Microsoft Ignite 2024, held November 19-22 in Chicago, featured nearly 100 announcements and software updates, including an AI feature in Teams that can translate speech and reproduce the voice of a individual employee. This year’s main theme was expanding the synthesis and rewrite capabilities of generative AI to meet more specialized use cases.
AI translator agent can reproduce your voice in Teams
Microsoft is focusing on AI “agents” with the aim of further abstracting the functioning of large language models. Ideally for Microsoft, this would make these models more capable of autonomous and sequential actions. Microsoft Copilot Studio will soon enable autonomous agents, with this functionality now in preview. Other major agent announcements at Ignite 2024 include:
- SharePoint agents, available now, can answer questions about files, folders or sites.
- A Teams Facilitator agent, which takes notes and summarizes meetings, is now in preview.
- An Interpreter agent in Teams, capable of playing a user’s voice in up to nine languages for real-time translation, will be previewed in early 2025.
Copilot Studio will soon include images and voice content
Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry will be more closely linked, with a Microsoft Agent SDK available for both developers to create custom agents. The Agent SDK, available now in preview, can leverage Azure’s extensive catalog of AI models.
Soon, Copilot Studio users will be able to experience multimodality in the agents they create. Image downloading and analysis is now in preview, and voice is in private preview. (Private preview in Azure is available by invitation only.)
SEE: From now on Patch TuesdayCopilot PC users can remap the AI button.
Azure AI Foundry offers new features
Microsoft announced a new way to access AI in Azure AI Foundry, a hub for AI models and solutions.
Azure AI Foundry is available in preview via an SDK or online portal and interacts with GitHub and Visual Studio. Both offer slightly different options: The SDK helps application administrators and developers evaluate AI models and test applications before deploying them. The portal replaces the legacy Azure AI Studio and provides management of AI applications, models, and services.
Redmond also announced a service allowing developers to create and deploy AI agents. Azure AI Agent Service will be in preview in December.
In other Azure news:
- Azure AI will offer an AI dashboard containing “model cards, model versions, content security filter configurations, and assessment metrics.” The goal of AI reporting is to help development teams perform compliance audits and reporting.
- Image content safety and risk assessments will flag harmful AI-generated content. The aim is to help with data-driven assessments of how often such content may appear.
- Cloud professionals can now map AI adoption in the Cloud Adoption Framework. AI workload guidance has also been added to the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
- Azure AI Content Understanding, now in preview, is a streamlined workflow for transforming unstructured text, images, and video into a body of data. It brings together models, core mechanisms, and confidence scores to help developers and businesses launch AI solutions.
- Developers can run AI workloads on serverless GPUs in Azure Container Apps, which is currently in preview.
Security Exposure Management Tool Goes General Availability
In the world of security, Microsoft has introduced a new service: Security Exposure Management. This service works in conjunction with Extended Detection and Response, Microsoft Defender XDR in Microsoft Security. It provides insight into an organization’s security posture. Now available to all users, Security Exposure Management was previously only in preview.
Deploying Security Exposure Management helps gain insight into an organization’s attack surface, analyze attack paths, and aggregate security posture data into Unified Exposure Insights. This information is in turn translated into metrics to measure security initiatives.
Additionally, Security Copilot in Intune for workflow management will be expanded. Security Copilot will now be able to respond to a wider range of scenarios in Intune, the Intune suite and Windows Autopatch. Intune admins can now add iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux devices to their hardware inventory.
Microsoft has announced several similar updates for Microsoft Purview, but we won’t cover them exhaustively here. Visit Microsoft for more information on the 90+ Ignite event announcements.
Copilot+ PCs add flexibility to Windows Search
From the beginning of 2025, the search will be different in File Explorer, Windows Search and Settings. Users can search documents and photos in natural language and no internet connection is required.
Microsoft encourages business customers to show prompts to colleagues
In today’s AI infrastructure, companies tend to produce tools that facilitate the adoption of their AI products.
For example, Copilot Analytics, which is expected to expand its capabilities in early 2025, offers insights into adoption and usage trends to measure business impact. Additionally, Microsoft is gamifying AI adoption by enabling easy sharing of prompts and introducing prompt ranking. Both features will be part of the Copilot Prompt Gallery – formerly Copilot Labs. Prompt sharing will roll out with Microsoft 365 Copilot later in 2024, while an organization-wide list of “new and trending prompts” is expected in early 2025.
A new feature, Generative AI Controls in Microsoft 356 Copilot, encourages caution around generative AI. The controls will notify users if prompts or responses in Microsoft 365 Copilot contain information that could be sensitive or put an organization at risk. Administrators can configure Microsoft Purview Data Loss Protection individually to match their organization’s data sensitivity.
Is the ROI of AI achievable?
In a recent survey, Slack revealed that AI adoption might be slowing down. For what? Some people feel that the technology doesn’t live up to the hype, that using AI is considered “lazy,” or that they don’t know how to use it.
However, in a November 2024 study, Microsoft reported a 10x increase in ROI among “top” business leaders using generative AI. Most of the AI use cases Microsoft observed were focused on productivity.
TechRepublic covered Microsoft Ignite remotely.
