Explore the latest release plans for Microsoft Industry Clouds

Microsoft Industry Clouds deliver technological innovation to help organizations build resiliency and accelerate digital transformation that supports their goals. New capabilities within the 2024 release wave 1 will be available from April 1, 2024, to September 30, 2024. Release plans are published on Microsoft Learn and updated regularly as capabilities, products, and services are released. This plan covers features for:

• Microsoft Cloud for Retail
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

During this wave, we continue to invest in generative AI and copilot solutions—these solutions include customer and partner feedback across industries. Our global partner ecosystem builds and extends our first-party offerings, enabling high-value scenarios for our customers. Read on for a summary of each industry’s release plan and learn about supporting resources. 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail  

The power of generative AI is transforming the way retailers are managing their businesses, engaging customers, and how they empower frontline workers to work more effectively. Microsoft Cloud for Retail 2024 release wave 1 includes additional capabilities for our retail customers along with considerable improvements to existing in-market solutions.  

The copilot template for personalized shopping on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) enables retailers to build tailored shopping experiences that allow consumers to shop using natural language. Using a retailer’s current systems and data, this copilot template can be embedded into existing experiences—such as a website or app—making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase the products they want. With the copilot template, retailers can offer customers personalized expert advice as well as guide the shopper to find unexpected items and learn more about the retailer. 

Copilot template for store operations on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) has been updated to drive more synergy and integration with modern work frontline worker applications and address customer feedback and requests. This AI-powered copilot template offers store associates on-demand access to store operational policies and tools to learn from customer behavior. Using key data points, employees can quickly and easily make adjustments that improve shopping experiences and drive revenue. 

Lastly, with Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, retailers can plan, architect, and design data solutions for retail data governance, reporting, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. With Sitecore OrderCloud connector, retailers can bring commerce data from the connector into a standardize format and draw actionable insights. And with frequently bought together functionality, organizations can leverage insights and analytics to improve product upselling, shelf optimization, and drive operational efficiencies. 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture 

The agriculture industry is at the heart of human civilization, and as the world’s population increases, so do the demands on farmers across the globe. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture empowers customers and partners to innovate using high-quality data that is no longer siloed, providing industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to unify farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions. With new large language model (LLM) APIs, others can develop copilots that turn data into insights on yield, labor needs, harvest windows and more—bringing generative AI to life in agriculture. The 2024 release wave 1 will provide key enhancements for analytics scenarios to align with leading industry standards. Enhanced ability for data set curation, compatibility with industry leading analytics services, more powerful geospatial scenario support, and repeatable data transformation workflows all work together to provide rich new analytics and AI capabilities. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services  

Built on a foundation of intelligence, security, and compliance, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services provides a powerful and flexible platform that helps unlock business value and deepen customer relationships. Financial services organizations can rely on the broad capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud as well as industry-specific solutions from our global partners to achieve impactful business outcomes quickly. Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services optimizes internal and external business processes through integrated collaboration and omnichannel communications capabilities. It enhances the customer experience through comprehensive customer insights and personalized, intelligence-driven interactions and helps accelerate products to market, removing data silos to turn insights into action, while defending against financial crime and supporting compliance needs. The 2024 release wave 1 plans include release of Meeting Prep for Financial Services—easing the burden of data discovery and curation for investment bankers in managing customer meeting preparations.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers customers and global partners to reach their sustainability goals by providing a digital structure to help enable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence, deliver sustainable information technology (IT) systems, improve ESG performance, unlock operational efficiencies, and unlock sustainable growth. We provide a digital structure to help enable ESG data intelligence, deliver sustainable IT systems, improve ESG performance, and unlock sustainable growth. This wave 1 release reflects our commitment to expanding the depth and breadth of our offering with new and enhanced features in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, including large language model (LLM) based Q&A and qualitative summary for ESG reporting. LLMs provide efficiencies by comprehending intricate queries, extracting relevant data, and offering meaningful, actionable information. Product carbon footprint data exchange, discovery, customization and testing of custom models and factor libraries, and AI-based suggestive labelling on waste data will help organizations measure their carbon or waste to take steps on report and reduce their environmental impact. 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides capabilities to manage health data at scale and makes it easier for healthcare organizations to improve the patient experience, coordinate care, and drive operational efficiency. For the next release wave, our investments are in continuing to improve our data model, supporting additional fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) in Virtual health data tables, and updates to healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.  

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit 

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit Community Training became generally available globally in December 2023. Community Training, an Azure-powered platform, enables organizations to build equity in skilling and deliver training to communities of any size, anywhere in the world through its mobile-optimized and customizable, white-label style platform. Community Training can be used by nonprofits and community programs to empower facilitators, train communities and volunteers, and to deliver education, health, or volunteer services in the field utilizing organizational-created content, with learner tracking and assessments, all while supporting low-bandwidth functionality for offline learning. This solution is part of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, in our “deliver programs in time and at scale” narrative and will be available in both a nonprofit and a commercial version for other sectors. Additionally, Microsoft released new functionality in Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, specifically an AI-powered model called Likelihood, to donate built into Fundraising and Engagement. The AI model utilizes an organization’s donor information to support a nonprofit’s understanding of who is most likely to give to programmatic initiatives based on an array of donor characteristics—including past donations, event interactions, and more. Utilizing the model can support the development of donor segments, helping nonprofits target interactions based on their needs and donor giving patterns currently and into the future. Finally, we will be releasing the French localized version of Fundraising and Engagement allowing for greater functionality and global use. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is now generally available across all Azure regions, we’re also announcing new capabilities moving into preview. These solutions underscore our continued investment in a rapid pace of innovation to advance sovereignty in the hyperscale cloud: 

• Drift analysis capabilities: Ongoing administration and maintenance can potentially introduce changes that don’t comply with policies, resulting in the deployment beginning to drift out of compliance over time. The new drift analysis tool inspects your deployment and generates a list of non-compliant settings, as well as a severity rating, making it easier to identify any discrepancies to remediate and verify the compliance of specific environments.  
• Transparency logs: Gives eligible customers visibility into the instances where Microsoft engineers have accessed customer resources through just-in-time (JIT) access, most commonly in response to a customer support request. With this update, customers can now request access to the preview feature through the Azure portal.  
• New configuration tools in the Azure portal: Allow customers to create a new sovereign landing zone in two simple steps using a guided experience. 

Learn more 

• Stay up-to-date on the latest release plans on Microsoft Learn.
• Follow the Microsoft Industry Blog for industry-specific news.
• Read more about what’s upcoming on our Microsoft Industry Clouds documentation page.

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Note: Some of the functionalities described in this release plan have not been released. Delivery timelines may change, and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). 

For a list of the countries or regions where Dynamics 365 business applications are available, go to the International availability guide. For more information about geographic areas and datacenters (regions), go to the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform availability page. 

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog