This article recaps the keynote presentation by Tony Surma, CTO for Microsoft’s Americas Global Partner Solution, delivered during 3Cloud’s Envision Summit.

An overwhelming majority of organizations, 87% in fact according to MIT Sloane Management Review, believe that AI will give them a competitive edge. What this tells us is that integrating AI into your business plan has now become an imperative. AI is going to change the way that people interact with applications, tools and processes, and those interactions will be in a much more natural and direct way.

In this article, we’ll break down the ways that AI can have a meaningful impact on your business in a relatively short amount of time. We’ll review how adopting AI can drive your business in these respects:

  • Amplify human ingenuity with a copilot for every employee
  • Deliver transformational experiences by building your own intelligent apps
  • Safeguard your business and data with the most trusted AI platform

Amplify Human Ingenuity With a Copilot for Every Employee

Employees are ready to embrace AI. 64% of employees say they lack the time and energy to do their job and 70% of employees would be willing to delegate work to AI. Source: 2023 Work Trends Index.

Employees want AI to help them with: finding information and answers, summarizing meetings and action items, producing creative work, simplifying analytical work, planning their day and performing administrative tasks. Having help with these tasks would free up employees to focus on innovation and problem solving.

  • Sales Teams envision using AI for: prospecting and lead generation, sales presentations and demos, improving customer relationships, negotiating and closing deals, collaboration with other sellers, and achieving sales targets. Doing more with less is the mantra for all sales teams. The ability to use AI for repetitious tasks gives sales teams the time to build those all-important personal relationships.
  • Security Professionals in particular can benefit from AI which can aid in digital threat protection, endpoint protection, identity and access management, incident response and reporting, compliance management, and data and application protection.
  • Developers on the other hand will make good use of AI for: guidance and suggestions, coding with context, auto filling repetitive code, converting comments to code, code documentation, and automatic test generation. This will increase the volume of work they can produce.

Deliver Transformational Experiences by Building Your Own Intelligent Apps

Generative AI makes apps truly intelligent. With current applications, we experience constrained interactions with hard-coded and fixed data sets, and making changes to an application is costly and complex. Conversely, intelligent apps use a natural language interaction and deliver data-driven, personalized experiences that improve over time. When change is needed, new features can be delivered quickly.

Some of the top use cases for Generative AI include:

  • Enterprise ChatGPT for better knowledge mining
  • Intelligent call centers with better analytics and service
  • Building your own copilot using your data, your apps for your people
  • Content generation for new products and services
  • Hyper-personalization for better sales and marketing

Safeguard Your Business and Data With the Most Trusted AI Platform

A survey by McKinsey of more than 1,300 business leaders and 3,000 consumers suggests that establishing trust in products and experiences that leverage AI, digital technologies, and data not only meets consumer expectations but also could promote growth. Establishing digital trust hinges on what we do today.

  • 72% of those surveyed want transparency on company AI policies
  • 68% have equal or more trust in AI vs. non-AI products

Microsoft has developed a Responsible AI Standard.  This framework is for building AI systems according to six principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. For Microsoft, these principles are the cornerstone of a responsible and trustworthy approach to AI, especially as intelligent technology becomes more prevalent in products and services that people use every day.

Microsoft Cloud provides AI you can trust. Your data is your data. Your data is not used to train the OpenAI foundation models without permission. Your data is protected by the most comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls in the industry.

AI Will Reinvent Every Industry

Each industry encounters distinctive challenges, prospects, pressures, and limitations, and the influence of AI will vary significantly, be it in healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing, or any other industry. Nonetheless, it’s evident that AI has the potential for profound impact. Here are ways in which AI will offer important advancements for these industries.

Personal Healthcare

  • More effective patient treatment plans
  • Accurate drug development and discovery
  • Precise medical imaging and diagnoses

Safe Finance

  • Protect loan/credit privacy with sharable data
  • Detect suspicious and fraudulent transactions
  • Turn data trends into risk assessments

Sustainable Retail

  • Tailor inventory and pricing based on demand
  • Authentic virtual try-ons and less returns
  • Generative product design and style transfers

Efficient Manufacturing

  • Optimize inventory tracing in the supply chain
  • Amplify humans with cobots (or collaborative robot, which is designed to work together with both people and other robots)
  • Navigate the inner complexity of machines

The AI transformation is one of the most significant changes of our generation, and you have the opportunity to be a part of it. To be successful in transforming your organization with AI, your teams must have a willingness to change, and that change must be fostered by leaders who make data-driven decisions.

To watch the full recording of Tony Surma’s keynote presentation, visit our YouTube channel.