Highlights of Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft's annual conference: Bing Chat Enterprise Edition, Copilot Pricing Announcement, Alliance with Meta...

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Original source: AGI Innovation Lab‌

On July 18, Microsoft Inspire, the annual conference of Microsoft's global partners, was officially held. Unsurprisingly, the central theme was the biggest buzzword in tech right now — artificial intelligence (AI).

Microsoft has more than 400,000 partners around the world, and these partners play an important role in Microsoft's promotion of its latest technologies and products to the world. The Microsoft Inspire conference is a new opportunity and way for Microsoft to introduce products to partners. Microsoft announced a lot of information that users are concerned about on the first day, including the pricing of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise Edition, new features of the Azure platform, and also announced a strategic cooperation with Meta.

Next, let's take a closer look at some of the highlights of this year's Microsoft Inspire conference.

1. Bing Chat Business - $5/month

In February of this year, Microsoft launched a new version of Bing with an AI chatbot, which received a lot of attention and praise, but this AI chat feature has also brought data protection and privacy concerns to enterprises. To this end, Microsoft is now launching Bing Chat Enterprise, an enterprise version of Bing Chat, which enables business data protection while providing AI-powered chat capabilities.

Bing Chat Enterprise is rolling out to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers in a free preview starting today. Bing Chat Enterprise will also be available as a standalone subscription in the future for $5 per user per month.

2. Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing - $30/month

Microsoft announced earlier this year that Microsoft 365 will integrate AI assistant Copilot. Today, the pricing for Microsoft 365 for Copilot was officially announced - it will be available to commercial customers at $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers.

Users build on business data like documents, email, calendars, chats, meetings, and contacts by taking the answers they get from Copilot and integrating it with your work environment. Microsoft says Copilot can spark your creativity in Word, analyze data in Excel, design presentations in PowerPoint, sort through your Outlook inbox, wrap up meetings in Teams (whether you’re in it or not), and more.

3. Microsoft Sales Copilot

Microsoft has also updated Microsoft Sales Copilot features for business professionals, such as AI-generated opportunity summaries, contextualized email drafts, and meeting preparation. The tool is designed to help salespeople cut through red tape so they can spend more time selling. For example, sales staff can upload documents such as customer emails and contracts, and use AI to automatically generate sales reports and customer analysis reports to improve work efficiency and quality. These capabilities add to the AI capabilities already in Microsoft Sales Copilot, such as Teams call summaries and email thread summaries.

4. Power Automate adds AI function

Organizations often struggle to identify impediments to workflow and how to remove them. To help, Microsoft announced the general availability of next-generation AI capabilities in Power Automate Process Mining, providing customers with AI-driven insights to optimize existing processes and increase efficiency through low-code automation. Through process mining, users can understand what is happening in their business, use AI to generate insights, applications and automation recommendations, and use Power Platform to quickly build the solutions they need.

5. New Azure capabilities and investments

We're also announcing a major investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate & Modernize and launching Azure Innovate, our new purpose-built investment to address the growing demand for analytics and artificial intelligence. These new offerings expand scenario coverage and provide richer incentives and support for everything from fast, frictionless migration to building new AI applications.

6. Meta's partnership with Microsoft

This may be the biggest news of this year's Inspire conference. Meta has "allied" with Microsoft on large models. Meta officially released a new generation of open source large language model Llama 2 at the Inspire conference, which is supported by Microsoft's Azure and Windows platforms. At the same time, Microsoft will become Meta's preferred partner. Azure platform customers will be able to easily fine-tune and deploy 7 billion parameter, 13 billion parameter and 70 billion parameter Llama 2 models easily and securely on Azure, and in addition, Llama 2 will be optimized to run Windows natively – enabling Windows developers to The runtime targets the Direct ML execution provider to take advantage of Llama 2.

7. Expand strategic cooperation with Epic

Microsoft announced the expansion of a strategic partnership with healthcare software company Epic to leverage the power of AI to help clinicians spend less time on administrative functions and more time delivering quality care. Epic has integrated Azure OpenAI services into its electronic health record (EHR) software to provide solutions ranging from helping clinicians explore clinical data in a conversational and intuitive way to helping them respond to patient messages more effectively.

With Nuance DAX Express, AI-driven clinical documentation capabilities are embedded directly into Epic workflows to help providers further reduce burnout-inducing administrative workloads, expand patient care, and improve healthcare outcomes.