2023 is a landmark year. In this year, just as the steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence has become a new production paradigm that drives the reconstruction of the world, unleashing amazing productivity and creativity that will change people's imagination of the future and work. As Microsoft Global CEO Satya Nadella said at the annual developer conference Build 2023: "AI is like the 'steam engine' of the human brain." The launch of ChatGPT will be a big moment for AI. ”
Kang Rong, Vice President of Microsoft Corporation and Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Greater China
Mingqiang Xu, Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft's Ecosystem Partner Group
Keeping pace with technological innovation, Microsoft looks forward to using AI to redefine the future of software development and work. As Microsoft released a series of AI "family buckets" at Build 2023 - covering fields from Azure OpenAI, Copilot Stack, development tools to collaborative applications, Microsoft integrates AI into the existing software and service ecosystem, from providing AI tools to building AI platforms and ecosystems, helping developers cope with the technological revolution in an all-round way, empowering people to use AI, so that everyone can benefit from these breakthrough technologies in work and life. Explore new opportunities and possibilities.
Left: Li Mian, Director of Data & AI Product Marketing, Azure Business Unit Greater China, Right Duan Xudong, Senior Product Marketing Director, Microsoft 365 Business Unit, Greater China
New frontiers for developers: building foundations, innovative experiences, and openness
From Microsoft's announcement of an expanded partnership with OpenAI, the launch of Azure OpenAI's enterprise-level services, to the "Copilot" and "Plugin" opening up new frontiers in AI application development, these are not just simple iterations of tools, but a major revolution in AI-driven software development. Microsoft is committed to building AI infrastructure, revolutionizing development experience, and opening AI capabilities to enterprises to help developers achieve the next generation of AI innovation.
Under the large-scale wave of AI, cloud computing can provide the computing resources and infrastructure required for large-scale training and deployment of AI models, and the importance of building a cloud architecture in the AI era is self-evident. As a pioneer in AI infrastructure, Microsoft Intelligent Cloud Azure helps customers build and deploy AI applications. Microsoft began working with OpenAI in 2019 and announced earlier this year to further expand the partnership to continue supporting OpenAI's pioneering research in the field of AI. As the exclusive cloud service provider of OpenAI, the global version of Microsoft Intelligent Cloud Azure provides power for the rapid development of OpenAI with an excellent leading architecture for the AI era. AI shows broad industry prospects, and the combination of large-scale AI and business scenarios presents great potential, which is also the key to the leap in digital productivity in all walks of life. Based on this, Microsoft provides Azure trusted enterprise-level services and AI-optimized infrastructure, officially launched Azure OpenAI services in the global version of Azure services in January this year, and connected OpenAI models in multiple product lines. With Azure OpenAI services, Azure global enterprise customers can directly invoke OpenAI models, including GPT-3, GPT-4, Codex and DALL. At the same time, the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service for enterprise users is also available in the global version of Azure.
All walks of life are embracing AI, and different companies have different levels of AI maturity. Microsoft sees that no matter what stage it takes, enterprises are looking forward to gaining an edge in AI competition and revolutionizing the development experience in innovation. In a series of updates this year, Microsoft combined its own Copilot development experience to launch the Copilot Stack, providing full-stack development tools and reference methods for developers to build their own Copilot, which is a major upgrade of AI development strategy and brings full-stack tools and services to enterprises at different stages. Microsoft launches Github Copilot to assist developers in programming. Microsoft launched Power Platform Copilot, which allows developers to use natural language to create the applications, processes or bots they want. announced a new open "plug-in" standard to ensure interoperability between a range of future "smart co-pilot" product services; Developers can connect apps and services to Microsoft 365 Copilot through "plugins." Developers can easily develop new Microsoft 365 Copilot plugins using Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Teams Toolkit development tools on Visual Studio.
Enterprises' demand for AI continues to be released, and developers look forward to "pocketing" this growth engine and developing their own new generation of intelligent applications in the way of "intelligent co-driver", which must be inseparable from solid technical support. Microsoft provides a package of products and services to help enterprises tap the value of AI - Azure OpenAI enterprise-level services integrate large models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 with Azure's secure and reliable enterprise-level services to help developers create their own exclusive business innovation solutions and applications; Microsoft's newly released Azure AI Studio helps developers integrate external data sources into Azure OpenAI services more conveniently, so as to polish a dialogue model based on their own data. AI is inseparable from data, the newly released Microsoft Fabric, is an end-to-end unified data analysis platform, bringing together a variety of data and analysis tools needed by enterprises, integrating technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI into a unified product, helping data and business personnel better explore and explore enterprise data, and laying the foundation for the advent of the AI era.
As Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott puts it, "The 'smart co-driver' supports developers with innovation. All applications will be refactored, and future applications will be built in ways that no one expected. "From building infrastructure to basic models, software development in all walks of life will shift to AI-driven, and Microsoft's AI ecosystem strategy has ushered in a major update, which is in line with Microsoft's mission - "empower every person and organization in the world to achieve extraordinary." Satya extended this a little more at the Build conference, "One thing we should be asking ourselves as developers is, why are we building technology? We want education, economic standards and living standards everywhere to improve, that's why we build technology, that's why we innovate, that's why technology exists. Not just the technology itself, but for the wider impact."
A new era of productivity: connectivity, competitiveness, creativity
Microsoft's latest 2023 Work Trend Index1 survey found that employees' pace and workload are growing exponentially, with 68% of employees saying they don't have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday and receive more emails, meetings, messages, and data every day than ever before, leaving them no time to innovate. People need more streamlined and efficient ways to free themselves from basic tasks, and leaders and employees alike are eager for AI to help ease the burden. In the future, AI will change the way people work, and every professional should have AI literacy.
"Intelligent co-driver" is the key to assisting users to call AI capabilities in the AI era. In March this year, Microsoft embedded "intelligent co-pilot" into a series of products and services such as Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, bringing the power of a new generation of AI to productivity tools; In April, Microsoft deeply integrated "intelligent co-pilot" with Microsoft Viva and launched Viva Glint to help enterprises build teams with stronger employee experience and higher productivity. At the Build conference, Microsoft announced that developers can connect applications and services to Microsoft 365 Copilot through "plug-ins", and the first supported plug-ins include ChatGPT, Teams information extension, Power Platform connector, etc., and can also connect application data outside of Microsoft 365 to Microsoft 365 Graph through Graph Connector, allowing Microsoft 365 Copilot can retrieve data from more enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, providing users with richer usage scenarios.
As productivity tools continue to be enriched, work styles and application scenarios are becoming more diverse. Microsoft seamlessly integrates AI technology with Microsoft 365, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. As an "assistant", the "smart co-driver" connects multiple productivity tools, so that employees can work "seamlessly", reduce the "sense of disconnection", and focus more time on innovative and important work.
AI-assisted work is becoming more common, and human-AI collaboration will lead to changes in the future of work. Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates productivity tools and workflows to improve individual and team efficiency. At the same time, people can use natural language to "work together" with the "intelligent co-driver", help analyze and judge with the help of AI, solve complex problems, and enhance the core competitiveness of the future workplace.
Satya has said: "The new generation of artificial intelligence will eliminate tedious work and unleash creativity. "The collaborative intelligence of humans and AI, in addition to reducing repetitive work, is also reflected in those "whimsical" and "brain-opening". Microsoft 365 Copilot helps reduce the workload and increase creativity, such as Copilot semantic indexing greatly saves information retrieval efficiency, allowing enterprises and users to build complex data maps; Using natural language to provide one or two words or ideas for the "intelligent co-pilot", it can quickly generate marketing slogans, activity themes, summarize the content in the whiteboard, classify different ideas, etc., to help quickly complete brainstorming; Copilot in PowerPoint generates images on request, eliminating search time; Copilot in Outlook helps write messages and save communication costs; Copilot in OneNote allows you to draft content quickly; New "smart co-pilot" feature on Microsoft Loop that automatically summarizes team progress; Copilot in Microsoft Viva learning automates the creation of targeted learning plans and more.
The AI wave is profoundly impacting every business and individual, giving birth to innovation opportunities and surprising unknowns. Looking forward to the future, with the upgrade of Microsoft's new AI ecological strategy, the objects, processes and tools of software development will be completely new, and people's working patterns will also usher in epoch-making changes. As Jared Spataro, Microsoft's global vice president and Microsoft 365 global division, said, "One hundred years from now, we'll look back on this moment, and we'll see that it was the beginning of the truly digital age." ”
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