Microsoft Ignite 2024 is a big day for businesses and developers, and CEO Satya Nadella's Day 1 keynote is going to cover two big topics: Copilot and security. I will be covering every announcement he makes on the stage.
Of course, we already know a good chunk of what will be unveiled — more agentic AI that businesses can custom build to take action on their behalf, deeper integration of Copilot in Microsoft 365, and an overhaul to Windows security that beefs up protection and reduces the annoyance of every app using/requiring admin privileges to name three.
But make no mistake about it, Microsoft is going big on supercharging organizations and developers with AI, and we're here to cover everything Nadella announces.
Watch Microsoft Ignite 2024 opening keynote
Big Microsoft Ignite 2024 announcements
- Microsoft reveals AI employees at Ignite — agents will come to the workplace
- Microsoft is changing the way admin privileges work in Windows — here’s why
Welcome to the Microsoft Ignite live blog! We're covering all the biggest announcements that CEO Satya Nadella has to make on stage around AI and security for businesses and developers.
Microsoft Teams will translate your real-time speech into foreign languages
One of the more fascinating announcements for me personally is the AI-powered speech-to-speech translation that is coming to Teams in early 2025.
As someone who has seen his fair share of missing key facts in international meetings, this real-time system looks to bridge that gap well. Plus, it'll support up to 31 translation languages!
What is a scareware blocker?
Microsoft has also announced something called a Scareware blocker for Microsoft Edge! So let's answer the obvious questions here — what is it? And what does it do?
Put simply, it is an AI-powered protective shield that detects those kinds of pop ups that warns you "your computer is infected" to try to scam you. With Scareware blocker, Edge is able to intercept this, and alert the user that it is a trap. This could be huge for both businesses and general consumers alike!
We are T-minus 4 minutes from the keynote beginning!
Annnd it's showtime! Satya Nadella takes the stage.
Microsoft is building a new kind of Windows PC — named Windows 365 Link. It has all the makings of some of the best Mini PCs, such as 4x USB ports, Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E and support for dual 4K monitors.
But the secret sauce? it runs Windows entirely in the cloud. Could this be the future of consumer computing? It will certainly help enterprises (especially with its $349), but it's a good proof of concept for cloud computing more broadly.
Satya's out the gate early with Agentic AI. Standby for more news on how it will help improve business!
And that is a lot of security updates!!
Copilot is getting an Employee Self-Service Agent built into Microsoft 365. This Business Chat (BizChat) will make it for any colleagues to get answers to any key questions and take action on HR and IT-related tasks. This is one of a few out-the-box purpose-built agents that Nadella will discuss.
Another piece of agentic AI coming to business is the ability to rapidly put together graphs and create documents that are important, but also pretty menial to do!
Copilot AI is turbocharging Word as part of Microsoft 365. You will able to craft a prompt not just in text, but you can add documents to it too — to direct document creation.
Copilot Actions look set to speed up all of your quick actions, to regain focus time and take control of your work to-dos.
You've got a set of templates, such as requesting feedback on a document from your direct managers, automating project management workflows, and creating customer briefs.
Copilot Studio is getting easier than ever! Previously, building Copilots was a dev-only affair. But now, you can build Copilots to help with specific tasks to your business with just a text prompt and data sources.
A lot of third parties are joining the Copilot party with their own Agents. These include the likes of Adobe, Workday and SAP.
And what about checking how effective Copilot has been in your business? That's where Copilot Analytics comes into the mix. You can take a look at the amount of interactions and how it has translated into positive action.
Completely remote controlled, the Windows 365 Link is a great little system purpose-built for cloud computing. Plus its super tiny!
Time for Security...
Azure Cobalt is a big deal to help with Azure workloads and data processing. This purpose-built data-processing unit (DPU) boosts efficienty across storage, networking, and accelerates accessing/processing this data across the cloud.
This is done by reducing the amount of tokens needed.
Introducing Fabric Databases. Autonomous databases can create a unified data platform that can make it easy for AI to operate across it all — running across SQL.
Azure AI Foundry is integrating both the Foundry and Copilot Studio, to become a one-stop shop for all things Microsoft AI. Whether you're developing your own via Azure's AI Agent Service, or choosing one of the 1,800+ Azure AI models, you'll find it here and every single one is easy to manage and control across your entire business.
So we're currently seeing an AI demo that is not just agentic but multimodal. We've gone from interacting with the chatbot to asking the hotel concierge in this demo to call us to continue taking action!
Meanwhile, how can AI drive transformation in science? Copilot models and Azure AI has been helping drug discovery projects for Novartis, Nissan is improving accuracy in EV battery degradation, Unilever is using AI to simulate thousands of simulated trials, and much more.
And to make all this happen is where quantum computing comes in — unlocking the ability to simulate what happens with a bunch of molecule and atoms interact, far beyond anything a traditional PC can do. And on top of this, the convergence of AI and Quantum computing will train the model on results and help keep scientists focussed on accelerated discoveries.
To help with this, Microsoft has partnered with Atom Computing to build the fastest quantum computer available to commercial customers! It's targeted to ship by end of 2025.
And that's it for Satya's opening keynote! A lot of big things coming from Microsoft for businesses and developers — from richer employee experiences thanks to Copilot, a huge integration of all Azure and Copilot AI efforts, security features and even new cloud computing hardware.
