Microsoft And OpenAI Just Revealed The FUTURE Of AI...

So Satya Nadella actually gave another speech at Microsoft Ignite 2024. And in this speech, he actually gave us a lot more information about AI and the various different ways we're going to experience AI in 2025. One of the ways that he actually talks about AI is, of course, the scaling laws. I'm sure you're all very familiar with the recent news that AI is apparently getting harder to build. But of course, Satya Nadella talks us through exactly how we're getting through these scaling laws and exactly what they mean for us.

You know, with every platform shift, it's always perhaps good to build a deep context and understanding of the underlying forces. And today we talk about them as scaling laws. You know, just like Moore's Law, we saw the doubling in performance every 18 months with AI. We have now started to see that doubling every six months. Months or so now, in fact, there's a lot of debate. In fact, just in the last multiple weeks, there's a lot of debate. Or have we hit the wall with scaling laws? Is it going to continue? I mean, the thing to remember, at the end of the day, these are not physical laws. These are just empirical observations that hold true, just like Moore's Law did for a long period of time. And so therefore, it's actually good to have some skepticism, some debate, because that, I think will motivate, quite frankly, more innovation on whether it's model architectures or whether it's data regimes or even systems architecture. So it's a good thing to have in that context, though, if anything, we are seeing the emergence of a new scaling law with test time or inference time compute. In fact, OpenAI's 01 is a good example of it. And features like the Copilot Think Harder is built on O1 is all about using test time to solve even harder problems.

Next, of course, is the three new capabilities that are coming to AI in 2025. I recently spoke about one of them recently being memory. But he actually speaks about two other new breakthroughs that are going to be coming to us with AI in 2025 and beyond.

So ultimately, though, all these breakthroughs manifest in three cases, capabilities that are exponentially getting better. The first is this new universal interface that's multimodal. It supports speech, images, videos, both as input and output. Second, we have this new reasoning and planning capabilities, which essentially we have new neural algebra to help solve complex problems, right? We can detect patterns involving people, places and things. You can even find relationships between people, places and things using this new algebra. And third, we now have this capability to support long term memory, rich context and in fact teach these models to use tools. So if you put all those things together, you can build a very rich agentic world defined by this tapestry of AI agents, right, which can act on our behalf across our work and life, across teams, business processes as well as organizations.

Next is where we managed to take a look at the Copilot ecosystem. So there's actually going to be three different platforms for Copilot and this is where we take a look at that.

And to do that we are building out three platforms. Copilot, Copilot Devices and Copilot and AI Stack. That's it. Those are the three platforms. It's rapidly becoming an organizing layer for work and how work gets done. Every employee will have a copilot that knows them, their work, helping them unlock productivity, enhancing creativity and saving time. And Copilot Studio will allow you to create agents that automate business processes. And every IT department will have a control system to manage, secure and measure impact. That's it. Those are the three basic concepts of the Copilot ecosystem. Over the past year we've seen incredible momentum. What Lean did for manufacturing AI will do for knowledge work. It's all about increasing value and reducing waste. Just take risk analysis at bank of Queensland Group. In the past, when an incident occurred, they would have to go through thousands of documents and write reports. And now they use Copilot to be able to synthesize everything that happened and create that first draft. That means analysis that took weeks is just taking a day. Vodafone is another great example. Their legal team used to manually analyze and draft and renegotiate thousands of contracts that govern their massive base station network. And now they use Copilot to determine which contracts need to be renewed, which need to be scrapped, and to keep track of all the expiry dates. Vodafone is also personalizing all of their customer service by leveraging Copilot as well as Azure AI to manage customer inquiries. Their virtual assistant engages in more than 45 million monthly customer conversations and it's reducing the average hold time by more than one minute. And of course, we're just getting started.

This is where we actually get some really cool information. So you know how we've got these Copilot agents and stuff like that. This is where you talk about Copilot's actions, which is where you can instruct these agents to do certain things and have them do them again and again and again to increase the efficiency of them.

Today I'm really excited to announce Copilot actions with with these actions, you can use Copilot to reduce the amount of time you spend on repetitive everyday tasks that you do. In fact, the best way to conceptualize actions is for those of you who used Outlook rules. This is Outlook rules for the age of AI and it works across the entire M365 system, not just in Outlook. Right. So it automates everything from asking for, let's say a status update from your team compiling weekly reports to scheduling emails requesting feedback on a document. Actions are a very simple but yet powerful way for you to scale what you do. Right? So whatever was the thing that you had to do multi step, you just create one of these actions and it just does it for you. You can discover templates for actions which you can reuse in your everyday work. It's just a simple interface and we're not stopping there. And today we are introducing new agents you can use within the context of your team. Again, the best way to think about these are as just your teammates. They're scoped to specific roles with very specific permissions, just like we have permissions and roles. For example, a facilitator agent is someone you can add to your team's meeting. And the facilitator will help keep the meeting focus, moderate the meeting chats, as well as the follow up and action items. Our project manager agent in planner will help automate in fact all the key steps in a project management workflow. It'll create a new plan, it'll from scratch, it'll help oversee what's happening across the project, task assignments, content creation and next is even self service agents. Right. So for these agents provide really useful information, answer questions and policies. But not just that. When it comes to HR and it, these agents will help you complete the task. Think of these as just augmenting your HR and IT departments. And we are also announcing SharePoint agents. Every SharePoint site will now have a built in agent. These agents provide instant access to real time information and insights from your knowledge base in the flow of your work. We're also giving you the ability to easily create your own copilot or your own agents using Copilot Studio. You know, sometimes we sort of mystify these agents as things that, you know, somehow require a lot of effort to build. But it's really pretty straightforward. In fact, our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide or an Excel spreadsheet. That's it. Like when you say Agent think creating a doc. You know, if I, I, this example is a good one, right? I can create a field service agent by simply describing it in natural language, connecting it to a couple of data sources, in this case a SharePoint site and my dynamic CRM. I can easily configure it to meet my specific needs. And you have an agent in seconds that's just now integrated into copilot. You can also make these agents autonomous using Copilot Studio. And they can always raise an exception in Copilot for input. Remember, like, even an autonomous agent from time to time will need attention and it'll need UI. And that UI for interacting with us is Copilot. Now, just last month we introduced 10 plus autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 that do everything from optimizing supply chains to helping customer service teams resolve issues. For example, take a look at a sales qualification agent autonomously researches all the leads that are there in your system and flags the best prospects for you and then drafts a personalized email that you can of course edit and send. And we're already seeing customers use capabilities like this. In fact, McKinsey has built an autonomous agent that reduces client onboarding time by as much as 90%. Dow has built agents to optimize their shipping process or freight shipping process and projecting millions of dollars of savings even in just the first year. And of course, you know, when we talk about extensibility, that includes changing how you interact with your bespoke business applications too, right? That's kind of fundamentally like the idea that I have to go to one business application at a time just goes away in this world of agents. And so we are very excited to share. Many of our partners have built their own agents and connectors in Microsoft 365 copilot. That includes Adobe and obviously LinkedIn, SAP ServiceNow Workday, and even companies like Cohere, they're building AI first. Agents are also integrating right into copilot. And now to show you all of this in action, I wanted to introduce my colleague Callie on stage to take you through the entire Copilot ecosystem. Callie, over to you.

So this is where we actually get the demo for the Copilot agents. And I think it's really important to watch this if you really want to understand how Copilot is going to be impacting businesses in the future and of course, how eventually you could implement them into your own business. I know I am paying so much attention to this because I want to be one of the first people who rapidly is able to scale A business using AI agents and actions at a scale that no one has ever seen before.

My day is comprised of a lot of important but time consuming tasks which can take away from the time I spend building customer relationships and closing deals. That's where agents come in. Created in Copilot Studio, agents range from simple prompt and response to fully autonomous. They help with everything from prioritizing leads to scheduling meetings to fulfilling orders. Let me show you. I have an autonomous agent that monitors and fills customer orders on my behalf. It alerts me when there's a cross sell or upsell opportunity. I can see one of my longtime customers placed a big order for more product. The agent is able to quickly fulfill this order and send me an alert that this is a great opportunity to offer the customer additional products in seconds. This deal just got the potential to be a lot more lucrative. Let's take the next step and get ready for the pitch meeting. I need to quickly get up to speed on the latest product updates and roadmap. For that I go to SharePoint. Over the years, SharePoint has become the most used solution in the enterprise for knowledge and business process. This site is where we keep all of the latest product specs, roadmap and training materials. Now every SharePoint site has an agent, so all this rich information is immediately accessible and useful. I can find just what I need in seconds by simply asking the agent. Now let's jump back to this chat. From here I can interact with the same SharePoint agent by simply mentioning it. I can ask it to give me an overview of the relevant process, products, availability and pitch decks. Because the agent is Grounded in this SharePoint site, it pulls from the right source of truth and gives me just what I'm looking for. Now it's been a while since I've met with this customer and of course I want to put my best foot forward and understand where they're at. Copilot points me to the sales agent which surfaces all of the details that I need like account highlights and opportunities, our most recent sales engagements and interactions with the customer. I can see that I have a new counterpart on the customer side and I want to learn more about them. For that I'm going to turn to LinkedIn. I can simply mention the LinkedIn Sales Navigator agent to see their background and experience and who else I might know in their network. It looks like we have several connections in common. Within seconds I'm up to speed on my new partner right in the flow of work. Now I'm ready for the meeting and I never even opened my CRM. I'm going to fast forward to after the meeting. It was super successful and now I'm going to work up a quote. Let's jump over to SAP's Copilot Jewel. I ask it to reference the latest pricing sheet and I want it to reflect the appropriate appropriate discount. Given the size of the order. SAP Jewel generates a detailed quote I can quickly review and send to the customer. Now I'm in great shape to land the business. And it's not just SAP. Many of our largest partners are creating agents to bring their unique knowledge right into the flow of work from HR to finance to sales. Take ServiceNow, which covers customer service, human resource management and workplace services. Or Adobe, which can help your team build world class marketing, design and visual content. Copilot will empower every employee and Copilot Studio agents will transform every business process. Back to you. Satya.