it for you, and manage the meetings. What sucks about this? Only preview later this year, no date yet.
7. Microsoft Power Automate: “Do as I do” and “Do as I say” is the essence of this capability. You don’t need to be a developer, just someone who does a full task on the computer while you explain what you’re doing. The computer watches you, listens, learns, and automate what you just did. Yeap, the easy way to automate that all business users have been asking for, it’s part of an Early Access Program. Where do I sign up?
8. Microsoft Edge Real-Time Video Translation: I don’t know if this is enough to get people to switch browsers, but maybe the ones who don’t get all their foreign drama videos from Youtube.

And one on the disappointing side:

Microsoft Teams and Loop AI Features: *Snooze* This reads like the Zoom + Slack feature list I’m afraid to say. We will need a lot more differentiation to be persuaded to switch even if Teams did come free with our Enterprise agreement.

Conclusion

It’s hard to keep track with every major player announcing wayyyyy too many AI products on a weekly basis. My very brief take is that right now Microsoft is doing better for AI application development tools and workflow for the enterprise IT developer, but Google is starting to catching up. If your enterprise tech stack is already on Google, it’s unclear if all of this is enough for you to switch or you just need to wait a few months to see if all the previews, betas, early access, and prototypes actually become available.

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