“We are in the midst of a massive platform shift with the new generation of AI.” – Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft
Whew! Showcasing the power of AI, Microsoft Inspire 2023 brought forth an array of exciting announcements and groundbreaking innovations leaving us feeling, well, inspired. With so much to cover, let’s dive right in!
1) Microsoft Copilot Pricing Announced
In case you missed it, Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI Large Language Model (LLM) tool that can help you write, recap, and create content from within the Microsoft Office applications. Sort of like an ingrained ChatGPT inside of each Office app. Although we didn’t get an official release date, we now know that Copilot will be $30 per month, per user for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers when it does become generally available.
2) Microsoft Sales Copilot
Sales Copilot brings new capabilities to Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to increase productivity and personalize customer interaction. The following Sales Copilot capabilities are now available for preview:
- AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries
- A customer meeting preparation summary view that includes auto-generated summaries of previous meetings, notes, highlights of issues and concerns
- Tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings that are prompted by the customer’s mention of a competitor or brand
- Customer email summary and follow-up, with contextual replies and actions based on Outlook emails and CRM data
3) Bing Chat Enterprise Announced
Bing Chat Enterprise is now available in preview and is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium. In the future, it will be available as a stand-alone offering for $5 per user, per month. Created in part to address enterprise concerns about privacy, with Bing Chat Enterprise, user and business data are protected and will not leak outside of the organization. Your chat data is not saved, Microsoft does not have access to it, and it will not be used to train the models. You can access Bing Chat Enterprise using your work account wherever Bing Chat is supported —Bing.com/chat and the Microsoft Edge sidebar.
4) Azure Migrate and Modernize
Formerly known as AMMP, the new Azure Migrate and Modernize offers an expanded set of features, as well as support for additional workloads like high-performance computing (HPC), Oracle, Linux, SAP, and mainframe migrations. Microsoft announced the company’s intention to make a “substantial investment to increase the scale and availability” of Azure Migrate and Modernize.
5) New AI Abilities Across Microsoft 365
- Copilot Expansion in Teams
The new expansions of Copilot in Teams boosts productivity in several key ways. Copilot in Teams chat can summarize chat threads, organize key discussion points, and help you get caught up on conversations you missed. Copilot in Teams Phone means you can make and receive calls from your Teams app and get real-time summarization and highlights. Copilot can also draft notes for you during the call and capture key points such as names, dates, numbers, and tasks. - Microsoft Viva
The latest update includes the launch of Viva Glint, which provides insights on employee engagement through surveys and connected actions, and Viva Pulse, which enables managers and project leads to get confidential feedback on the flow of work in real-time. - Windows 365 Frontline
An easy and affordable way to provide the power of Cloud PCs to frontline, shift, and part-time workers, Windows 365 Frontline allows manufacturing customers to securely access their personalized Windows experience on any device. - Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive Announced
Both coming to public preview later this year, M365 Backup will provide a recovery of your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange data, while keeping it all within the M365 security boundary. M365 Archive gives you a cold data storage tier that enables you to keep inactive or aging data within SharePoint. - AI-Powered Process Mining in Power Automate
Providing AI-powered insights that permit customers to optimize existing processes and evaluate efficiencies with low-code automation, Power Automate Process Mining offers two industry-standard capabilities, task mining and process mining. This innovation breaks down various barriers that might make it difficult for an organization to identify inefficiencies in their workflows and where they could use improvement. Process Mining includes functionality such as the Process Mining desktop app with advanced analytics and Power BI customization.
With so many exciting updates and opportunities, please reach out to your Connection Account Team for more information or with any questions. Read more about the Microsoft Inspire 2023 announcements on the official Microsoft blog.
Makayla Mota
Makayla Mota is a Partner Marketing Specialist at Connection with a background in educational technology training on Microsoft solutions in the classroom. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, spending time with her family, antiquing, hiking, and watching movies.
