A summary of the most exciting AI announcements from Microsoft’s annual developer conference

Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, took place from May 21 to May 23, 2024. This year’s event emphasized the transformative impact AI technology is having on organisations leveraging it to enhance efficiencies, elevate customer experiences and achieve differentiating innovations. At Transparity, we are witnessing a turning point in the market as AI moves from vision to everyday reality and Microsoft is bringing that to the forefront with their latest announcements.

In this blog, we will focus on some of the key AI announcements that Microsoft made during the event and what they mean for the future of AI development and adoption.

Empowering you with a broad selection of small and large language models  

Microsoft provides you with more than 1,600 models through their model catalog in Azure AI Studio. This enables you to have the flexibility to compare cost & performance, giving you the ability to select the right model for your use-case and business needs.

At Build, Microsoft added to this with:

• GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship model is now generally available in Azure OpenAI Service. You may have seen the latest innovation from OpenAI: GPT-4o, which showcases incredible multi-modal demos across text, vision, and audio. API includes support for text and image with audio support coming soon. Dive into GPT-4o’s capabilities with the playground available in Azure OpenAI Studio.
• Phi-3: Redefining what’s possible with SLMs. Announcing Phi-3-small, Phi-3-medium, and Phi-3-vision, a new multimodal model, in the Phi-3 family of AI small language models (SLMs), developed by Microsoft. Phi-3 models are powerful, cost-effective and optimized for resource constrained environments including on-device, edge, offline inference, and latency bound scenarios where fast response times are critical. 

To learn more about the following announcements and the new ways Azure is helping you to build transformational AI experiences, read the blog post by Jessica Hawk, CVP, Data, AI, Digital Applications Marketing.

New agent capabilities in Microsoft Copilot unlock business value

Microsoft announced a host of new powerful capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio—the single conversational AI tool you can use to create your very own custom copilots or extend Microsoft Copilot experiences with your own enterprise data and scenarios.

Copilot can now act as independent agents—ones that can be triggered by events—not just conversation—and can automate and orchestrate complex, long-running business processes with more autonomy and less human intervention:

• New Copilot agents with Copilot Studio: developers can build copilots for specific functions that respond to data and events and can autonomously complete long-running processes. These new agent capabilities are currently available in a limited early access preview and will be released for public preview later this calendar year.
• Introducing Copilot Connectors: Organisations want copilots to be able to reason over and use data from their own enterprise’s business systems and apps. Copilot connectors enable anyone to ground their copilot with a curated catalog of data sources including Dataverse, Microsoft Fabric OneLake (coming this calendar year.) Copilot connectors will be available in public preview soon.

To learn more about all of the powerful capabilities announced for Microsoft Copilot Studio, read the blog post by Omar Aftab, Vice President, Conversational AI.

60+ Announcements

These are just some of the highlights of the AI announcements that Microsoft made at Build 2024:

• See the full set of announcements: read the Book of News, the Official Microsoft Blog, and the hero blogs and resources linked above to learn more about their key announcements.  
• Tune into watch Microsoft Build sessions live and on demand and browse the session catalog to explore all the available learning opportunities.

We hope you are as inspired and excited by the possibilities and opportunities that AI can bring to your development and business goals as we are. These AI advancements are creating a myriad of new use-cases, and we are starting to see more of a shift from ideas to production. We are working with our customers every day to unlock business challenges; helping them to create more personalised customer experiences, optimise their operations and jump start that creative process to become more innovate.

If you would like a conversation with our Data & AI team on how to get started and take your ideas into production, then please reach out to us for a chat or an AI Readiness assessment.