Top 5 AI announcements at Microsoft Inspire 2023

Microsoft has made a slew of artificial intelligent (AI)-led announcements at this year’s Inspire 2023, its annual partner event, virtually hosted on July 18-19.

Some of these include a $30 pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot, expansion of Bing Chat for the enterprise, its partnership with Meta, and a $100 million investment for partners in the areas of analytics and AI. 

Here are the five key takeaways from Microsoft's AI advancements and partnerships from Inspire 2023. 

Launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing for $30 

Microsoft announced pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which the company said, will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers. 

Copilot is a generative AI assistant that sits across the company’s suite of business productivity and collaboration apps and can automate tasks and create content — including analysing Excel data, designing PowerPoint presentations, and summarising Teams meetings. 

Microsoft has said that this pricing will come into force when Copilot becomes “broadly available,” but is yet to share a timeline for when that might be. Currently, 600 global enterprise customers are signed up to its early access program. 

New Bing Chat Enterprise offers better privacy for businesses

Microsoft announced the expansion of Bing Chat, through the launch of Bing Chat Enterprise, which is a work-specific version of the company’s AI-powered chat feature that it launched in February. The offering allows users to ask questions and receive answers from GPT-4, the OpenAI Large Language Model (LLM) that Microsoft has invested heavily in since the end of 2022. 

“Since launching the new Bing in February, we’ve heard from many corporate customers who are excited to empower their organizations with powerful new AI tools but are concerned that their companies’ data will not be protected,” Frank X. Shaw - Chief Communications Officer, Microsoft, said in a blog.  

Bing Chat Enterprise comes with business-focused data privacy and governance controls. For example, it does not save any chat data or use it to train the underlying LLM model. Furthermore, Microsoft cannot view a customer’s business data and hence cannot use it to train the underlying AI models. 

Bing Chat Enterprise is rolling out in preview from today and is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium, the company said, adding that it will be available as a stand-alone offering for $5 per user, per month in the future. 

Microsoft adds sales-related AI capabilities  

Microsoft added a new generative AI assistant, dubbed Sales Copilot that is designed for sellers and can be accessed via tools including Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales. 

Microsoft Sales Copilot provides a range of productivity and support tools for CRM users. For example, the chatbots with Copilot will help sales organisations to field AI-driven chatbots with all the capabilities of services like ChatGPT, but tailored specifically for customer service, containing the unique product and service knowledge customers will need. 

Sales Copilot has been made generally available both as a stand-alone subscription and included as part of customers’ existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses at no additional cost, the company said. 

Additionally, the company said that enterprises will be able to use the Copilot inside Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in order to orchestrate contextually relevant customer data across marketing, sales, and service via natural language prompts.  

Meta and Microsoft partnership

Meta and Microsoft have announced support for the Llama family of large language models on Azure and Windows. The Meta AI model, dubbed Llama 2, will be free and available to developers building software on Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform, the companies said.  

Meta, in February, first announced its LLaMA model in February, and said it received over 100,000 requests from researchers to use its first model, but the open-source LLaMA 2 will likely have a far bigger reach because the latest version was trained on 40% more data than LLaMa 1. 

While Microsoft called Meta as a "preferred" partner, it said the model will be made available through other platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft's main cloud rival, as well as AI startup Hugging Face and others. 

$100 mn investment into partner AI innovation and more

At Inspire 2023, Microsoft announced a $100 million investment in analytics and AI to help partners incorporate AI solutions into applications, generate insights from analytics, and build custom cloud-native applications with AI capabilities. The Redmond giant further  relaunched its Microsoft Cloud Partner Programme, to Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Programme to suit the new AI-driven era. 

In a blog post, Nicole Dezen, chief partner officer at Microsoft, said the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner programme is “designed to put partners in the position to benefit from the changing and increasingly complex demands of modern customers, which presumably can only be met by leveraging AI-enabled solutions”.

It is aimed at helping partners build AI-based applications, modernize existing applications with AI, and facilitate moving services to the cloud. The programme utilizes the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives and co-selling. It will also offer partners a special AI designation that can be used in their marketing efforts to showcase their expertise in offering AI-level services.