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Microsoft and OpenAI expand association

by Monsurat Omobusayo on May 24, 2023

With an investment of several years and billions of dollars, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term relationship with OpenAI in order to hasten the development of AI and ensure that its advantages are widely available to all people.

This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.

Supercomputing at scale – Microsoft will increase our investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. We will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale.
New AI-powered experiences – Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology. This includes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which empowers developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models backed by Azure’s trusted, enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools.
Exclusive cloud provider – As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”

“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”

Since 2016, Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, serving as the foundation of our vision to democratize AI as a platform. Through our initial investment and collaboration, Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology, announcing our first top-5 supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently constructing multiple AI supercomputing systems at massive scale. OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its breakthrough models, which are now deployed in Azure to power category-defining AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT.

These innovations have captured imaginations and introduced large-scale AI as a powerful, general-purpose technology platform that we believe will create transformative impact at the magnitude of the personal computer, the internet, mobile devices and the cloud.

Underpinning all of our efforts is Microsoft and OpenAI’s shared commitment to building AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe. OpenAI’s leading research on AI Alignment and Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard not only establish a leading and advancing framework for the safe deployment of our own AI technologies, but will also help guide the industry toward more responsible outcomes.

Making healthcare history with the next stage of AI

by Monsurat Omobusayo on May 24, 2023

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Since the advent of modern medicine, the arc of innovation has brought about previously unthinkable discoveries and cures that have increased lifespans and improved health outcomes. The way that enterprises approach patient engagement, care team cooperation, and the provider experience are being redefined by digital transformation in the modern day. Technology has provided healthcare practitioners with solutions that enable higher efficiency and, most importantly, increase the quality of treatment offered to patients. These solutions range from better access to patient data through electronic health records (EHR) to improved access to healthcare through telemedicine.

But there is an opportunity to do more. The healthcare industry still faces challenges that technology can play a vital role in addressing. Next-generation AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by empowering clinicians to focus on personalized patient connections – strengthening the human interaction in medicine, reducing costs, and easing the administrative and cognitive burdens providers face. This is the reason that Microsoft and Nuance joined forces in 2022.

Today we are introducing a new solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX™) Express, which represents the next breakthrough for healthcare and a major milestone in our journey to automate clinical documentation at scale. DAX Express is an automated clinical documentation application integrated into the workflow that is the first to combine proven conversational and ambient AI with the advanced reasoning and natural language capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4. Extending the proven Dragon Medical portfolio of solutions and building on the market-leading DAX ambient solution launched in 2020, DAX Express is the next milestone in Nuance’s long-standing mission to reduce administrative burden and empower clinicians to spend more time taking care of patients and less time on paperwork.

AI solutions at work in healthcare today
Physicians and nurses have been overwhelmed by the administrative demands that come with providing high-quality care. They must navigate complicated coding and billing requirements, manage the cognitive burden to accurately record and recall increasing amounts of patient data, and treat an aging and growing population. As a result, many organizations, including the U.S. Surgeon General and professional medical associations, are urging the development of comprehensive, secure solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into clinical workflows to reduce clinician burnout.

DAX Express tackles this head-on, with advanced automated clinical documentation seamlessly integrated in physicians’ workflows. It’s another proof point of how Microsoft and Nuance’s solutions, backed by industry-defining AI and amplified by the power of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, are reshaping care delivery with measurable and growing outcomes:

Relieving workforce burnout – Our solutions are proven to lead the industry in addressing this seemingly intractable problem – with physicians reporting up to 70% reduction in feelings of burnout and fatigue.
Supporting specialty workflows – From surgeons to radiologists, our solutions analyze vast amounts of patient data, deliver workflow automation, facilitate reporting and communication, and provide AI insights that support more informed decision-making, planning and treatment—improving radiologist efficiency by 50% and reducing time-to-intervention by 74%.
Improving adherence – By analyzing data to uncover findings, simplifying patient and physician communication, and providing comprehensive care plan tracking, our solutions deliver a 52% improvement in follow-up adherence.
Increasing access to care – Our automated clinical documentation solutions give back time to clinicians who often choose to see more patients, adding five appointments per average clinic day – enabling clinicians to provide their best care to more people.
Enhancing patient engagement – AI-powered chatbots are just one example of how AI is providing patients with quick and accessible information using built-in medical knowledge bases and triage protocols, which can trigger seamless handoff from bot interaction to a doctor, nurse or support agent. And, by delivering consistent and contextually relevant patient experiences, healthcare organizations are realizing 30% increases in patient self-service rates and 50% reductions in patient support costs.

Shared mission and complementary capabilities in healthcare
Microsoft and Nuance came together with a shared vision to reshape healthcare: leveraging our unique capabilities to solve the industry’s biggest challenges and equip the entire ecosystem to achieve more. At our core, we believe that technologies like AI, in partnership with clinicians, play a key role in accelerating progress in the industry, making physician and patient experiences more personal and engaging, and helping increase access to care. Our North Star is empowering clinicians to return their focus to patient care – using our proven solutions, combined with their judgment, to reduce cognitive burdens and support better outcomes.

Microsoft and Nuance have for years been ahead of the curve in innovating AI solutions, and organizations large and small have long trusted our responsible, secure applications and infrastructure. Microsoft’s years of strategic investments in research, cloud and AI – including the acquisition of Nuance – have led us to where we are today. Through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft is providing responsible, integrated AI capabilities at scale that make it easier to improve the entire healthcare experience. Microsoft is also driving research, incubations and moonshots that drive real-world impact across healthcare and the life sciences. For example, Microsoft Research partners with leading organizations to advance and build infrastructure for emerging precision health modalities and empowers scientists with AI to speed up the discovery and development of breakthrough medicines. And we’re empowering health organizations to tackle some of the toughest challenges in global health with our AI for Health philanthropic program.

Similarly, Nuance has decades of experience developing healthcare solutions used by hundreds of thousands of practitioners that are proven to consistently deliver value for physicians, nurses, radiologists and patients. Nuance has long been at the forefront of innovating conversational and ambient AI in healthcare – most notably with Dragon Medical One and most recently with DAX – and for years has leveraged expertise in large language models, natural language processing and clinical workflows to deliver refined, trusted AI solutions for clinical documentation around the globe. With this new innovation, the Nuance healthcare portfolio gives customers even more flexibility to automate and enhance their clinical documentation workflows with the accuracy and reliability of Dragon Medical One, the customized, full-service experience of DAX, and the immediacy and speed of DAX Express. Together, we are combining the power of Microsoft Azure, a deeply rich health data platform, and robust engineering and AI expertise to deliver outcomes-focused healthcare applications at scale to improve provider and patient experiences.

DAX Express represents the next step in delivering AI technology that provides an immediate, practical and highly accessible entry point for healthcare organizations to adopt at scale a new generation of AI-powered solutions, leveraging their existing investments in trusted Nuance solutions. For the more than 550,000 Dragon Medical users, DAX Express automatically and securely creates draft clinical notes in seconds, available immediately for clinical review and completion, after each patient visit in the exam room or via telehealth patient conversations. Clinicians will benefit from the seamless capabilities of Dragon Medical One, DAX Express, and DAX, which are tightly integrated into the electronic medical record, beginning from pre-visit through post-encounter, reducing cognitive burdens and helping increase the joy of medicine.

Responsible AI in healthcare
DAX Express is developed in alignment with Microsoft’s responsible AI standards, and consistent with our long-standing commitment to data security and privacy, helping to ensure AI systems and solutions that are trustworthy and safe. Microsoft and Nuance believe that while AI in healthcare has the potential to make a lasting, positive impact on the industry and the patients it serves, it is imperative we ensure the technology is used responsibly and transparently. As we have for years, we will continue to work closely with healthcare providers and the broader industry to help ensure AI is used in a way that is ethical and transparent.

Microsoft and Nuance are uniquely positioned to amplify the healthcare industry’s ability to deliver meaningful outcomes with the power of AI. We are proud to be at the cutting edge of healthcare innovation, and we look forward to continuing to help the industry solve healthcare’s biggest challenges

Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365. Copilot, the first copilot in both CRM and ERP in the world, introduces next-generation AI to every business sector.

by Monsurat Omobusayo on May 24, 2023

The introduction of the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, which offers interactive, AI-powered support across business tasks, is among the enhancements we’re announcing today for our portfolio of business products.

Nearly 9 out of 10 workers, according to our most recent poll on business trends, expect AI to eliminate repetitive chores from their professions. Organizations may equip their staff with AI solutions designed for sales, service, marketing, operational, and supply chain roles with the help of Dynamics 365 Copilot. Everyone can spend more time on the most rewarding aspects of their professions and less time on tedious ones thanks to these AI skills.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have long been mission-critical customer and business data sources; however, they frequently require burdensome tasks like manual data entry, content generation and notetaking. Dynamics 365 Copilot takes advantage of recent advancements in generative AI to automate these tedious tasks and unlock the full creativity of the workforce. Dynamics 365 Copilot puts CRM and ERP to work for business users to accelerate their pace of innovation and improve business outcomes in every line of business:

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales helps sellers dramatically reduce the time they spend on clerical tasks. AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, as well as insights from the recorded Teams call. With sellers spending as much as 66% of their day checking and responding to emails, this presents a significant business upside to give the seller more time with their customers.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers agents to deliver exceptional customer care. Dynamics 365 Copilot drafts contextual answers to queries in both chat and email, in addition to providing an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history so this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions. We’re also making it easier for customer service departments to build virtual agents in minutes with conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents, which harnesses the power of Azure OpenAI Service and Bing to provide answers from company websites and internal knowledge bases that you choose.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing empowers marketers to simplify their workflow in data exploration, audience segmentation and content creation.
- With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marketers can curate highly personalized and targeted customer segments by having a dialogue with their customer data platform using natural language. Marketers can receive suggestions about additional segments that may not have been previously considered. This new capability can handle complex calculations and match customers that fit a select profile.
- Using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can describe their customer segment in their own words to create a target segment with the query assist feature. Marketers can also use Dynamics 365 Copilot to effortlessly get inspiration for fresh email campaign content based on a simple request. Copilot makes suggestions based on key topics entered by the marketer, the organization’s existing marketing emails, as well as from a range of internet sources to increase the relevance of generated ideas.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central streamlines the creation of product listings for online commerce. Product attributes such as color, material and size can be used to create compelling product descriptions for online storefronts in seconds. The descriptions can be further tailored by choosing tone of voice, format and length. Business Central customers using Shopify can seamlessly publish the products with descriptions to their Shopify store in just a few clicks.
Lastly, Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers can access, will proactively flag external issues such as weather, financials and geography that may impact key supply chain processes. Predictive insights then surface impacted orders across materials, inventory, carrier, distribution network and more. Supply chain planners can then automatically draft an email generated by Dynamics 365 Copilot to alert impacted partners and mitigate potential disruptions before they happen.

The next era of business applications is being transformed by generative AI. Users will increasingly expect their CRM and ERP applications to include AI-powered expertise. Dynamics 365 Copilot brings the latest AI breakthroughs to every line of business, improving customer experience, employee experience and operational efficiency. Essential to our approach as we bring these latest advancements to customers is our commitment to responsible AI by design – our framework for the safe deployment of AI technologies.

Today’s announcement builds on recent AI momentum across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform. This includes: the next generation of AI capabilities in Microsot Teams, the collaboration platform for work with more than 280 million monthly active users; Viva Sales, which helps sellers by bringing a sales copilot to their flow of work in Microsoft 365; and Power Apps, enabling citizen developers to write code using natural language.

You can read more about today’s AI announcements from Emily He, CVP, Business Applications and Platform here. Join us on March 16 as we share the next step in our journey to reinvent productivity with AI. You can RSVP for the event on the Microsoft LinkedIn page.

Presenting Microsoft Security Copilot: Engaging safeguards at the speed of artificial intelligence.

by Monsurat Omobusayo on May 23, 2023

The chances are against the present safeguards
Today the chances stay stacked against online protection experts. Time after time, they take on a topsy-turvy conflict against productive, steady and refined assailants. To safeguard their associations, protectors should answer dangers that are frequently tucked away among commotion. Intensifying this challenge is a worldwide lack of talented security experts, prompting an expected 3.4 million openings in the field.

The volume and velocity of attacks requires us to continually create new technologies that can tip the scales in favor of defenders. Security professionals are scarce, and we must empower them to disrupt attackers’ traditional advantages and drive innovation for their organizations.

In the last few months, the world has witnessed a wave of innovation as organizations apply advanced AI to new technologies and use cases. We are ready for a paradigm shift and taking a massive leap forward by combining Microsoft’s leading security technologies with the latest advancements in AI.

Today, at our inaugural Microsoft Secure event, I am delighted to welcome you to the new era of security — shaped by the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI — and thrilled to introduce to you Microsoft Security Copilot.

Security Copilot — end-to-end defense at machine speed and scale
Microsoft Security Copilot is the first security product to enable defenders to move at the speed and scale of AI. Security Copilot combines this advanced large language model (LLM) with a security-specific model from Microsoft. This security-specific model in turn incorporates a growing set of security-specific skills and is informed by Microsoft’s unique global threat intelligence and more than 65 trillion daily signals. Security Copilot also delivers an enterprise-grade security and privacy-compliant experience as it runs on Azure’s hyperscale infrastructure.

When Security Copilot receives a prompt from a security professional, it uses the full power of the security-specific model to deploy skills and queries that maximize the value of the latest large language model capabilities. And this is unique to a security use-case. Our cyber-trained model adds a learning system to create and tune new skills. Security Copilot then can help catch what other approaches might miss and augment an analyst’s work. In a typical incident, this boost translates into gains in the quality of detection, speed of response and ability to strengthen security posture.

Security Copilot doesn’t always get everything right. AI-generated content can contain mistakes. But Security Copilot is a closed-loop learning system, which means it’s continually learning from users and giving them the opportunity to give explicit feedback with the feedback feature that is built directly into the tool. As we continue to learn from these interactions, we are adjusting its responses to create more coherent, relevant and useful answers.

Security Copilot also integrates with the end-to-end Microsoft Security products, and over time it will expand to a growing ecosystem of third-party products. So, in short, Security Copilot is not only a large language model, but rather a system that learns, to enable organizations to truly defend at machine speed.

We absolutely believe that security is a team sport, and security should be built with privacy at the core. We’ve built Security Copilot with security teams in mind— your data is always your data and stays within your control. It is not used to train the foundation AI models, and in fact, it is protected by the most comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls. While remaining private, each user interaction can be easily shared with other team members to accelerate incident response, collaborate more effectively on complex problems and develop collective skills.

Technology that elevates human strengths
Human creativity and knowledge will always be imperative for defense. Security Copilot can augment security professionals with machine speed and scale, so human ingenuity is deployed where it matters most. In delivering this experience, we are guided by three principles:

Simplify the complex.
In security, minutes count. With Security Copilot, defenders can respond to security incidents within minutes instead of hours or days. Security Copilot delivers critical step-by-step guidance and context through a natural language-based investigation experience that accelerates incident investigation and response. The ability to quickly summarize any process or event and tune reporting to suit a desired audience frees defenders to focus on the most pressing work.
Catch what others miss.
Attackers hide behind noise and weak signals. Defenders can now discover malicious behavior and threat signals that could otherwise go undetected. Security Copilot surfaces prioritized threats in real time and anticipates a threat actor’s next move with continuous reasoning based on Microsoft’s global threat intelligence. Security Copilot also comes with skills that represent the expertise of security analysts in areas such as threat hunting, incident response and vulnerability management.
Address the talent gap.
A security team’s capacity will always be limited by the team’s size and the natural limits of human attention. Security Copilot boosts your defenders’ skills with its ability to answer security-related questions – from the basic to the complex. Security Copilot continually learns from user interactions, adapts to enterprise preferences, and advises defenders on the best course of action to achieve more secure outcomes. It also supports learning for new team members as it exposes them to new skills and approaches as they develop. This enables security teams to do more with less, and to operate with the capabilities of a larger, more mature organization.

Unrivaled security capabilities
With Security Copilot, we are taking the agility advantage back to defenders by combining Microsoft leading security technologies with the latest advancements in AI. By working with Security Copilot, organizations get access to an unrivaled depth and breadth of security AI capabilities, including:

Ongoing access to the most advanced OpenAI models to support the most demanding security tasks and applications
A security-specific model that benefits from continuous reinforcement, learning and user feedback to meet the unique needs of security professionals;
Visibility and evergreen threat intelligence powered by your organization’s security products and the 65 trillion threat signals Microsoft sees every day to ensure that security teams are operating with the latest knowledge of attackers, their tactics, techniques, and procedures;
Integration with Microsoft’s end-to-end security portfolio for a highly efficient experience that builds on the security signals;
A growing list of unique skills and prompts that elevate the expertise of security teams and set the bar higher for what is possible even under limited resources. Delivering security AI in a responsible way
Without a doubt, AI will transform how organizations around the world interact with security technologies. To achieve their highest potential, security AI solutions must be delivered in a safe, secure and responsible way. With Security Copilot, we reinforce our commitment to impactful and responsible AI practices by innovating responsibly, empowering others, and fostering positive impact.
The cornerstone of this work is our commitment to how Security Copilot handles your data:
- Your data is your data. It’s yours to own and control, and yours to choose how you want to leverage and monetize.
- Your data is not used to train or enrich foundation AI models used by others – no one beyond your organization is benefiting from AI trained on your data or business processes.
- Your data and AI models are protected at every step by the most comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls in the industry.
The new era of security
At Microsoft, we believe that security is ultimately about people. With Security Copilot, we are building a future where every defender is empowered with the technologies and expertise that enable them to reach their full potential. Technology will play an essential role on this journey, but successful security is, and will continue to be, a human endeavor.
We’re excited to be on this journey with you and we look forward to sharing more soon. Welcome to the new era of security