Accelerating Business Transformation with Industry AI and Copilot

AI is the transformative technology of our time, ushering individuals and organizations across industries into a new era. Over the past year, we have witnessed the power of AI as a catalyst to drive growth, innovation, and unlocking human potential. From enhancing business processes to redefining roles and functions, the impact of AI is at the forefront for our customers and partners. Regardless of their growth or innovation goals, organizations are looking to achieve outcomes such as increasing employee productivity and happiness, reinventing customer experiences, reimagining business functions, and accelerating innovation. With 3.5 billion employees worldwide, AI is¹ From farmers to nurses, from lean startups to multinational conglomerates, AI can deliver more valuable experiences to workers across industries and geographies — all powered by the Microsoft Cloud.

At the center of this transformation is a global ecosystem of partners and developers building industry solutions on the Microsoft Cloud. Organizations are just beginning to realize the full potential for innovation and transformation with AI. Microsoft and our partners are investing in industry-specific capabilities to help customers deploy innovative AI solutions faster, such as Copilot templates for building AI assistants for high-value scenarios and industry data solutions that provide the data and analytics foundation to ensure your data is AI-ready.

The co-pilot era

Copilots are everyday AI companions that assist with complex cognitive tasks, streamline operations, and enhance decision-making, becoming essential to nearly every aspect of work and creativity. Leveraging advances in machine learning and natural language processing, Copilots are impacting nearly every industry and business function, including healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and agriculture.

For example, in healthcare, Stanford Medicine is deploying Nuance DAX™ Copilot, an AI assistant that automates clinical documentation like consultation summaries and care orders, reducing physician burnout and administrative burdens and expanding access to personalized, high-quality care. In a preliminary survey of Stanford Health Care clinicians using DAX Copilot, 78% said it accelerated clinical note creation.

In the manufacturing industry, Volvo Group is using Microsoft Azure AI to streamline invoice and document processing in its customer service and finance departments, which had to process important internal and customer-facing paperwork in a variety of formats, from email to PDFs to invoices. By extracting data from images such as photos and stamps, and translating documents between multiple languages, Volvo Group is saving more than 850 hours of manual work each month.

These success stories are just the beginning: we also work with industry partners such as LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) in financial services, Bayer in agriculture and Siemens in manufacturing to bring the power of co-pilot to their employees and customers.

LSE London Stock Exchange Group is a leading global financial markets infrastructure provider with over 45,000 customers across more than 170 countries. The company uses AI to improve productivity with interoperable, secure and compliant solutions to help financial services optimize strategies and make faster, data-driven decisions. LSEG is working with Microsoft to build a new interoperable solution that streamlines meeting preparation for investment bankers and other financial services professionals by integrating the power of Microsoft Copilot into existing workflows. The solution is built directly into Microsoft Teams. The solution makes it easier to discover data, summarize documents and provide support to investment bankers, making client interactions more efficient and informed.

Additionally, LSEG has created custom chatbots and copilots within its flagship LSEG Workspace platform to ease the switch to Teams through seamless end-to-end workflows and enable interoperability with its custom application environment to quickly answer financial queries. LSEG's AI-powered solutions are transforming the financial services industry by improving productivity and accelerating value creation for customers.

BayerBayer, a global company with core business in the life sciences sectors of healthcare and agriculture, is piloting a unique generative AI solution for agriculture, trained by Bayer agronomists using proprietary Bayer product data. The solution is designed to empower Bayer team members by quickly and accurately answering and supporting their questions about agronomy, farm management and Bayer agricultural products. The system responds to natural language queries and generates concise, relevant information within seconds, a significant improvement over the traditionally time-consuming process of information collection and synthesis. AI is fast becoming an essential technology for the agriculture industry, with the potential to help agronomists and benefit farmers around the world. Collaboration with Microsoft, a key technology partner, will enable exploration of how to integrate the technology into Bayer's digital products and will open up broad opportunities for collaboration with other agriculture products and partners.

Siemens is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transportation and healthcare. Siemens Industrial Copilot is a generative AI-powered assistant designed to enhance human-machine collaboration and increase manufacturing productivity, embodying the transformative solutions and sustainable growth potential of our global partner ecosystem. Siemens Industrial Copilot enables companies to rapidly generate, optimize and debug complex automation code and drastically reduce simulation time from weeks to minutes. It captures automation and process simulation information from Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens' open digital business platform, and is powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.

For more information about industry-specific solutions, visit Microsoft AppSource.

New Copilot Template for Retail and Sustainability

As part of our ongoing efforts to foster innovation, we’re excited to share even more ways to kickstart your Copilot journey. At Microsoft Build 2024, we announced new Copilot templates for retail and sustainability.

1. Store operations Empower retail frontline associates to use natural language to query store procedures, processes, and policies like merchandise returns to improve customer service and productivity.

2. Sustainability Insights Give users easy access to insights, facts and data about their company's sustainability goals and progress.

Available through Copilot Studio, these templates provide ready-to-use dialogs, intents, entities, prompts, and actions that can be easily customized and extended based on your needs.

Additionally, we are adding industry-specific prompts to the Microsoft Copilot Lab. These new prompts enable customers to quickly get started with Copilot in sector-, job-, and role-specific scenarios, and can be customized with domain-specific details, best practices, and industry context, reducing trial and error and ensuring high-quality output.

Powering AI with industry data solutions from Microsoft Fabric

An AI-ready data estate is critical for AI success. Analyzing vast amounts of data, which is often unstructured or semi-structured, poses a significant challenge for any organization. Built on the Microsoft Fabric platform, our industry data solutions provide a one-stop shop for data integration, data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and business intelligence without compromising data privacy and security. Microsoft Fabric data solutions provide a robust platform for customers and developers to manage all their data in one place, leverage a set of analytics experiences that work together seamlessly, and apply AI to make data-driven decisions that address industry-specific challenges. These data solutions available in preview include:

Microsoft Fabric healthcare data solutions (preview)

This customized solution enables healthcare organizations to break down data silos and harmonize disparate medical data in a single, unified store that can operationalize analytics and AI workloads at scale. By leveraging the platform's native capabilities, healthcare organizations can create connected experiences at each point of care, empower employees, and derive value from clinical and operational data.

Microsoft Fabric Retail Data Solutions (Preview)

For retailers to deliver truly personalized experiences to customers through generative AI, they must first break down data silos within their organizations and understand their data assets holistically. A unified data platform is key to unlock deeper, actionable insights that help retailers deliver more meaningful experiences for their customers. Achieving data compatibility is also a critical step in unlocking value from AI investments. This will ultimately enable retailers to optimize store operations, improve store associate performance and productivity, and unlock insights for product upselling and shelf optimization. Partners like Sitecore are already connecting and building on their platforms to help retailers overcome data incompatibility and take advantage of the new capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Microsoft Fabric Sustainability Data Solutions (Preview)

The solution enables organizations to centralize and transform disparate data into a standardized Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data lake. It also enables collection and processing of subscription and resource level emissions data. Users can connect to data from the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution to create custom environmental notebooks and build insights to better understand carbon, water, and waste emissions. These capabilities are delivered through pre-built and configured Fabric resources that can be easily configured to meet your sustainability needs.

Resources that drive innovation

To get started and learn more about our complete set of Data and AI industry solutions, visit Microsoft Industry Clouds or sign in to your account at the Microsoft Cloud Solution Center.

Learn more at the Copilot learning hub, where you can discover how Microsoft Copilot can help you in your specific industry.

To learn more about these announcements, visit Microsoft Build 2024.

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¹Number of employees worldwide from 1991 to 2024, Statista.