Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Microsoft and ServiceNow at Knowledge 2024: Introducing generative AI innovation

We are in the midst of a major platform shift where AI has emerged as a transformative force that’s redefining productivity in the workplace. This evolution compels organizations to embrace new technologies that not only enhance efficiency but also foster innovation and champion responsible design. That’s why Microsoft is proud to partner with ServiceNow, a leader in digital workflows and generative AI, to create seamless and powerful experiences that empower every organization on the planet to achieve more.  

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Innovation Unleashed: ServiceNow and the Microsoft Cloud

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Collaboration and integration with ServiceNow at Knowledge 2024

I had the opportunity to celebrate the results of this partnership at Knowledge 2024, ServiceNow’s flagship event that brought together 20,000 global business leaders, IT professionals, partners, and developers. During this time, industry professionals from both Microsoft and ServiceNow discussed how we’re joining efforts to boost collaboration, increase efficiency, and streamline business processes by integrating generative AI solutions. It was an honor to also have Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella join the keynote, where he expressed gratitude for the progress we’ve made in this partnership and enthusiasm for future innovation.

Since 2019, as partners, Microsoft and ServiceNow have been jointly innovating to bring the best of the Microsoft Cloud and the ServiceNow platform to improve customer and employee experiences. We have delivered over 100 pre-built integrations that provide our mutual customers with the ability to confidently plan, scale, and manage cloud adoption and their digital transformation initiatives.

As an example of this commitment, we recently migrated our internal ServiceNow instances to Azure, introducing greater interoperability between our platforms. Our mutual customers can also procure ServiceNow on Azure through the Azure Marketplace, and streamline procurement against their existing Azure commitment. This strategic collaboration, which combines the power of ServiceNow’s business transformation capabilities with Azure’s cloud infrastructure, has ushered in a host of new and exciting solutions to accelerate cloud value, enhance employee experiences, and invent new AI use cases. It was a privilege to witness the unveiling of one of those solutions at Knowledge 2024—a new connection between the ServiceNow platform and Microsoft Copilot. With this integration, organizations can now access top-tier generative AI models within the natural flow of their work.

Why have one when you could have two powerful generative AI assistants?

Think about how helpful it would be if employees had access to round-the-clock support to fix problems and maximize productivity. This is the vision we’re realizing by combining ServiceNow and Microsoft AI assistants to enhance employee choice and flexibility. The resulting ServiceNow Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot integration allows generative AI experiences to coexist within the same ecosystem. The Now Platform is widely used for IT management, security operations, field service management, compliance, HR, and workflow automation. Now, both ServiceNow and Microsoft customers can benefit from intelligent support using natural language—inside the Now Platform or Microsoft 365.

This new integration lets users benefit from digital assistants on both platforms without leaving their workflows. For example, when a buyer initiates a purchase order for office supplies, Copilot generates the purchase order using simple prompts. It then hands it off to Now Assist to finalize within ServiceNow. The buyer can move quickly through the ordering process without switching platforms or programs. Whichever AI assistant knows the answer will respond, unlocking a newfound level of efficiency and eliminating context switching.

To explore other AI-based enhancements to the Now Platform, watch the demo below:  

Generative AI is a personal initiative that’s driving internal value

How are ServiceNow and Microsoft seeing value with generative AI? I had the opportunity to explore this question and more with Nalina Athyantha, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Field Marketing at ServiceNow. Responding to the recent announcement of the ServiceNow platform and Microsoft Copilot integration, Nalina and I were able to provide context for these new developments in the partnership and share more about where this alliance is headed. During our conversation, we discussed the importance of upleveling employee experiences by streamlining workflows and eliminating redundancies with AI. I was impressed to hear how ServiceNow itself is reaping the benefits of AI by embedding these capabilities into the systems their employees use daily. The organization has already observed a $10 million dollar reduction in costs with a notable increase in productivity. By enabling seamless AI-assisted experiences with Now Assist and Microsoft 365 applications, both ServiceNow and Microsoft are seeing the impact firsthand through the lens of our respective organizations. And we’re excited to extend that value to our shared customers, too.

Watch the video below to hear my entire conversation with Nalina:

We’re proud to be innovating alongside pioneers like ServiceNow

I want to extend a sincere thanks to ServiceNow on behalf of Microsoft for recognizing us as their 2024 Innovation Partner of the Year as well as the 2024 Build Partner of the Year. The latter award was particularly meaningful as it commends our joint effort in creating and delivering seamless user experiences on the Now Platform and Azure.

We believe that we can achieve more by collaborating with ServiceNow. That’s why we appreciated the chance to embrace the learning aspect of Knowledge 2024 and show others how they can benefit from integrating ServiceNow into their Microsoft ecosystem. Our team at Microsoft led two sessions during the event that helped attendees delve deeper into ServiceNow on Azure. Reenu Saluja, a Global Partner Technology Strategist within Microsoft’s Industry Partner Solution Organization, and Stephen Bidgood, an Advisory Solution Consultant at ServiceNow, walked participants through a live Q&A that provided a technical overview of AI, security, and modern work. This interactive format allowed for an engaging learning experience that was equally enriching on both sides. While I discussed the value of ServiceNow and the Microsoft Cloud, innovating together and exploring the integration opportunities.

Microsoft team accepts the award as ServiceNow’s 2024 Innovation Partner of the Year and 2024 Build Partner of the Year.

The digital transformation journey continues

The ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 event highlighted how Microsoft and ServiceNow can help organizations of all sizes accelerate their cloud transformation with generative AI. We’re excited about the future of AI innovation that Microsoft and ServiceNow can enable together.

For a more in-depth look at the newly announced integration and to learn more about Microsoft and ServiceNow’s partnership, read our blog “Innovation Unleashed: ServiceNow and the Microsoft Cloud.”
The post Microsoft and ServiceNow at Knowledge 2024: Introducing generative AI innovation appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Unlock AI innovation with new joint capabilities from Microsoft and SAP

Microsoft and SAP have been partners and customers of each other for over 30 years, collaborating on innovative business solutions and helping thousands of joint customers accelerate their business transformation. Microsoft Cloud is the market leader for running SAP workloads in the cloud, including RISE with SAP, and today at SAP Sapphire 2024, we are very excited to bring more amazing innovation to the market for our joint customers. 

In this blog, we explore the most recent exciting developments from the Microsoft and SAP partnership and how they help customers accelerate their business transformation. 

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Announcing new joint AI integration between Microsoft 365 Copilot and SAP Joule

Today at SAP Sapphire, Microsoft and SAP are expanding our partnership by bringing Joule together with Microsoft Copilot into a unified experience, allowing employees to get more done in the flow of their work through seamless access to information from business applications in SAP as well as Microsoft 365.  

Customers want AI assistants to carry out requests regardless of data location or the system that needs to be accessed. By integrating Joule and Copilot for Microsoft 365, the generative AI solutions will interact intuitively so users can find information faster and execute tasks without leaving the platform they are already in. 

A user in Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be able to leverage SAP Joule to access information stored in SAP—for example S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, or SAP Concur. Similarly, someone using SAP Joule in a SAP application will be able to use Copilot for Microsoft 365 capabilities without context switching.

To see this in action, tune into the “Innovation: The key to bringing out your best” keynote at SAP Sapphire which will also be available on-demand and read the announcement blog. 

Unlock business transformation with Microsoft AI and RISE with SAP

SAP systems host mission-critical data powering core business processes and can greatly benefit from the insights, automation, and efficiencies unlocked by AI. Microsoft Cloud—the most trusted, comprehensive and integrated cloud—is best positioned to help you achieve these benefits. You can extend RISE with SAP by using a broad set of Microsoft AI services to maximize business outcomes, catered to your business needs: 

1: Unlocking joint AI innovation with SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and Microsoft Azure: SAP BTP is a platform offering from SAP that maximizes the value of the RISE with SAP offering. We recently partnered with SAP to announce the availability of SAP AI Core, an integral part of BTP, including Generative AI Hub and Joule on Microsoft Azure in West Europe, US East, and Sydney. Customers that use BTP and want to embed more intelligence into their finance, supply chain, and order to cash business processes can now do so easily, on Azure. SAP customers can also take advantage of the most popular large language models like GPT-4o available in SAP Generative AI Hub offered only on Azure through the Azure OpenAI Service.

2: Unlocking end-user productivity with Microsoft Copilot: SAP customers can use Copilot for Microsoft 365, available in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PowerBI so that end-users can unlock insights, and perform tasks faster. You can go one step further by tailoring Copilot to work the way you need, with your data, processes and policies using the SAP plugin in Microsoft Copilot Studio. You can now customize Copilot to connect to your SAP systems and retrieve the information you need such as expense information, inventory, and so on. This is made possible with new Copilot connectors and new agent capabilities that we announced at Microsoft Build last week. 

3: Enabling AI transformation using Azure AI services: SAP customers running their workloads on Azure can build their own AI capabilities using the Azure OpenAI Service with their SAP data to quickly develop generative AI applications. We offer over 1,600 frontier and open models in Azure AI, including the latest from OpenAI, Meta, and others—providing you with the choice and flexibility to choose the model suited for your use case. More than 50,000 customers use Azure AI today, signaling the amazing momentum in this space. 

A powerful productivity enhancement use case here is the combination of OpenAI, along with business process automation tools like the Microsoft Power Platform which has SAP connectors available to help a user interact with SAP data easily and complete tasks faster. 

For example, a sales assistant can access SAP data to place product orders, directly from Microsoft Teams, leveraging the power of Azure OpenAI. Watch this video to see this scenario in action. 

RISE with SAP customers can also consume OpenAI services through Cloud Application programming model (CAP) and SAP BTP, AI Core. 

4: Automatic attack disruption for SAP, powered by AI: Microsoft Security Copilot empowers all security and IT roles to detect and address cyberthreats at machine speed, including those arising from SAP systems. For customers using Microsoft Sentinel for SAP, which is certified for RISE with SAP, attack disruption will automatically detect financial fraud techniques and disable the native SAP and connected Microsoft Entra account to prevent the cyberattacker from transferring any funds–with no additional intervention. See this video to learn more and read more about automatic attack disruption for SAP. 

More choice and flexibility with expanded availability of SAP BTP on Azure 

Together with SAP, we recently announced the expanded availability of SAP BTP to six new Azure regions (Brazil, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, and one to be announced) as well as additional BTP services in the existing seven public Microsoft Azure regions (Australia, Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, the United States East-VA, and the United States West-WA.) Upon completion, SAP Business Technology Platform will run in 13 Microsoft Azure regions, and all the key BTP services that most customers are asking for, will be available on Azure.

The expanded service availability, based on customer demand, unlocks AI innovation and business transformation for customers more easily, as you can now integrate SAP Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SAP BTP services with Microsoft Azure services, including AI services from both companies, within the same data center region.  

New and powerful infrastructure options for running SAP HANA on Azure

Last year we announced the Azure M-Series Mv3 family—the next generation of memory optimized virtual machines, giving customers faster insights, more uptime, a lower total cost of ownership, and improved price-performance for running SAP HANA workloads with Azure IaaS deployments and SAP RISE on Azure. These VMs, supporting up to 32 TB of memory, are powered by the 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Azure Boost, one of Azure’s latest infrastructure innovations.  

Today, we are pleased to build on this investment and share that the Mv3 Very High Memory (up to 32TB of memory) offering is generally available for customers and the Mv3 High Memory offering (upto 16TB) is in preview.

Microsoft and SAP Signavio: Teaming up to accelerate transformation

Microsoft and SAP continue to collaborate to help customers in their journey to S/4HANA and RISE on Azure. SAP Signavio Process Insights is an integral part of SAP’s cloud-based process transformation suite and gives companies the ability to rapidly discover areas for improvement and automation within your SAP business processes. SAP Signavio Process Insights is now available on Microsoft Azure and provides ECC customers an accelerated path to S/4HANA, allowing customers to unlock the value of innovation through the Microsoft platform. 

Simplifying business collaboration with new integrations in Microsoft Teams 

Microsoft and SAP have been working together for several years enabling organizations and their employees improve productivity through collaborative experiences that combine mission critical data from SAP with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.

Today, we are excited to build on this and announce new joint capabilities with exciting updates to Microsoft Teams apps for SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and, SAP Concur:

Upcoming features in S/4HANA app for Microsoft Teams

S/4HANA Copilot plugin: Users can access S/4HANA sales details, order status, sales quotes, and more using natural language with Copilot for Microsoft 365. See a sample query below: 

Adaptive Card Loop components: Share intelligent cards in Teams and Outlook (available for pre-release users only). 

Teams search-based message extension: Users can quickly search for and insert information from S/4HANA without leaving the Teams environment.  

SAP Community search: Search SAP Community and share content with co-workers in Microsoft Teams—without having to leave the app. While chatting with a colleague or a group, click on the three dots below the text field, open the SAP S/4HANA app, and enter your search term in the popup window. From the results list, pick the topic you want to share and directly send it to your colleagues. 

Share to Microsoft Teams as Card: Communicate better with your co-workers using Microsoft Teams by providing a collaborative view that shows application content in a new window and enables you to have a meaningful conversation. 

Access S/4HANA within Microsoft 365 Home and Outlook too:

New release: SuccessFactors for Microsoft Teams

HR Task Reminders through Teams Chatbot: Receive a private message from the SuccessFactors Teams chatbot, which can help you complete HR tasks directly in Teams or guide you to SuccessFactors online for more complex workloads. 

Trigger Quick Actions through Commands: Request and provide feedback to your colleagues, manage time entries, view learning assignments and approvals, access employee and manager self-services, and much more!  

Coming soon: New SuccessFactors Dashboard in Teams tab. 

Coming soon: Concur Travel and Expense

Users will be to able to share travel itineraries and expense reports with colleagues in Microsoft Teams. This app will be released later this summer. 

Microsoft and SAP collaborate to modernize identity for SAP customers 

Earlier this year, we announced that we are collaborating with SAP to develop a solution that enables customers to migrate their identity management scenarios from SAP Identity Management (IDM) to Microsoft Entra ID. We’re excited to announce that guidance for this migration will be available soon.

Driving joint customer success 

It’s super exciting to see all the product innovation that will ultimately drive success and business outcomes for customers. Microsoft was one of the early adopters of RISE with SAP internally, and is proud to have helped thousands of customers accelerate their business transformation to RISE with SAP with the power of the Microsoft Cloud. 

Construction industry supplier Hilti Group migrated its massive SAP landscape to RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure, accelerating their continuous innovation roadmap. In parallel, it upgraded from a 12-terabyte to a 24-terabyte SAP S/4HANA ERP application and is about to shut down its on-premises datacenter to make Azure its sole platform. Hilti wanted to be one of the first adopters of the RISE with SAP offering, which brings project management, technical migration, and premium engagement services together in a single contract. The accelerated, on-demand business transformation solution was the perfect match to help evolve the company’s massive SAP landscape, which serves as the backbone of the company’s transactional business.

“RISE with SAP on Azure helped us move our experts and resources into areas where they can add the most value, which was a game-changer.” 
Dr. Christoph Baeck, Head of IT Platforms, Hilti Group

Tokyo-based steel manufacturer, JFE Steel Corporation wanted to upgrade it’s on-premises SAP systems to a hybrid cloud strategy to pursue better digital experiences. The company chose S/4 HANA Cloud private edition—which provides the SAP SaaS solution, RISE, in a private cloud environment, and Microsoft Azure was chosen as the foundation for this. They achieved the migration of their SAP system to the cloud in just seven months and are also driving further innovation with the Microsoft Power Platform. 

“We considered on-premises and various cloud services based on the three axes of quality, cost, and turnaround time. Azure was the first choice because we had confidence in its quality, and we had accumulated know-how in the company. We also actively use Microsoft Power Platform and other products, and we appreciated the high degree of affinity and integration between the products.” 
Mr. Etsuo Kasuya, JFE Systems, Inc. Tokyo Office Business Management System Development Department Accounting Group

Australian mining and metals company South32 set its goal of transitioning its more than 100 terabyte data landscape into a fit-for-purpose ERP system. South32 seamlessly completed phase one of its SAP migration to Azure, achieving consolidation and simplification of its estate and building a scalable, easy to manage system environment using SAP S/4HANA with RISE on Azure by working with SAP, Microsoft and key partner TCS. 

“Now that we’ve moved our SAP landscape to Azure, we have more breadth of coverage. Our environments are standardized, which provides our infrastructure team with much better tools to manage consumption and give us transparency around costs.” 
Stuart Munday, Group Manager, ERP, South32 

Learn more 

Microsoft and SAP are committed to continuing our partnership to serve our joint customers and enable their growth and transformation as well as unlock innovation for them in the era of AI. There are several ways you can learn more and engage with us: 

Visit us at SAP Sapphire this week: If you are at SAP Sapphire this week in Orlando or the next week in Barcelona, visit the Microsoft Booth to learn about the exciting announcements. Also, for the latest product updates from Sapphire, check out our engineering blog.   

Learn more on our website: To learn more about why the Microsoft Cloud is the leading cloud platform for SAP workloads, including RISE with SAP, visit our website. 

Read more about how customers are unlocking AI innovation and business transformation with SAP and the Microsoft Cloud. 

Migration offers and incentives: Beyond the announcements we are making today, we also offer programs, and incentives so you can make your migration decisions with confidence The Azure Migrate and Modernize offering gives you guidance, expert help, and funding to streamline your move to Azure for SAP workloads, including RISE with SAP.   

Skilling: Business leaders often share with us that skilling for their teams is top of mind so that the organization can better prepare itself for the cloud journey. We offer several online learning paths as well as instructor-led offerings so you can maximize the value of your migration to the cloud—learn more. 

The post Unlock AI innovation with new joint capabilities from Microsoft and SAP appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Announcing Advanced Container Networking Services for your Azure Kubernetes Service clusters

Following the successful open sourcing of Retina: A Cloud-Native Container Networking Observability Platform, Microsoft’s Azure Container Networking team is excited to announce a new offering called Advanced Container Networking Services. It’s a suite of services built on top of existing networking solutions for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) to address complex challenges around observability, security, and compliance. The first feature in this suite, Advanced Network Observability, is now available in Public Preview.

What is Advanced Container Networking Services?

Advanced Container Networking Services is a suite of services built to significantly enhance the operational capabilities of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. The suite is comprehensive and is designed to address the multifaceted and intricate needs of modern containerized applications. With capabilities specifically tailored for observability, security, and compliance, customers can unlock a new approach to managing container networking.

Advanced Container Networking Services focuses on delivering a seamless and integrated experience that empowers you to maintain robust security postures, ensure comprehensive compliance and gain deep insights into your network traffic and application performance. This ensures that your containerized applications are not only secure and compliant but also meet or exceed your performance and reliability goals, allowing you to confidently manage and scale your infrastructure.

What is Advanced Network Observability?

Advanced Network Observability is the inaugural feature of the Advanced Container Networking Services suite bringing the power of Hubble’s control plane to both Cilium and Non-Cilium Linux data planes. It unlocks Hubble metrics, Hubble’s command line interface (CLI) and the Hubble user interface (UI) on your AKS clusters providing deep insights into your containerized workloads. Advanced Network Observability empowers customers to precisely detect and root-cause network related issues in a Kubernetes cluster.

This capability provides network flow information in the form of metrics or flow logs at pod-level granularity by collecting data in real time from Linux Kernel leveraging extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology. Along with network traffic flows, volumetric data and dropped packets, it now brings domain name service (DNS) metrics and flow information with deep request and response insights.

eBPF based observability powered by either Cilium or Retina.

Container Network Interface (CNI) agnostic experience.

Monitor network traffic in real time to identify bottlenecks and performance issues with Hubble metrics.

Trace packet flows across your cluster to understand and debug complex networking behaviors with on-demand Hubble command line interface (CLI) network flows.

Visualize network dependencies and interactions between services to ensure optimal configuration and performance with an unmanaged Hubble UI.

Generate detailed metrics and logs to meet compliance requirements and enhance security postures.

Architecture diagram of Hubble interfacing with Cilium/Retina.

Container Network Interface (CNI) agnostic Hubble

Advanced Network Observability extends the Hubble control plane beyond Cilium. In Cilium based clusters, Cilium provides the eBPF events to Hubble. In non-Cilium based clusters, Microsoft Retina serves as the dataplane surfacing deep insights to Hubble, providing a seamless interactive experience for customers.

Visualizing Hubble metrics with Grafana

Advanced Network Observability supports two integration modes for visualization:

Azure Managed Prometheus and Grafana.

Bring your own (BYO) Prometheus and Grafana for advanced users comfortable with increased management overhead.

With the Azure-managed Prometheus and Grafana approach, Azure offers integrated services that simplify the setup and management of monitoring and visualization. Azure Monitor provides a managed instance of Prometheus, which collects and stores metrics from various sources including Hubble.

Querying network flows with Hubble CLI

With Advanced Network Observability, customers can use the Hubble command line interface (CLI) to query for all or filtered network flows across all nodes.

Customers will be able to identify dropped or forwarded flows from all nodes via a single pane of glass.

Service dependency graph with Hubble UI

Customers can deploy Hubble UI on to clusters with Advanced Network Observability enabled to visualize service dependencies. Hubble UI provides on-demand view of flows across the whole cluster and allows customers to select a given namespace and view network flows between different pods within the cluster surfacing in-depth information about each flow.

Benefits

Advanced network visibility

Advanced Network Observability offers unparalleled network visibility by providing granular insights into network traffic at the pod level. This detailed visibility enables administrators to monitor traffic flows, detect anomalies, and gain a comprehensive understanding of network behavior within their Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. By leveraging eBPF-based data collection from the Linux Kernel, Advanced Network Observability provides real-time metrics and logs that surface traffic volume, packet drops, and DNS metrics. This enhanced visibility ensures that network administrators can swiftly identify and address potential issues, thereby maintaining optimal network performance and security.

Cross node network flow tracking

With Advanced Network Observability, customers can track network flows across multiple nodes within their Kubernetes clusters. This allows precise tracing of packet flows, making it possible to understand complex networking behaviors and interactions between different nodes. Hubble CLI can query network flows enabling users to filter and analyze specific traffic patterns. This cross-node tracking capability is invaluable for debugging network issues, as it surfaces the entire network flow within a single pane of glass identifying both dropped and forwarded packets across all nodes.

Real-time performance monitoring

Advanced Network Observability provides customers real-time performance monitoring capabilities. By integrating Hubble metrics powered by either Cilium or Retina, users can monitor network traffic in real time, identifying bottlenecks and performance issues as they occur. This immediate feedback loop is critical for maintaining high-performance and ensuring that any degradation in network performance is promptly surfaced and addressed. The managed Hubble metrics and flow logs offer continuous, detailed insights into network operations, allowing for proactive management and rapid troubleshooting.

Multi-Cluster historical analysis

Advanced Network Observability coupled with Azure Managed Prometheus and Grafana extends its benefits to multi-cluster environments, providing historical analysis capabilities that are essential for long-term network management and optimization. By storing and analyzing historical data across multiple clusters, administrators can identify trends, patterns, and recurring issues that may impact network performance and reliability going forward. This historical perspective is crucial for capacity planning, performance benchmarking, and compliance reporting. The ability to review and analyze past network data helps in understanding the evolution of network performance over time and informs future network design and configuration decisions.

Learn More about Advanced Container Networking Services in Azure

Read more in the Advanced Container Networking Services documentation and try it out on your clusters today.

Learn more about Azure Kubernetes Service.

Explore Microsoft Retina to gain more insight.

Discover more about Azure Monitor.

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The post Announcing Advanced Container Networking Services for your Azure Kubernetes Service clusters appeared first on Azure Blog.
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IT trends show customers need computing power to take advantage of AI 

This is part of a larger series on the new infrastructure of the era of AI, highlighting emerging technology and trends in large-scale compute. This month, we’re sharing the Tech Pulse: March 2024 to help businesses harness the power of AI now. 

IT professionals today are focused on generative AI and its potential benefits, but one of the biggest challenges they face is securing the necessary computing power. In a recent study, Microsoft surveyed more than 2,000 IT professionals across 10 countries on their tech readiness for and adoption of AI. The report highlights their concerns and challenges along the way and is now available to help inform your business’s AI strategy. Stay ahead of the game with the latest insights from Microsoft.

Read the Tech Pulse: March 2024 study

Learn what the rise of AI means for IT professionals

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Leading the charge in AI adoption and use  

IT professionals are at the forefront of AI adoption and use, with 79% of professionals using it multiple times a week. They are positive AI will have a positive impact on their company and role, make their jobs easier, and enable them to be strategic. The positivity crosses both the professional and personal spheres.  

IT professionals’ expectations of AI

AI in the professional sphere  

68% of IT professionals surveyed have already implemented AI in their work, a testament to the field’s eagerness to embrace this cutting-edge technology. This widespread adoption is not just a trend; it reflects the strategic importance placed on AI as a tool for enhancing productivity, driving innovation, and maintaining a competitive edge in a rapidly changing digital economy. 

AI in personal lives  

The influence of AI extends beyond the confines of the workplace, with 66% of those surveyed incorporating AI into their daily routines. This integration of AI into personal life underscores the technology’s versatility and its capacity to improve efficiency and decision-making in various aspects of life. It shows that people are not being pulled along in the newest IT trend—they are ready and excited to find additional uses outside of work to enhance their own productivity. 

Rethinking their tech stack requirements  

The emergence of AI is already changing many aspects of cloud computing. Even companies that started in the cloud have questions to consider when it comes to their future cloud strategy. While IT professionals remain positive about the cloud amid the changing landscape of AI, they increasingly cite the need for changes to the infrastructure they support. 72% of respondents agreed that AI will fundamentally change their tech stacks.

Embrace the future of ai

Learn about Azure innovation insights

With AI integration and a changing tech stack, proactively addressing uncertainties and changes that impact cloud computing is crucial. This includes adapting to new security paradigms, managing evolving skill requirements for AI-driven tasks, and optimizing cloud resources amid dynamic shifts in workload patterns. Additionally, IT professionals will need to ensure compliance with emerging regulations to effectively navigate the evolving landscape of AI-optimized cloud services.

Building AI confidence

As the IT landscape rapidly evolves with the integration of AI, professionals in the field are facing a mix of emotions and questions about the future. There’s a general optimism about the potential of AI to enhance productivity and innovation, yet IT experts are also mindful of skilling requirements and the pace of technological advancement. 

IT professionals are confident in their skills and the positive changes AI can bring to their roles and organizations. A significant 78% of IT pros surveyed have AI deployed or in pilot stages within their companies, indicating a strong move towards embracing AI technologies. However, this rapid adoption comes with its own set of challenges and questions around the pace of AI evolution, costs, and governance.

As organizations continue to invest in AI, it’s now more important than ever to focus on these concerns and drive the appropriate opportunities and messaging internally. Skilling will continue to be front of mind as IT Pros grapple with the rapid changes and investments that are happening in the space. The good news is there are a lot of tools and resources to help as people start to ramp up their AI skilling.  Great places to find training are online through providers and partners, hands-on labs, and events like Microsoft Build (developers), Microsoft Ignite (all audiences), and NVIDIA GTC (developers).

Looking for AI model accuracy, increased privacy and security

IT professionals are prioritizing AI model accuracy, privacy, and security when selecting a technology partner. AI model accuracy ranks highest, followed by a commitment to privacy and security, and a strong reputation as a technology leader. 

5 most important AI provider characteristics 

Accuracy remains the key to success

The march towards AI integration in IT is marked by a meticulous search for precision and a shield of privacy and security. Alliances with the right partners can guarantee the highest degree of AI model accuracy while accelerating usage of AI. Precision is paramount, as it forms the foundation upon which reliable and effective AI solutions are built. As IT professionals continue to grapple with skilling up in an accelerated timeframe, utilizing partners help relieve some of the gaps and accelerate the timeline for organizations wanting to integrate AI as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality. 

A commitment to privacy and security  

Beyond accuracy, IT professionals demand a steadfast commitment to privacy and security. In an era where data breaches are all too common, a technology partner’s ability to protect sensitive information is a critical criterion. IT professionals understand that robust security measures are not just a feature but a necessity, ensuring that AI solutions enhance rather than endanger their operations. 

Learn more about the future of AI

Many organizations will need to make significant tech and infrastructure changes to fully leverage AI’s benefits. You can read more about our findings in the Tech Pulse: March 2024 report. To better help your teams be AI-ready, consider attending one of our events this year or reading our State of AI Infrastructure report. Whether you’re a CEO, working hand-in-hand with the infrastructure, a developer, or end user, you can see firsthand how to design infrastructure that has the necessary computing power to support all your workloads and AI solutions.

More from the series:

Tech Pulse: What the rise of AI means for IT Professionals

New infrastructure for the era of AI: Emerging technology and trends in 2024

A year in review for AI Infrastructure

The post IT trends show customers need computing power to take advantage of AI  appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Celebrating customers’ journeys to AI innovation at Microsoft Build 2024

Ever since I started at Microsoft in August 2023, I was more than excited for Microsoft Build 2024, which wrapped up last week. Why? The achievements of our customers leveraging Azure AI to drive innovation across all industries are astounding, and I’ll happily take every opportunity to showcase and celebrate them. From enhancing productivity and creativity to revolutionizing customer interactions with custom copilots, our customers demonstrate the transformative power of generative AI and truly, brought Build 2024 to life. So, how’d they do it?  

Fostering creativity and innovation 

By creating Muse Chat, a copilot for coding and documentation, Unity Technologies showcases how AI can foster creativity in the gaming industry. This tool, developed with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Content Safety, allows developers to create and perfect their own video games. At Build, Unity gave a live demo on Muse Chat during the Multimodel, Multimodal and Multiagent Innovation with Azure AI, which resulted in a video game prototype based on prompts, without typing a single line of code. Unity also provided a gaming station at our event celebration and gave out Unity trial subscriptions to developers.  

Figure 1: Live demo of Unity Muse Chat, powered on Azure OpenAI Service, to create a space-inspired video game.

Pushing the boundaries of creative expression and efficiency, WPP explores the use of video, images, and speech to accelerate content creation with Azure OpenAI Service (GPT-4 with Vision). Generative AI and multimodality are central to their innovation. Additionally, WPP is a leader when it comes to accessibility. Featured in the Day 1 keynote and the Accessibility in the era of generative AI, WPP showcased their solutions with Seeing AI. 

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The New York City Department of Education is leveraging generative AI through Azure OpenAI Service to create a specialized teaching assistant capable of providing instant feedback and addressing student inquiries. This solution is developed using the Azure platform, ensuring seamless integration and enhanced educational support. During the Build session, safeguard your copilot with Azure AI, event-goers learned how NYC built this solution and how they are keeping the experience safe for teachers and students alike. 

Figure 2: New York City Department of Education uses Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Content Safety to safeguard their educational generative AI tools.

Enhancing productivity and efficiency 

Utilizing AI Tax Assist with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio, H&R Block is helping tax professionals and filers reduce the time and effort needed to file taxes. The integration of Azure AI Search for RAG exemplifies how AI can streamline complex processes to enhance productivity. 

Featured in the Azure AI Studio—creating and scaling your custom copilots session, Sweco focused on freeing up time for more creative solutions in client projects by developing SwecoGPT using Azure AI Studio. This digital assistant automates document creation and analysis, allowing consultants to quickly find critical project information and deliver more personalized services. As a result, consultants report increased productivity and added client value.  

By leveraging the full Microsoft Azure stack, Sapiens International enhances developer creativity and streamlines the development of automated customer solutions. The use of Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure-managed databases significantly improves tasks like underwriting, claims processing, and fraud detection. 

For PwC, the creation of ChatPwC, a scalable and secure GenAI solution using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, and Azure AI Document Intelligence, has been a game-changer. This tool helps employees summarize, assess, and identify themes in client data, benefiting hundreds of thousands of employees daily. 

Transforming customer interactions 

Revolutionizing customer interactions, Vodafone introduced TOBi, a public-facing virtual assistant which efficiently handles calls and empowers agents through context-aware conversations and call transcriptions. SuperAgent, a company-wide internal conversational AI search copilot, enhances agent efficiency, helping customer journeys. 

To transform their MBUX Voice Assistant and dashcams, Mercedes-Benz integrates GPT-4 Turbo with Vision via Azure OpenAI Service. This technology enables the car to understand its surroundings and provide context for speech assistance with the ‘Hey Mercedes’ cue. In the new multimodal vision AI models and their practical applications breakout session, Mercedes showcased the power of multimodality by demonstrating the capabilities of ‘Hey Mercedes’ including the ability to add DALL-E generated images to vehicles’ dashboards by a simple voice command. 

Figure 3: Mercedes-Benz utilizes Dall-E to display an image of Olympic National park on the car’s dashboard using a simple voice command.

Offering an immersive in-car infotainment system, TomTom utilizes Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, and CosmosDB. Their Digital Cockpit demonstrates the impact of advanced technologies in creating a seamless and enriched driving environment. In the TomTom brings AI-powered, talking cars to life with Azure session at Build, staff data scientist Massimiliano Ungheretti showcased how he led the development of the Digital Cockpit.  

Detecting suspicious activity by analyzing millions of daily transactions, Kinectify uses its AI-powered anti-money laundering (AML) risk management platform. Built with Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Services, and Azure Kubernetes Service, the platform is scalable and robust. 

Elevating business operations 

Featured in the Build sophisticated custom copilots with Azure OpenAI Assistants API breakout session, Coca-Cola aims to improve the productivity of its 30,000 associates by leveraging the Assistants API with GPT-4 Turbo for KO Assist, their genAI copilot. These standardized assistants help with enhanced business intelligence, data synthesis, strategic planning, and risk management across all departments. 

Figure 4: Cola-Cola demonstrates the power of their KO Assist chatbot, powered by Azure OpenAI Assistants API.

Increasing productivity and enabling more intuitive app development, Freshworks uses Freddy Copilot to provide conversational assistance and informed insights to employees and customers. This tool is supported by the Assistants API. Freshworks showcased Freddy Copilot in Build sophisticated custom copilots with Azure OpenAI Assistants API. 

Featured in the Day 2 keynote, the fastest growing consumer experience in history, OpenAI, now offers enhanced features like GPTs for customizing ChatGPT with external knowledge and Assistants API for developers to create AI-powered assistants with scaled-up external knowledge integration using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Leveraging Azure AI Search, OpenAI API users can now upload 500 times more files, transforming it into a powerful retrieval system, solving significant present and future challenges. 

Thank you 

We are proud to celebrate the remarkable achievements of our customers at Microsoft Build 2024 and beyond. These examples underscore the transformative impact of Azure AI across various industries, showcasing how innovative solutions can revolutionize the way we act, think, and work.

As we continue to develop and support cutting-edge AI technologies, we are excited for even more groundbreaking advancements to come from our customers, driving the future of digital transformation and setting new standards for excellence. Together, we are shaping a smarter, more efficient, and more connected world.

Curious how your enterprise can unleash their potential with generative AI? With Azure, the opportunities are endless.
The post Celebrating customers’ journeys to AI innovation at Microsoft Build 2024 appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

New models added to the Phi-3 family, available on Microsoft Azure

Read more announcements from Azure at Microsoft Build 2024: New ways Azure helps you build transformational AI experiences and The new era of compute powering Azure AI solutions.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we are excited to add new models to the Phi-3 family of small, open models developed by Microsoft. We are introducing Phi-3-vision, a multimodal model that brings together language and vision capabilities. You can try Phi-3-vision today.

Phi-3-small and Phi-3-medium, announced earlier, are now available on Microsoft Azure, empowering developers with models for generative AI applications that require strong reasoning, limited compute, and latency bound scenarios. Lastly, previously available Phi-3-mini, as well as Phi-3-medium, are now also available through Azure AI’s models as a service offering, allowing users to get started quickly and easily.

The Phi-3 family

Phi-3 models are the most capable and cost-effective small language models (SLMs) available, outperforming models of the same size and next size up across a variety of language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks. They are trained using high quality training data, as explained in Tiny but mighty: The Phi-3 small language models with big potential. The availability of Phi-3 models expands the selection of high-quality models for Azure customers, offering more practical choices as they compose and build generative AI applications.

Phi-3-vision

Bringing together language and vision capabilities

Try it today

There are four models in the Phi-3 model family; each model is instruction-tuned and developed in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI, safety, and security standards to ensure it’s ready to use off-the-shelf.

Phi-3-vision is a 4.2B parameter multimodal model with language and vision capabilities.

Phi-3-mini is a 3.8B parameter language model, available in two context lengths (128K and 4K).

Phi-3-small is a 7B parameter language model, available in two context lengths (128K and 8K).

Phi-3-medium is a 14B parameter language model, available in two context lengths (128K and 4K).

Find all Phi-3 models on Azure AI and Hugging Face.

Phi-3 models have been optimized to run across a variety of hardware. Optimized variants are available with ONNX Runtime and DirectML providing developers with support across a wide range of devices and platforms including mobile and web deployments. Phi-3 models are also available as NVIDIA NIM inference microservices with a standard API interface that can be deployed anywhere and have been optimized for inference on NVIDIA GPUs and Intel accelerators.

It’s inspiring to see how developers are using Phi-3 to do incredible things—from ITC, an Indian conglomerate, which has built a copilot for Indian farmers to ask questions about their crops in their own vernacular, to the Khan Academy, who is currently leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to power their Khanmigo for teachers pilot and experimenting with Phi-3 to improve math tutoring in an affordable, scalable, and adaptable manner. Healthcare software company Epic is looking to also use Phi-3 to summarize complex patient histories more efficiently. Seth Hain, senior vice president of R&D at Epic explains, “AI is embedded directly into Epic workflows to help solve important issues like clinician burnout, staffing shortages, and organizational financial challenges. Small language models, like Phi-3, have robust yet efficient reasoning capabilities that enable us to offer high-quality generative AI at a lower cost across our applications that help with challenges like summarizing complex patient histories and responding faster to patients.”

Digital Green, used by more than 6 million farmers, is introducing video to their AI assistant, Farmer.Chat, adding to their multimodal conversational interface. “We’re excited about leveraging Phi-3 to increase the efficiency of Farmer.Chat and to enable rural communities to leverage the power of AI to uplift themselves,” said Rikin Gandhi, CEO, Digital Green.

Bringing multimodality to Phi-3

Phi-3-vision is the first multimodal model in the Phi-3 family, bringing together text and images, and the ability to reason over real-world images and extract and reason over text from images. It has also been optimized for chart and diagram understanding and can be used to generate insights and answer questions. Phi-3-vision builds on the language capabilities of the Phi-3-mini, continuing to pack strong language and image reasoning quality in a small model.

Phi-3-vision can generate insights from charts and diagrams:

Groundbreaking performance at a small size

As previously shared, Phi-3-small and Phi-3-medium outperform language models of the same size as well as those that are much larger.

Phi-3-small with only 7B parameters beats GPT-3.5T across a variety of language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks.1

The Phi-3-medium with 14B parameters continues the trend and outperforms Gemini 1.0 Pro.2

Phi-3-vision with just 4.2B parameters continues that trend and outperforms larger models such as Claude-3 Haiku and Gemini 1.0 Pro V across general visual reasoning tasks, OCR, table, and chart understanding tasks.3

All reported numbers are produced with the same pipeline to ensure that the numbers are comparable. As a result, these numbers may differ from other published numbers due to slight differences in the evaluation methodology. More details on benchmarks are provided in our technical paper.

See detailed benchmarks in the footnotes of this post.

Prioritizing safety

Phi-3 models were developed in accordance with the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard and underwent rigorous safety measurement and evaluation, red-teaming, sensitive use review, and adherence to security guidance to help ensure that these models are responsibly developed, tested, and deployed in alignment with Microsoft’s standards and best practices.

Phi-3 models are also trained using high-quality data and were further improved with safety post-training, including reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), automated testing and evaluations across dozens of harm categories, and manual red-teaming. Our approach to safety training and evaluations are detailed in our technical paper, and we outline recommended uses and limitations in the model cards.

Finally, developers using the Phi-3 model family can also take advantage of a suite of tools available in Azure AI to help them build safer and more trustworthy applications.

Choosing the right model

With the evolving landscape of available models, customers are increasingly looking to leverage multiple models in their applications depending on use case and business needs. Choosing the right model depends on the needs of a specific use case.

Small language models are designed to perform well for simpler tasks, are more accessible and easier to use for organizations with limited resources, and they can be more easily fine-tuned to meet specific needs. They are well suited for applications that need to run locally on a device, where a task doesn’t require extensive reasoning and a quick response is needed.

The choice between using Phi-3-mini, Phi-3-small, and Phi-3-medium depends on the complexity of the task and available computational resources. They can be employed across a variety of language understanding and generation tasks such as content authoring, summarization, question-answering, and sentiment analysis. Beyond traditional language tasks these models have strong reasoning and logic capabilities, making them good candidates for analytical tasks. The longer context window available across all models enables taking in and reasoning over large text content—documents, web pages, code, and more.

Phi-3-vision is great for tasks that require reasoning over image and text together. It is especially good for OCR tasks including reasoning and Q&A over extracted text, as well as chart, diagram, and table understanding tasks.

Get started today

To experience Phi-3 for yourself, start with playing with the model on Azure AI Playground. Learn more about building with and customizing Phi-3 for your scenarios using the Azure AI Studio.

Footnotes

1Table 1: Phi-3-small with only 7B parameters

2Table 2: Phi-3-medium with 14B parameters

3Table 3: Phi-3-vision with 4.2B parameters

The post New models added to the Phi-3 family, available on Microsoft Azure appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure