At the annual Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft showcased its new technology being introduced in the new year. As expected, like many other technology vendors, Microsoft’s upcoming changes and continued focus is on AI, specifically its Copilot product, which now makes an appearance in practically every element of its products.
We’ve highlighted our top 5 highlights from the conference:
1. Easier AI app building
Among the expected general enhancements across Copilot for Microsoft 365, there were some big changes to open up Microsoft’s AI capabilities to developers, making it easier for even the most novice developer to break into building AI applications. Or importantly, for every software vendor out there, the ability to create AI capabilities into existing software products incredibly easily, using the hugely popular ChatGPT model under the hood. If they haven’t already, we expect to see more and more software vendors incorporating AI chat capabilities, powered by Microsoft’s AI platform, into their software.
2. Accelerator tools
Another huge and important set of changes are, just like for developers, Microsoft is providing accelerator tools to build custom Copilots/ChatGPT’s that anyone can create in their business. The creation of this is akin to building a website, which these days is fairly easy and intuitive. By creating these custom Copilots, feeding specific work documents, data and websites, it is possible to create an AI that can act as a knowledge agent, answering questions about a specific topic in your business, based on your data.
3. Microsoft 365 Actions
Natural language automation, whereby someone is guided through to a prompt to create an automation, took a big step forward with “Microsoft 365 Actions”. Whilst this technically didn’t hit Microsoft Ignite (it was released not long after), but one that is incredibly exciting. AI + automation, whilst already present to some degree, is getting closer and closer to ubiquity in the everyday person's toolbox, much like Outlook is now. What has been demonstrated is that automation has the potential to mainstream and doesn’t require any prerequisite skills, just being able to describe what it is you want to achieve (within reason, and limited to automations within Microsoft 365).
4. Recall capability changes
There are going to be changes to the recall capability, where your screen could effectively be recorded with AI layered on top of it allowing you to search for that “thing” you did previously but could only loosely remember. When the recall capability was previewed earlier in the year, it caused an incredible stir with critics rightly calling out privacy concerns. Well, that feature is now disabled by default, is opt-in only, and is only available to new machines with specific hardware that ensures that this all happens on your individual device.
5. Update on preventing another CrowdStrike scenario
What was an interesting but welcome appearance, providing a short break from AI, was Microsoft’s latest actions to address any future occurrence of the CrowdStrike issue that affected the world earlier in the year, where approx. 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide were disabled by a faulty update. As we’ve previously written about, there was never going to be a particularly easy solution to this, and Microsoft has settled on providing a way to recover machines should the exact same scenario happen again. Ultimately a third party caused the issue and it appears those companies are committed to controlled rollouts of updates.
The future of AI is not slowing down
As 2024 comes to a close, what we at Lanware are seeing is a move from generic AIs, like Copilot, to a focus on AIs that are built and customised specifically to an organisation and people’s roles so making them more useful. This is the next evolution in AI that may bring it closer to being integrated into the everyday worker's workflow. Microsoft continues to be an extremely strong player, well positioned with its existing technology and not relenting on its pace of change to keep up with the fast developments in this field.
The theme of 2025 is and will likely remain for the foreseeable, AI.
