Microsoft AI Tour Sydney

With Microsoft 365 Copilot becoming generally available in recent months and this being the first major Microsoft conference in Australia for several years the attendance was high (I believe the last big Microsoft conference in Sydney was pre-COVID with the Ignite Tour in 2019). Rumour has it the tickets were capped at 5,000 and it was a sell-out. I can attest to waiting in a very long line for badge pickup that spanned 3 floors of the Sydney International Convention Center!

Clearly there is a large appetite for people to understand the current state of AI, the opportunities, challenges, and where to even start.

Microsoft has been talking about and demonstrating the different incarnations of AI Copilots since early 2023 (Bing Chat, Windows Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilots) and the story is now both slick and compelling.

The main takeaways here are:

• The Copilot experiences are grounded in your Microsoft 365 data (Mail, Calendar, SharePoint, Teams, Dynamics etc.) meaning you are getting an interaction experience similar to Chat GPT but it is reasoning over your Enterprise Microsoft 365 data.
• Data privacy and ownership – Using Microsoft Copilots will not expose your Enterprise data to others. Your data is not used by Microsoft to train the underlying models. Enterprise data is your data not Microsoft’s.
• There are several high-level Copilot experiences (such as Microsoft 365 Copilot) and many more specific Copilot experiences tailored to the products they surface in (e.g Copilot for Outlook, Copilot for Word), or the vertical use case such as Copilot for Sales or Copilot for Service.
• Microsoft has built all of these Copilot experiences on the same underlying Azure platform.
• The Copilot experience is extensible in multiple ways from low-code options to full code SDKs with a centralised experience via Azure AI Studio.
• The statistics quoted from Microsoft’s internal use and of Enterprise customers using Copilot during the preview phase show significant improvements in productivity, job satisfaction and return on investment.
• 77% of users said once they used Copilot, they didn’t want to give it up

Microsoft has a great story to tell in being the cloud supercomputer for AI. I also love that Microsoft presentations tackle the security, privacy, data ownership and ethical AI concerns head-on. These are the first concerns I hear of when organisations are looking to start leveraging AI and with good reason as there have been several high-profile incidents that emerged over the last 12 months with organisations using various forms of AI technology.

When Microsoft says it takes these concerns seriously, they really are putting their money where their mouth is with the announcement of the Customer Copyright Commitment.

To address this customer concern, Microsoft is announcing our new Copilot Copyright Commitment. As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved.

This new commitment extends our existing intellectual property indemnity support to commercial Copilot services and builds on our previous AI Customer Commitments. Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products.

Thanks to Paul Bullock for compiling this great list of resources for Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI Resources that I’d recommend for those looking to dive deeper.