Building Momentum

Every year when Microsoft has a conference, I'm asked by colleagues and clients what my favorite parts are - and predictably, my stock answer is "Have you read the Book of News ?"

Why? Because it's almost impossible to summarize a large conference - but the Microsoft team that works on the Book of News, whether for Build, or Ignite or any other event - always seems to be able to neatly summarize what the biggest moments from the event are in an easily digestible format - often with some key visual assets used when you describe the event.

So go read it!

Now that you've read the Build 2024 Book of News - let's dive into which areas resonated strongly.

One of the biggest announcements was of course "Team Copilot " for a couple of reasons.

• By moving from positioning Copilot as a mere "personal assistant" to a member of the team, Microsoft has helped ensure that the perceived value of the outputs are much stronger; tasks such as managing a project or facilitating a meeting (rather than being a silent observer of said meeting) help redefine how much value an AI can bring to the table
• Businesses that are struggling with the organizational change requirements needed to support Copilot are going to have to re-imagine those requirements in a Teams Copilot world; we've seen several clients with legacy policies around sharing, transcriptions and recording have to re-examine whether they need to refresh those given how central they are to Copilot operating in a truly transformative manner

That latter point is something Satya Nadella mentioned a few weeks ago: the biggest impediment to these transformational tools taking root in an organization are the legacy behaviors in many cases left over from decades ago. Today, having the ability to have seamless real-time transcription to assist those who need assistance with spoken words is a breath of fresh air to a truly accessible workplace. Yet many firms prevent these accessibility technologies from being enabled - and in doing so, hamstring the entire organization as tools like Copilot are rolled out. The organizations who truly believe in accessibility are going to be able to move more quickly than those who don't when it comes to tools such as Copilot.

Another big announcement at Build was custom copilots from SharePoint sites . One of the most popular requests we've seen internally at Cognizant and from our clients is the ability to limit the set of documents Copilot for Microsoft 365 is looking at. Today, that can be done only by choosing specific documents, or asking to look at a particular property of a document. There's no "look in this specific folder" capability available today.

Yet it keeps coming up because organizations have historically moved documents of a particular type into a single SharePoint site or document library - and this new functionality allowing custom Copilots tied to those libraries will see instance value in most organizations.

Best of all, these custom copilots will show up as recently used Copilot extensions - allowing you to keep using the familiar Copilot chat experience but now with greater functionality.

As many of us have grown familiar with Copilot - we've also come to depend upon a tiny keyboard shortcut to power our experience - and that was another big announcement at Build - the ability to use slash "/" commands in Teams . Much like the @ symbol before it - the / enabling a quick link to a message, individual or even a meeting has changed how we interact with many applications in the Microsoft universe - enabling quicker prompting and more specific answers to our questions. Having this come to Teams is key.

The last update I'll mention is one that is more future facing than most - namely, the ability to have Loop-supported Code Blocks. Loop is becoming a more powerful tool each day - and as more folks use the generated notes in Teams, tied to the "Agenda" and "Recap" functions - they are inadvertently starting to use Loop for tasks, meetings notes, etc.

The more people use Loop, the more sense it makes - by being able to transform static emails (asynchronous by nature; synchronous with Loop) into real-time updates - it also positions almost every component as "always up to date" - which again helps more progressive organizations avoid those legacy questions such as "what's the status of X?" or "which version are you on?" It feels weird to have to say this in 2024 - but many organizations today still capture critical details in offline emails and spreadsheets.

All of these improvements are going to help organizations make the transition to more modern, progressive, truly accessible experiences.