Microsoft Ignite

- Microsoft is a master at enterprise integration. And recently, at their annual Ignite conference, they made over 70 announcements about AI tooling, including some that are foundational to what makes them special. Let's take a look at the key transformational announcements and get hands-on with some of what you can work with today. One of the first big announcements was something called Agent 365. It's a control center for businesses to manage their agents working within their infrastructure, and it provides analytics to see how the agents are made available to users inside their companies. This isn't a product that is readily available, but you can sign up for this through the special Microsoft Frontier Program. It might be a great idea to start testing this out for your own business, something that sets Microsoft apart. It's how Copilot has access to your entire layer of business knowledge. There's three components to this new infrastructure. First is something called Work IQ. This is the access layer. It allows Copilot to connect to your existing business files, emails, and chats within Microsoft 365 so that your chat bot can answer questions based on your real work. Work IQ opens the door to all of your content. The second layer is called Fabric IQ, and it's something that's built upon Microsoft Fabric. Use it to create a semantic model, a single source of truth for business data. Once you build this, you can ask a pilot for your customer churn rate, and Fabric IQ makes sure the data Copilot provides, uses an approved KPI definition instead of generic or hallucinated information. The last layer is something called Foundry IQ. This will give you access to generate knowledge engines, and it's going to be part of Microsoft's Foundry, a unified catalog of cutting edge tools, connectors, and MCP servers. You can use this when you need agents to receive trusted sources of knowledge so you can ask them to explain what steps to follow for a data breach under GDPR and Foundry IQ could pull an official compliance playbook you generate for this purpose for more accurate results. Let's take a look at some of the other capabilities in Microsoft Copilot. Wanna make sure that I'm in the work tab. That's the superpower tab that gives Microsoft Copilot access to all of your work information. In the chat bot, you also have access to specific data from Work IQ. So if I hit the slash button, I can see this dropdown that shows me all the things that I can find, my recent documents or specific people within my company that I may want to use in a prompt, as well as look through any meetings or emails that I've written recently. Also available in this plus sign, you can either add this work content directly here or attach cloud files by going to your SharePoint and locating some files that are part of your business knowledge. Once you have that data, you can ask it to do something practical. I'm gonna say summarize the main privacy compliance steps outlined in, and then I'm gonna look for the legal policy draft here, and here it is. And now I'm not just asking a question about generic legal policies, but something that is going to be focused on this specific document. It is showing you the source of this document. And if you have multiple documents, the answers will also have references to where it retrieve that information from. It usually ends most conversations by asking you a follow-up question and giving you some of these buttons where you can do even more. Let's try another one. We'll go ahead and create a new chat. I'll say, based on my previous comments, I'll use the legal policy draft once again. I'm gonna ask you to draft a follow up email. This time ,I'll pull up a person here so it's not just access to documents and it can do actionable work based on those parameters. Another thing that you can do is use your Copilot application on your mobile device and ask Copilot a question via voice commands. Draft a quick email to Stuart Moray summarizing our compliance review progress and the next steps. - [Copilot] Absolutely, here's a quick email draft you could use, subject compliance review, progress update, and next steps. - The interesting thing about voice mode is that it's always synced with your desktop. So if you start something on your MOA device, you can always find that same conversation on your Copilot and then we can copy the text that it generated for me and add it to an email and Outlook. You can have it process more complex tasks, so I'm gonna ask it given some updates in our recap. So I'm gonna look for Weekly Team Recap, and I'm gonna ask it to correlate that and the compliance steps in another document, my legal policy draft, I'll say, "What should be our next priority for conference planning?" So Copilot is gonna be able to combine historical context and policy guidance to recommend some actionable next steps. And notice that now it's referring to both of these files right here as it is answering the questions, and it's gonna make some recommendations for us. I can also use Copilot inside M365 apps like Excel to start a conversation that I can leverage back on Copilot. I'll say, "Analyze the sales trends and highlight the top performing products by region. Show me some different visualizations that would help me understand blind spots." It's writing some Python code to understand the data and process some of the requests that I've asked. It made some analysis, and now it started to build the visualizations for me. The visualizations are interactive, so I can roll over some of these numbers and see what's going on, and I can also copy a preview if I want to paste this somewhere else. I like one of the suggestions to create a dashboard. I'll say, "Let's build a dashboard layout." But now it's giving me a more concise layout that I can copy and send somewhere else. Now notice that what I did in Excel is also available here in Copilot 365. And one of the things that I can do is click on this edit and pages document, and this now becomes an editable document. I can delete this introduction part and start editing the document that Excel created for me. Now, if I share this document, I can create a link and invite other people to join in and work on this document with me, modifying the settings, you can control who has access to this document and ask others to make comments on these insights. You can also ask for this to be converted into a Word document, and use the power of Microsoft Word as well as the Copilot to make changes. Another exciting announcement was the addition of the Sora models available directly inside the Create Agent in Microsoft Copilot. And I'm actually gonna start that on a regular chat. So I'll begin a new chat and then I'll start by typing in, "Help me generate a script for a video to feed Sora. I want to explain our work from home policy." It found some files from SharePoint, and it generated a sample script for me. I'm gonna go ahead and copy this script, and then I'll switch over to the Create tab, and I'll go ahead and paste the script here. Now, I do wanna edit this a little bit because it does copy a lot more than just a script. Right, let's go ahead and play this. - [Copilot] Working from home isn't just a perk, it's a strategic move for a modern connected team. Imagine achieving real balance. Our work from home policy doesn't just set rules. - [Instructor] And you can see that it generates a great video as well as a transcript, which you can easily modify here if it doesn't say exactly what you want it to say, and you can also go back and edit the script if you want to change something, add specific files, and change the tone of the conversation here. You can also modify the type of music that this uses, the voice, and even change the branding to match your brand colors. - [Copilot] Ordering for every employee, only a click away, and our HR team is always ready to help. - [Instructor] You can also hit this Replace Media icon and see some different options for what you can use. Obviously, there's a lot more to digest from the Microsoft Ignite Conference. Thankfully, all the sessions are now available online and you can watch all the rest of the announcements on this website.