Accelerating business transformation with industry AI and copilots

AI, the transformative technology of our time, has catapulted individuals and organizations across industries into a new era. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed its power as a catalyst for growth, innovation, and the unleashing of human potential. From enhancing business processes to redefining roles and functions, AI’s impact is front and center for our customers and partners. Organizations, regardless of their goals for growth and innovation, strive to achieve outcomes such as increase in employee productivity and wellbeing, reinvent customer experiences, reshape business functions, and bend the curve on innovation. With a global workforce of 3.5 billion,¹ from farmers to nurses, from lean-running startups to multinational conglomerates, AI can deliver high-value experiences to workers across industries and regions—all powered by the Microsoft Cloud. 

At the heart of this transformation is our global ecosystem of partners and developers who build industry solutions on the Microsoft Cloud. Organizations are only beginning to grasp the full extent of the possibilities that lie ahead to innovate and transform with AI. Microsoft and our partners are investing in industry-specific capabilities to help customers adopt revolutionary AI solutions faster like copilot templates to create AI assistants for high value scenarios and industry data solutions that provide a data and analytics foundation to ensure your data is AI ready. 

The age of copilots

Copilots, your everyday AI companion that assists with complex cognitive tasks, helps streamline operations, and enhances decision making, are becoming integral to almost every aspect of work and creativity. Powered by advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, copilots are impacting nearly every industry and business function, such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and agriculture.  

For example in healthcare, Stanford Medicine is deploying Nuance DAX™ Copilot, an AI assistant that automates clinical documentation such as visit summaries and care instructions, to reduce heavy administrative workloads that lead to physician burnout and expand access to personalized, high-quality care. In a preliminary survey of Stanford Health Care clinicians using DAX Copilot, 78% reported that it expedited clinical notetaking.  

In manufacturing, Volvo Group is using Microsoft Azure AI to streamline invoice and document processing in their customer service and finance departments, which had to process critical internal and customer-facing paperwork in various forms from emails to PDFs and written bills. By extracting data from images, like photographs and stamps, and translating documents to and from multiple languages, Volvo Group is saving more than 850 manual hours per month. 

These success stories are just the beginning. We are also collaborating with industry partners to bring the power of copilots to their workforce and their customers, including LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) in financial services, Bayer in agriculture, and Siemens in manufacturing.  

LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), one of the world’s leading providers of financial markets infrastructure with more than 45,000 customers in over 170 countries, is using AI to improve productivity with interoperable, secure, and compliant solutions that help optimize strategies and enable faster data-driven decisions in financial services. By integrating Microsoft Copilot capabilities into existing workflows, LSEG is working with Microsoft to build a new, interoperable solution to streamline meeting preparation for financial services professionals like investment bankers, built directly into Microsoft Teams. This solution makes it easier to discover data, summarize documents, and support investment bankers, making their customer interactions more efficient and informed. 

Additionally, LSEG is creating custom chatbots and copilots within its flagship LSEG Workspace platform that makes it easier to switch to Teams through seamless, end-to-end workflows, enabling interoperability with custom application environments to provide quick answers to financial queries. Capitalizing on AI, LSEG’s solutions will transform the financial services industry by improving productivity and accelerating value creation for customers. 

Bayer, a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of healthcare and agriculture, is piloting a unique generative AI solution for agriculture, trained by Bayer agronomists using proprietary Bayer product data. The solution aims to assist Bayer team members by providing quick and accurate answers and support to agronomy, farm management, and Bayer agricultural product-related questions. The system responds to natural language queries, generating concise, relevant information within seconds, a significant improvement over the traditional time-consuming process of information gathering and synthesizing. AI is quickly becoming an indispensable technology for the agriculture industry, with the potential to serve agronomists and benefit farmers globally. The collaboration with Microsoft as a leading technology partner is enabling exploration of ways to integrate this technology into Bayer’s digital offerings, with broad opportunities for collaboration with other agricultural offerings and partners. 

Siemens is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. Siemens’ Industrial Copilot is a generative AI-powered assistant designed to enhance human-machine collaboration and boost productivity in manufacturing, exemplifying the transformative solutions and sustainable growth potential of our global partner ecosystem. Siemens Industrial Copilot allows users to rapidly generate, optimize, and debug complex automation code, and significantly shorten simulation times from weeks to minutes. It ingests automation and process simulation information from Siemens’ open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator, and is enhanced with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.  

To find out more about solutions specific to your industry, please visit Microsoft AppSource.  

New copilot templates for retail and sustainability

In our ongoing effort to foster innovation, we are excited to introduce more ways to help you jumpstart your copilot journey. At Microsoft Build 2024, we announced new copilot templates for retail and sustainability. 

1. Store operations help retail frontline workers improve customer service and productivity by using natural language to query store operating procedures, processes, and policies on topics such as product returns. 

2. Sustainability insights enable users to easily obtain insights, facts, and data around their own company’s sustainability goals and progress. 

Available through Copilot Studio, these templates provide ready-made dialogs, intents, entities, prompts, and actions that can be easily customized and extended according to the user’s needs. 

Additionally, we will be adding industry-specific prompts to the Microsoft Copilot Lab. These new prompts will help customers quickly get started using Copilot for sector, job, and role-specific scenarios and can be customized with domain specific details, best practices, and industry context to reduce trial and error and ensure high-quality output. 

Fuel AI with industry data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

An AI-ready data estate is critical to the success of AI. Analyzing vast amounts of data, often unstructured or semi-structured, poses a significant challenge for any organization. Our industry data solutions built on top of the Microsoft Fabric platform provides a one-stop-shop for data integration, data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and business intelligence without compromising the privacy and security of your data. Data solutions in Microsoft Fabric provide a robust platform for customers and developers to manage all their data in one place, leverage a suite of analytics experiences that work together seamlessly, and apply AI to help make data driven decisions that address challenges unique to their industry. Some of these data solutions available in preview include:  

Healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) 

This tailored solution enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize their disparate healthcare data in a single unified store where analytics and AI workloads can operate at-scale. Leveraging the native capabilities of the platform, healthcare organizations can create connected experiences at each point of care, empower their workforce, and unlock value from clinical and operational data.  

Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) 

For retailers to truly deliver personalized experiences through generative AI for their customers, the first step is to break down data silos within their organizations and get a holistic understanding of their data estate. A unified data platform is the key to unlocking deeper, actionable insights that give retailers the ability to drive more meaningful experiences for customers. Achieving data compatibility is also a key step to getting value from AI investments, ultimately allowing retailers to optimize store operations, enhance store associates’ performance and productivity, and uncover insights for product upselling and shelf optimization. Partners like Sitecore are already connecting and building on top of the platform to further help retailers overcome data incompatibility and unlock new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Retail. 

Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview)  

The solution allows organizations to centralize and transform disparate data into standardized environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data lakes. It also enables the collection and processing of subscription and resource level emissions data. Users can connect to their data in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions to create custom environmental notebooks and build insights to better understand their carbon, water, and waste emissions. These capabilities are provided through prebuilt and preconfigured Fabric resources, that can be easily configured for your sustainability needs. 

Resources to drive innovation

To get started and learn more about our complete set of data and AI industry solutions, visit Microsoft Industry Clouds or sign-in to your account on Microsoft Cloud Solution center. 

Learn more at the Copilot learning hub, where you can discover how Microsoft Copilot can help you in your specific industry.  

Learn more about these announcements at Microsoft Build 2024

• Microsoft Build opening keynote with Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, and Rajesh Jha
• Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud
• Enabling ISVs to transform industries in the age of copilots
• Launch AI applications and get to market faster with marketplace
• Transforming the most valuable industry workflows with Copilot
• Shaping next-gen development: the future of Copilot in Power Platform
• Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next
• Build your own copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Grow your business with Copilot extensions and marketplace

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¹Number of employees worldwide from 1991 to 2024, Statista.

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog