Microsoft Inspire 2023 is over and we got many interesting news and announcements. AI was the number one topic (as expected), but it doesn’t mean that others were less important or boring. Let’s go for a quick walk through the most important announcements.
Copilot pricing
News number 1 – how much money do you need to use Microsoft 365 Copilot? It will be available for commercial customers for 30 USD per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers. Is it expensive? It depends on the use cases. If it speeds up your common tasks and gives you more time for more valuable ones – then yes. If you want to use it once a month – it’s not for you.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will leverage the GPT language model, and the data stored in your tenant to help you on your everyday tasks. It will summarize your meetings, generate sales reports, create marketing presentation templates, and much more.
Copilot is only available for 600 enterprise customers as a paid Early Access Program, and we need to wait to discover all its features. Global Availability data hasn’t been announced so we must be patient.
Copilots in Teams
Copilot in Teams Phone gives you AI capabilities during Teams phone calls. You can use it to summarize a phone call, get the most important details from the call, and generate a follow-up e-mail or a note. All are available from the Team phone call window. Copilot in Teams Phone is now available to customers participating in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program.
Copilot in Teams chat – this feature was mentioned a few months ago but now we have more details. You will use it to summarize chat threads, organize key discussion points, extract information, etc. Could be helpful if you need to work with a large discussion thread. Copilot in Teams chat is now available to customers participating in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program.
Bing Chat Enterprise
Microsoft released Bing Chat in February 2023 and offered a chat powered by the OpenAI GPT model. The enterprise version is an enhanced and secured version of that chat and is available for businesses (for users with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium licenses).
Security is the number one feature of Bing Chat Enterprise. Microsoft protects all your data and does not track anything that you type. All prompts are anonymized before they go to the OpenAI engine. Moreover, your data is not used to train the language model.
The chat doesn’t have access to your company data – anything that you or your users store in Microsoft 365 is not accessible by the chat. All your documents, Teams chat history, emails, and attachments are protected.
Plugins are also not supported by the chat to protect your data and prompts. Chat history is disabled so you can’t access your previous prompts.
Bing Chat Enterprise will be available for licensed users in mid-August 2023, but you can enable it right now using this Microsoft guide – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/bing-chat-enterprise/manage.
Process Mining in Power Automate
The process mining capability in Power Automate was initially introduced in November 2022 as the public preview feature. It’s going to become publicly generally available on August 1, 2023.
Process mining is a research area and technology that helps businesses understand their real processes, and how they’re operated, and identify opportunities for improvement, automation, and digitization. It is gaining more attention in business. You can use it to discover all real processes in your organization even if they’re informal and are not mapped in any tool. You can also use existing business tools to identify bottlenecks and unnecessary steps, and then optimize processes.
This announcement is a huge step for Power Automate. It’s not only about Flows and automation, now it can be used in enterprise processes!
Meta and Microsoft partnership
Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family of large language models on Azure and Windows. Llama 2 is designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences. Now Azure customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models on Azure.
This is really interesting news. It opens a lot more options for more complex scenarios and gives you more choices when designing and deploying AI on Azure.
Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive
Microsoft 365 Backup provides recovery of your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange data while keeping it all within the Microsoft 365 security boundary. You can configure it directly from the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Main features:
• Backup all or select SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes
• Restore files, sites, and mailbox items in your tenant in parallel to a prior point in time in a granular manner or at a massive scale.
• Search or filter content in your backups using key metadata such as item or site names, owners, or event types within specific restore point date ranges.
Microsoft 365 Archive gives you a cold data storage tier that enables you to keep inactive data within SharePoint. Main features:
• Select and archive or reactivate full sites in place without
• Maintain full admin-level search, eDiscovery, access policy, sensitivity label, Data Loss Prevention, retention policy, access control settings, and other security and compliance functionality
• Gain additional de-cluttering experiences and site lifecycle control capabilities.
Those 2 features look great – no more 3rd party tools and complex scenarios to keep your data secure. All options will be available directly from the M365 admin center and all data will be stored inside Microsoft datacenters. It will be FAST! We need to wait for more information and prices.
Check the full list of announcements from the Inspire 2023 conference – https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/microsoft-inspire-accelerating-ai-transformation-through-partnership/.
