Navigating What’s Next with Top Announcements from Microsoft Build

What do Microsoft Build’s announcements mean for Lunavi and you?

Microsoft Build is one of Microsoft’s premiere conferences of the year. This conference focuses on product enhancements in the Microsoft ecosystem for developer tools. That means if you are looking to move faster as a developer team, work more security, adopt innovative technologies, or refine your current technology stack, then this is the conference for you.

This will be a quick hitter of some of the highlights that we believe could have an immediate impact on not only any organization, but even our workflow here at Lunavi. To find the complete list of all things announced at Microsoft Build look for the Microsoft Build Book of News or click here.

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AI Is Here to Stay

Copilots

After listening to many of the announcements at Microsoft Build, I can say with confidence AI is going to quickly become a common tool in any workflow. Lunavi has already implemented some AI processes into various workflows from sales to development, and copilots will make our work, and yours with AI easier. Microsoft announced copilots for many of their current toolsets including but not limited to Office Products, VS Code, and even Windows. One of the keynotes showed how you can use copilot for Windows to set focus timers, change where your windows are snapped, and even change to dark mode (a soon to be developer favorite I am sure). For our customer's that use Microsoft products, there is an incredibly good chance, there is a copilot in preview or already released for what you're already using, take some time to learn about it if you haven't yet. You can also reach out to our experts here at Lunavi to walk discuss these AI developments.

Azure Open AI Bring Your Own Data

One feature I am particularly excited about is the linking of your own personal data to your Azure Open AI services! Before you could link your data, you had to do it via Azure Search Service, index your data, and pay for those services. Considering the cheapest standard tier of Azure Search is over $200/month that could be cost prohibitive to some small to medium organizations. Now by bringing your own data you can link your data stores within your Azure Open AI Studio. You no longer need a standalone Azure Search Service and can directly query against your data from the AI Studio without having to build an application or API to link the two together. Since this is still in preview, the price of this feature has not been announced yet. If it is consumption based, it could be a nice alternative for companies that do not want to invest in an Azure Search Service. It could also take away the pain points of having to manually build out an index for your data. Only time will tell once that feature is in public preview, but it is one to watch for!

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric was announced to be in preview as well, and we are following it's progress closely as it will bring efficient change to Data Analytics. This combines a lot of toolsets of AI and Data Scientists under one product. You can use this tool to build out analytic workloads, Power BI, Data Factory, and Synapse all under one roof! This will allow you from a permissions standpoint to give your engineers tools they need to get their jobs done, and Copilot in Microsoft Fabric was also announced. So not only do you have a toolset specific to your analytics or AI team, but you also have a copilot designed to enable the use of natural language and a chat experience to generate code and queries, create AI plugins using a low/no-code experience, enable custom Q&A, tailor semantics and components within the plugin and deploy to Microsoft Teams, Power BI and web. Fabric is also coming with OneLake which should help reduce the need to extract, move or replicate data within an organization helping eliminate rogue data sprawl.

Plugins with AI

Microsoft also announced Bing Chat and the plug-ins that go along with that data. This is Chat GPT integrating with the Bing dataset as grounding data. Everyone has been excited about Chat GPT, and has become a part of many companies workflows in some capacity, even here at Lunavi. Now, it's getting even better. This will allow Chat GPT to remain more current since it can use a search engine to ground it. While building this plugin out Microsoft developed a common plugin platform. This is a standard way to feed your APIs definitions into a Chat GPT plugin so you can leverage AI to grab actionable insights on data and APIs you already must increase your speed to go to market. This can be super exciting if you want to build out plugins for Chat GPT, Microsoft Teams, or many other products.

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps is now in preview for Azure DevOps. This brings a ton of the excellent features of GitHub Enterprise to Azure DevOps! While in preview this tool is free, and it combines many offerings of other security tools out there for code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency scanning. If you are curious about it there is no better time to check it out than while it is free to use, and we're happy to assist you as you explore it!

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Conclusion

Overall, most of these main announcements and breakthroughs are credited to the rapid innovation of AI and based on the announcements Microsoft is planning to continue to invest in AI. Microsoft is in the depths of changing the future of our workflows with AI. We're excited not only for our own personal applications of these new features and services, but also for how they can add business value to your organization by creating efficiency and expanding what you're capable of. If you are curious about any announcement or about Microsoft Build, a lot of the sessions were recorded. You can view them on YouTube or on the Microsoft Build website. If you are looking for a high-level overview the Microsoft Build Book of News is always a wonderful place to start. Maybe you're interested in these announcements, but don't know where to start. Contact us today, and we'd would be more than happy to explore these exciting developments alongside you.