Everything Revealed at Microsoft Ignite 2024
Hello and welcome to Ignite. You know, we continue to invest in security. You can see the updates we’re making tons and tons of announcements that you’ll hear about across the security stack. Um, the one thing though I want to point out is Purview. It’s probably the product, um, for this conference because in the age of AI, data governance takes on an even more critical, central, important. and in purview we’re introducing updates to prevent everything from oversharing risky use of AI such as malicious intent detection, prompt injections, misuse of protected materials, so there’s a lot in purview, and today I’m really excited to announce a zero day quest. Uh, this is the first big announcement that I’m excited about because. It’s a new hacking event. Uh, there will be $4 million in rewards focused on securing cloud and AI. It’s the highest rewards of any public hacking event in the industry, and the quest starts today and will culminate in an in-person hacking event next year. So we’re very, very excited about it. You know, co-pilot is the UI for AI. It’s rapidly becoming an organizing layer for work and how work gets done. Every employee will have a co-pilot. That knows them, their work, helping them unlock productivity, enhancing creativity, and saving time. And Copilo Studio will allow you to create agents that automate business processes, and every IT department will have a control system to manage, secure, and measure impact. That’s it. Those are the three basic concepts of the co-pilot ecosystem. Today I’m really excited to announce co-pilot actions. With with these actions you can use co-pilot to reduce the amount of time you spend on repetitive everyday tasks that you do. In fact, the best way to conceptualize actions is for those of you who use Outlook rules, this is Outlook rules for the age of AI. And it works across the entire M 365 system, not just in Outlook, right, so it automates everything from asking for, let’s say a status update from your team, compiling weekly reports to scheduling emails requesting feedback on a document. Actions are a very simple but yet. Powerful way for you to scale what you do, right? So whatever was the thing that you had to do multi-step, you just create one of these actions and it just does it for you. And we’re not stopping there and today we’re introducing new agents you can use within the context of your team. Again, the best way to think about these are as just your teammates. There’s scope to specific roles with very specific permissions just like, you know, we have permissions and roles. For example, a facilitator, agent is someone you can add to your team’s meeting. And the facilitator will help keep the meeting focused, moderate the meeting, chats, as well as the follow up and action items. Our project manager agent in planner will help automate in fact all the key steps in a project management workflow. It’ll create a new plan. It’ll from scratch. It’ll help oversee what’s happening across the project task assignments, content creation. And next is even self-service agents, right? So for these agents provide really useful information, answer questions and policies, but not just that when it comes to HR and IT, these agents will help you complete the task, thinking of, think of this as just augmenting your HR and IT departments. And we’re also announcing SharePoint agents. Every SharePoint site will now have a built-in agent. These agents provide instant access to real-time information and insights from your knowledge base in the flow of your work. Uh, we’re also giving you the ability to easily create your own copilot, uh, or your own agents using copilot Studio. You know, sometimes we sort of mystify these agents as things that, you know, somehow require a lot of effort to build, but it’s. Really pretty straightforward. In fact, our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide or an Excel spreadsheet. That’s it. Like when you say agent, think creating a doc. Today we are very excited to announce co-pilot analytics. Yeah. Here, if you take, let’s say a sales territory manager, uh, you see they can now correlate the specific co-pilot usage to a business metric like their win rate over time. Right, and it’s not just co-pilot, it’s co-pilot and all the agents that you’ve built, uh, you can look at their usage and start tuning even the usage, uh, to the business KPIs, right? Our goal is to show how co-pilot usage is ultimately directly translating into. Business outcomes across sales, marketing, finance, and more. Today we are announcing, in fact, Windows App is coming to Android. We’re excited about that. We’re announcing mobile application management. I know this is something that IT has wanted for a long time and it’s both to iOS and Android. This means any employee. Can work on Windows 365 even on their personal devices like this iPad, because your corporate apps and files stay secure all managed on the cloud PC. I’m really thrilled to announce Windows 365 link. You can see it right here. It’s a simple, secure, purpose-built device for Windows 365. It’s admin-less, password-less. And security configurations are enabled by default and cannot be turned off. Windows 365 link expands the PC category or the cloud PC category by connecting you directly to your productivity in the cloud with no data or information left on any device. And I’m also pleased to say that it’s going to be available in April of next. So really looking forward to it. In addition, we are excited to announce this new Windows resiliency initiative. Super important they’re doubling down on our commitment to make Windows secure and reliable for customers for all their mission critical workloads. As part of this work, we are making changes to low level operating system access. Um, we’re introducing new features in partnership with the entire ecosystem establishing new guidelines for safe deployment practices. One example of this, which is, I think, you know, something that is really exciting is Windows Hot Patch, which works across your entire Windows estate to apply critical security updates without requiring a restart. And today we’re going further and announcing Azure local. This is again something that many of you have asked us to do, which is bring, you know, Azure Ark all the way to all of the edge with Azure Local extends Azure services across hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge locations with one central control plane. It brings Azure services to customers. Distributed locations whether they’re in retail or hospitality, obviously manufacturing so that they can run their mission critical workloads, some of these new AI workloads across the cloud and edge, and I’m excited to announce our first in-house security chip, Azure integrated HSM. This is it. This It is a dedicated hardware security module that hardens key management, managing encryption and key signing that can remain within the bounds of the device without compromising performance or security. And starting next year, it will be part of every new server deployed on Azure enhancing security for both confidential computing as well as general purpose virtual machines and containers. So we are very, very excited about this new silicon innovation. Today we are very excited about expanding Azure Boost with our first in-house DPU. Um, and this is a DPUs are processors specifically architected to accelerate data centric workloads absorbing multiple components of a traditional server into a single piece of silicon. It runs in fact, cloud storage workloads at 3 times less power and 4 times the performance. I mean, what this will do for storage is what Smartniks did for hosts in the network. These are going to do for storage. And today we are announcing the preview of Nvidia Blackwale AI infrastructure on Azure. Now, you know, black hole is pretty amazing. It’s got the 72 GPUs on a single envy link domain, and then you combine it with Infinite band on the back end. These racks are optimized for the most cutting edge, uh, training workloads and you know, and infants workloads. So we are very excited about having Blackwell and today we’re introducing, in fact, Azure HPV 5 which we co-engineered. With AMD, it’s up to 8 times faster than any other cloud virtual machine setting a new standard for high performance computing, and it’ll be generally available next year. And we are very excited to announce that we are bringing our flagship operational database, SQL Server natively to Fabric with Microsoft Fabric databases. Just like fabric simplified every aspect of an organization’s analytical needs, we want to do the same for operational, uh, databases. So now with Microsoft Fabric customers have an enterprise data platform that serves all of their use cases, right, whether it’s batch data, real time or. Even massive transactional performance all in one unified product and all of that data is in open source formats in fabrics one leg, and that’s why we’re building out a first class app server for the AI age, announcing Azure AI Foundry. With Foundry we’re unifying all of our models, tooling, safety, and monitoring solutions into a single experience integrated with the most popular developer tools available as a standalone SDK and a portal. It all starts in fact with our approach to models. We know models and moral choice obviously sit at the core of every use case. You want to be able to optimize for cogs, latency and performance, and we want to help you choose that right model for the right job. In fact, we now have 1800 models in our catalog. In addition to our own offerings, we’re also announcing new collaboration to help developers accelerate this. Model customization from data prep and generation to training, eval, experimentation with fine tuned models. These are all the considerations of an app server. Our work with Gretel Labs and Scale AI helps developers remove data bottlenecks, make data AI ready for training. We’re working with Statsik to help customers configure, run these fast AB tests. Using different models, also introducing a new service to help you simplify the creation of all of these AI powered agents, right? Our new agent service helps developers build, deploy, and scale AI apps that automate business processes. Um, you know, I showed you before how you can use copilot Studio to build agents just with a few clicks, but develop as developers. You want a code first approach to building an agent, and that’s what the agent service really enables. You can build agents that are grounded in data wherever it lives, public data from the web, enterprise data in Microsoft 365, SharePoint, or you can leverage even fabrics one lake to unify your data across all of your clouds, and these agents then can take actions, right? So you want to be. able to give action space to these agents and you can take that, you know, 1200 plus connectors we have and logic apps that we have been using as in our app services and you can connect it to the agent run time. And that’s why we are very excited to share that we are bringing really new management capabilities to Foundry. For example, we’re introducing AI reports that will help developers document. Share their applications use case and most importantly eval results because I think one of the ways we’re going to be able to think about and talk about and reason about what your application does is through the evals of the models on which it’s built. Safety is the most important feature of any AI app, uh, and we’ll continue to ensure we have the best tools to build these secure AI apps including things like PrompShield and So that you can detect and block manipulation of outputs for your business content and today also we’re announcing, uh, you know, risk and safety evaluations for image content that’s become a very important consideration right in Foundry and today I’m really thrilled to announce yet another milestone this time with atom computing we just doubled the previous record creating a machine of 24 logical qubits. I mean, to just kind of put this in perspective, like these logical qubits are all entangled, making it the foundation for the world’s most powerful quantum machines and, and to give you a sense of why this matters, uh, if you add 100 of these reliable qubits, you will have scientific quantum advantage, uh, well, you know, could be achieved. And so this is then that’ll unlock, as you can imagine, the computing power to go solve some of the most pressing challenges we have.
