Microsoft ‘igniting’ innovations for businesses to “do more with less”

• Microsoft introduced new products and features at Microsoft Ignite that’ll benefit businesses, consumers, partners, and developers
• Moving to the cloud is the best approach to coordinating IT investments

Organizations across all industries are turning to their technology providers to help them succeed while everyone goes through this momentum-shifting period of economic, social, and technological change. In essence, that is what Microsoft aims to “do more with less” for customers of various businesses.

“You are the change agents who make doing more with less possible – less time, less cost, less complexity, with more innovation, more agility and more resilience. Doing more with less doesn’t mean working harder or longer,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO at Microsoft. “It’s not going to scale. It means applying technology to amplify what you can do, and, ultimately, what an organization can achieve amidst today’s constraints.”

In light of the fact that businesses want to alter their working practices to produce better outcomes with less friction and more choice at this year’s Microsoft Ignite, the company will be emphasizing how Microsoft Cloud is helping customers do more with less.

Microsoft Ignite showcased the finest of what’s coming up for Microsoft and its partners, technical decision-makers, and information technology implementers. The new products and improvements announced at Microsoft Ignite are intended to help users, partners, and developers realize the full potential of Microsoft’s technology.

According to Nadella, moving to the cloud is the best approach to coordinate your IT investments to expand with demand and enable you to accomplish more with fewer resources.

“We see this clearly in our data. Moving to Azure enables cost and operational efficiencies, and we want to help you leverage these savings to accelerate your own innovation,” he said. “Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads, from enterprises to startups, to highly regulated industries.”

Harnessing AI to its full potential

Artificial intelligence is the ultimate business resource amplifier. It’s going to change what an application looks like, what the design language of an application is and how it gets built, and how it gets delivered.

One of the massive things Microsoft have been doing is their work with OpenAI. They have trained the GPT family of AI models for human-like language generation, DALL-E for realistic image generation and editing, and Codex for code generation in more than a dozen programming languages.

Microsoft is integrating these developments into their first-party services, such as Microsoft Designer, a new AI-powered personal design generator. And the company is bringing the power of DALL-E 2 to Designer, too.

“We’re bringing the power of DALL-E 2 in Designer, not just for our own app, but also to our new Image Creator tool in Bing and Edge. For years, we’ve been limited to searching for images that are already existing on the web. Soon, you will be able to turn your own words into images you want to see,” said Nadella.

This helps a small business, for instance, that has to produce images and content for social media posts, invitations, graphics, and other things. Users can generate custom-made graphics based on their ideas by simply typing a few key words in Designer, which will instantly build templates for them depending on what they type.

Microsoft helps businesses thrive in the new world of work

The way people work has changed in an unprecedented way. There is less emphasis on a ‘come to work every day’ policy. More people are working from different locations, including their homes, coffee shops and offices, yet leaders are still concerned that their employees are not getting the job done.

Microsoft Places, a new workplace app that maximizes the utilization of physical space, was unveiled at Microsoft Ignite. Places provides information about when co-workers will arrive at the office, or what meetings should be held in person.

Additionally, there is an intelligent recap function which serves as a virtual assistant during each meeting. AI will be used to assign tasks from meetings, produce meeting chapters automatically, give individualized meeting recording insights, and much more.

Microsoft also continues to invest in unique experiences that facilitate the workplace with Microsoft Edge. Microsoft Edge Workspaces is a brand-new experience that lets everyone working on a project view the same collection of webpages, online apps, and files in one location to stay in sync.

“It’s about making web browsing multiplayer. Instead of sending links over e-mail or chat, you can open an Edge Workspace and access a shared set of tabs,” Nadella concluded.

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