Everything You Need To Know

Are you watching Microsoft Inspire 2023?

Don’t worry if you’re not, as we’re glued to our screens for you!

The big theme this year has to be Open AI. To quote Satya Nadella, “Microsoft loves Open AI”.

Here’s everything we know so far:

Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing Announced!

Although we’re still waiting on a date for general availability, we do now have a price of $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business standard and Business Premium.

New Features For Copilot

Although not yet released to general availability, Microsoft are already announcing new features for this groundbreaking bit of tech.

Copilot’s capabilities have been extended to Teams Phone & Chat with aids to unscheduled phone calls, as well as enhancing chat conversations.

“Today, at the Microsoft Inspire conference, we announced the next wave of generative AI for Teams, with the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams Phone and Teams chat. Incorporating advanced AI capabilities into unscheduled phone calls and written chat conversations, Copilot will now help you stay on top of your discussions, capture important information, and follow up on action items.”

Pete Daderko – Director, Microsoft Teams Product Marketing

With Copilot you will now be able to make and receive Teams calls on any device and afterwards receive a real-time summary and insights of the call.

You’ll be able to ask Copilot to draft notes during the call, underline any key points that come up including names, dates, times, numbers and specific tasks… all with natural language requests.

AI Comes To Sales

We warned you this would be heavy on the AI and the first really big change comes to all Sales related features within the suite.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will now be able to provide AI powered and enhanced data analysis and predictions for your customer interaction data.

Microsoft Sales Copilot will come as standard with a range of productivity tools for CRM users.

Copilot chatbots will allow companies to deploy AI-driven chatbots with the capabilities of ChatGPT but tailored specifically for their websites, with unique product knowledge that today’s customers need.

Oh, and keep an eye out for AIM, a new program that will give AI-guided support on moving customers from on-prem, into the cloud!

All Business Operations Will Receive An AI Boost

One of the bigger announcements at MS Inspire this year was that Power Automate Process Mining would hit general availability by Aug 01^st (this year!) and will include AI tools to generate process insights, optimise existing processes, improve overall efficiency and even offer automation suggestions.

Microsoft will also offer out-of-the-box templates for users to get up and running even faster.

Azure’s Migration Support Program Updated

As you’d expect at Inspire, we had to have at least one name change, as the Azure Migration and Modernisation Program (what was AMMP) now becomes Azure Migrate & Modernise (so AMM)… we’re assuming someone didn’t like the P!

It’s not just a name change though. It also comes with a set of new and extended features, which include assessments, support for additional workloads like high-performance computing (HPC), Oracle, Linux, SAP and mainframe migrations.

They’ve also made a commitment to make a “substantial investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernise”.

A New Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program Is Coming

The new AI Cloud Partner Program has been created with the intention of leveraging both Microsoft AI and Microsoft Cloud Initiatives in one place, helping partners like FormusPro build AI-based apps for our clients, modernise existing apps with emerging AI tech and help migrate companies into the cloud at a much faster pace.

From early 2024, this new partner program will also make available Microsoft’s industrial metaverse within the new program.

The ISV Success Program Moves Into General Availability

At Inspire last year, Microsoft announced they’d be spinning up an ISC success program designed to take early-stage, independent software vendors and help them build well-architectured apps to publish on the Microsoft marketplace.

Thanks to the success of the program, this year it moves to general availability.

Interested in knowing more? Reach out to find out how these new Microsoft features can help your organisation…