Microsoft’s Copilot tunes could be music to CIOs’ ears

The updates announced at Microsoft’s Build annual developer conference are likely to help CIOs tackle priorities such as boosting productivity, retaining talent, and optimizing IT expenditure.

If anyone used OpenAI’s GPT-4o to summarize the announcements from Build for CIOs in the form of a music playlist, just like it was used to tell a story in a sing-song manner during its showcase earlier this month, it could hit a home run with the C-suite leaders who nearly always have to do more with less.

At least that’s what analysts say.

The news coming out of the annual conference from Seattle this week was summarized by Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella at the beginning of his keynote address on Tuesday, wherein he said the company was focusing on three platforms — Copilot, Copilot Stack, and Copilot+ PCs.

During his 53-minute keynote, Nadella showcased updates around most of the company’s offerings, including new large language models (LLMs), updates to Azure AI Studio, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Fabric, databases offerings, infrastructure, Power Platform, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft 365 among others.

“CIOs, nearly always, must focus on doing more with less, delivering innovation and digital capability to enable topline growth while constraining operating expenses,” Ritu Jyoti, group vice president of research at IDC, said while trying to explain the takeaways for CIOs from the developer-focused conference.

While the cost of offerings, lack of skills inhibiting scale and innovation, extensibility of off-the-shelf generative AI services, and maturity of data ecosystem continue to be critical barriers or worries for CIOs in 2024, they are also burdened with turning generative AI into tangible business value and at the same time boost productivity without risking over expenditure and keeping vacancies filled, Jyoti explained.

Addressing lack of skills and extensibility

The updates to Azure AI and its component Azure AI Studio, which are now generally available, address the lack of skills and extensibility requirements “seamlessly,” Jyoti said, adding that these updates act as a differentiator for Microsoft in areas, such as pace of innovation and composability requirements.

“Azure AI Studio is a key component. The pro-code platform empowers responsible generative AI development, including the development of copilots, to support complex applications and tasks like content generation, data analysis, project management, automation of routine tasks, and more,” Jyoti said.

“Developers can use Azure AI Studio to explore the latest AI tools, orchestrate multiple interoperating APIs and models, ground models on their protected data, test and evaluate their AI innovations for performance and safety, and deploy at scale and with continuous monitoring in production,” Jyoti added.

Microsoft is also taking a dual development approach by including a friendlier approach with enhancing low-code capabilities in Copilot Studio to enhance business users and accelerate citizen development.

During the keynote, Nadella said it would be adding agent-building capabilities within Copilot Studio. In addition, Microsoft would be adding copilot connectors to Copilot Studio in order to simplify how developers connect their business and collaboration data to their copilots. These connectors include over 1,400 Microsoft Power Platform connectors, Microsoft Graph connectors, and Power Query connectors.

Boosting productivity across the enterprise

The enhancements made to the Copilot stack along with other updates would help CIOs boost productivity and help deliver innovation while keeping expenses in check.

“Microsoft is now doing most of the heavy lifting across its product line to embed the latest new AI features — mostly branded as Copilots — into their products, such as in Dynamics 365, Viva, and Power BI,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, practice lead at The Futurum Research.

These capabilities not only boost productivity but provide CIOs a feeling of comfort that Microsoft is doing the fundamental work to make Azure, and its 365 suite AI-ready.

“AI readiness and enterprise support for generative AI across their product lines was the primary takeaway they wanted IT leaders to come away with. The updates, including rich off-the-shelf capabilities, ensure that CIOs can avoid the extensive investments and uncertainty in trying to AI-enable their Microsoft platforms and products, which are often core to the business, on their own,” Hinchcliffe explained.

One of the many updates introduced to the Microsoft 365 suite includes introducing Microsoft’s 365 Copilot, which has mainly been positioned as a personal assistant for individual workers, as a Copilot for Teams to make generative AI assistant accessible in group settings, helping enable video meetings and coordinating team projects.

Speaking about this update, West Monroe’s senior partner for product experience Erik Brown said that CIOs should take advantage of AI capabilities being integrated into enterprise productivity and collaboration suites, allowing workers to spend less time on mundane tasks, e.g. summarizing notes, prepping for upcoming meetings, validating project plans.

Addressing cost and retaining talent

While most of the updates try to optimize IT expenditure for enterprises in one way or the other, the updates from Build also focus on trying to optimize expenditure on infrastructure by offering better models, energy-efficient chips, and other updates, analysts said.

“The availability of Phi-3 models small language models (SLMs) expands the selection of high-quality models for Azure customers, offering more practical choices as they compose and build generative AI applications,” IDC’s Jyoti said.

Other updates that make it easy to train and infer LLMs include plans to release Azure VMs that can run on Cobalt 100 processors along with the general availability of AMD’s ND MI300X series of processors.

To further reign in cost, Microsoft has not only released a new provisioning service to meet various compute requirements but is also planning to open up its Copilot in Azure to help enterprise teams manage cloud and edge operations in natural language.

Microsoft is also paying attention to developer tools and is trying to transform the development experience, which in turn could help CIOs retain talent, analysts said.

“Microsoft is fundamentally changing the way software gets built and consumed in the enterprise. Rather than create static, monolithic user experiences that attempt to anticipate user requirements through pull-down menus and button bars, Microsoft and others are plying generative AI as an interface unto itself, one that simply fronts a rich back-end API, delivering whatever a user can think of without having to wait for the next software version,” said Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst at Omdia.

However, he also pointed out that it might take some time for the technology to reach a point of maturity where the enterprise can place full trust in this new form of “software”. Some of the updates to developers’ tools include enhancements to GitHub Copilot, Power Platform, Microsoft Fabric, CosmosDB, and Azure AI.