BUILDing the future

So last week we were treated to Microsoft’s developer conference Build 2023, which is the annual flagship event for developers. Microsoft has always been quick to announce tools and platforms that will empower and enabled developers, and this year was no exception. We had details on new AI plugins to Windows Copilot, there was something for everyone.

You are in for a treat as some of these tools will massively help in the months to come.

Here are some of the key highlights that were announced:

- AI Plugins: Microsoft is growing the AI plugin ecosystem to enable systems to exchange and make use of the data that they already have, across ChatGPT and the breadth of Microsoft's copilot offerings. There will be some favourite AI plugins such as ChatGPT, M365, GitHub, Visual Studio and Azure Copilot. You can also create your own plugins and share them with the community. I for one am looking forward to seeing what niche products come out of this to further enable development and productivity.

- Windows Copilot: Windows Copilot is a new AI virtual assistant that will help you perform setting changes, suggest music choices, and streamline workflows. So if you are familiar with the helpful assistant Clippy who was part of our Microsoft lives in office between 97 and 2001, think of this as his much more intelligent and more helpful cousin.

But on a serious note, this will be an amazing tool to help, when it comes to running specific commands, centralised AI assistance, organising a desktop and it pops up your development split screens or even scanning a document and summarising it. The great thing is that it will integrate with other applications so you can ask it to open say Adobe to work on a marketing campaign and then get it to share to a Teams channel so others can collaborate, this should be an interesting addition.

- Azure AI Studio: Azure AI Studio is a new cloud-based IDE that lets you build, train, deploy, and manage AI models using a drag-and-drop interface. The great thing is that you can use Azure AI Studio to create AI solutions for various scenarios, such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and the safety element is hard baked in to make sure what is being build is responsible AI. Basically, a great AI lifecycle tool to help you to access pre-built AI models from Azure Cognitive Services or import your own custom models. Azure AI Studio simplifies the AI development lifecycle by providing an integrated environment that supports code-free or code-first approaches.

- Microsoft Fabric: Is probably one of my favourite announcements made as it will massively impact the IT world. Microsoft Fabric is a new data analytics platform that enables you to ingest, process, analyse, and visualize data from various sources. Now the awesome thing here, is that you can connect to different data sources such as, SQL server and Azure data lake storage or Power BI. Why is that new I hear you cry …. Well for starters it is a unified interface making these tasks a boat load easier and because it basically creates a SaaS data lake where converting the data into the same format it is a lot easier to pull different data from different sources and query it in a project or Lake houses (I see what you did there Microsoft).

The other cool thing is that it can go across Clouds so you could connect it with an AWS storage account for example and visualise your data, but the data is not duplicated, now isn’t that awesome.

These are just some of the awesome updates that Microsoft announced at Build 2023. There are many more that I didn't cover here, so I encourage you to check out the updates and sessions on the Microsoft build website and see what creative triggers for you and your business.

Happy developing.