Microsoft Ignite 2024: AI, Security, and Teams Innovations

Microsoft Ignite 2024, held Nov. 19 – 22 in Chicago, featured nearly 100 announcements and software updates, including an AI feature in Teams that can translate speech and replicate an individual employee’s voice. This year’s overarching theme was expanding generative AI’s summarization and rewriting capabilities to address more niche use cases.

AI translator agent can replicate your voice in Teams

Microsoft is going all-in on AI “agents” in an effort to further abstract the workings of large language models. Ideally for Microsoft, this would make those models more capable of autonomous, sequential actions. Microsoft Copilot Studio will enable autonomous agents soon, with this feature now in preview. Other major announcements around agents at Ignite 2024 include:

• Agents in SharePoint, available now, can answer questions about files, folders, or sites.
• A Teams Facilitator agent, which takes notes and summarizes meetings, is now in preview.
• An Interpreter agent in Teams, which can replicate a user’s voice in up to nine languages for real-time translation, will be in preview in early 2025.

Copilot Studio will soon include images and voice content

Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry will be more closely linked, with a Microsoft Agent SDK available for both developers to create custom agents. The Agent SDK, available now in preview, can draw from Azure’s large AI model catalog.

Soon, Copilot Studio users can experiment with multimodality in the agents they build. Image upload and analysis are now in preview, and voice is in private preview. (Private preview in Azure is invite-only.)

SEE: As of this Patch Tuesday, Copilot PC users can remap the AI button.

Azure AI Foundry offers new capabilities

Microsoft announced a new way to access AI in the Azure AI Foundry, a hub for AI models and solutions.

Azure AI Foundry is accessible in preview through either an SDK or online portal and interoperates with GitHub and Visual Studio. Both offer slightly different options: the SDK helps admins and app developers evaluate AI models and test apps before deploying them. The portal replaces the former Azure AI Studio and offers management of AI apps, models, and services.

Redmond also announced a service allowing developers to make and deploy AI agents. Azure AI Agent Service will be in preview in December.

In other Azure news:

• Azure AI will offer an AI scorecard containing “model cards, model versions, content safety filter configurations, and evaluation metrics.” The goal of AI reports is to help development teams complete audits and compliance reports.
• Risk and safety evaluations for image content will flag harmful content generated by AI. The go is to help with data-driven assessments of how often such content might appear.
• Cloud professionals can now map out AI adoption in the Cloud Adoption Framework. AI workload guidance has also been added to the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
• Azure AI Content Understanding, now in preview, is a streamlined workflow for turning unstructured text, images, and video into a corpus of data. It packages together templates, grounding mechanisms, and confidence scores to help developers and enterprises release AI solutions.
• Developers can run AI workloads on serverless GPUs in Azure Container Apps, which are currently in preview.

Security Exposure Management tool enters general availability

In the security world, Microsoft introduced a new service: Security Exposure Management. This service works in concert with Extended Detection and Response, Microsoft Defender XDR in Microsoft Security. It provides insight into an organization’s security posture. Now available to all users, Security Exposure Management had previously been in preview only.

Deploying Security Exposure Management helps raise awareness of an organization’s attack surface, analyzes attack paths, and aggregates security posture data into “Unified Exposure Insights.” These insights, in turn, are translated into metrics to measure security initiatives.

In other security news, Security Copilot in Intune for workflow management will be expanded. Security Copilot will now be able to weigh in on a broader range of scenarios across Intune, the Intune Suite, and Windows Autopatch. Intune admins can now add iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux devices to their hardware inventory.

Microsoft announced several similar updates for Microsoft Purview, but we won’t cover them exhaustively here. See Microsoft for more information about the 90-plus announcements from the Ignite event.

Copilot+ PCs add flexibility to Windows Search

Starting in early 2025, Search will look different in File Explorer, Windows Search, and Settings. Users can search for documents and photos using natural language, and an internet connection isn’t required.

Microsoft encourages business customers to show off prompts to coworkers

In today’s AI infrastructure, companies tend to produce tools that make adopting their AI products easier.

For example, Copilot Analytics, set to expand its features in early 2025, offers insights into adoption and usage trends to measure business impact. Additionally, Microsoft is gamifying AI adoption by enabling easy prompt sharing and introducing a prompt leaderboard. Both features will be part of the Copilot Prompt Gallery — formerly Copilot Labs. Prompt sharing will roll out with Microsoft 365 Copilot later in 2024, while an organization-wide “new and trending prompts” list is expected in early 2025.

One new feature, generative AI controls in Microsoft 356 Copilot, encourages caution with generative AI. The controls will notify users if prompts or responses in Microsoft 365 Copilot contain information that might be sensitive or put an organization at risk. Admins can configure Microsoft Purview Data Loss protection individually to match the sensitivity of their organization’s data.

Is AI ROI panning out?

In a recent survey, Slack revealed that AI adoption might be slowing down. Why? Some people feel the technology hasn’t lived up to the hype, that AI use is considered “lazy,” or that they don’t know how to use AI.

However, in a November 2024 study, Microsoft reported a 10x ROI increase among “top” business leaders using generative AI. Most AI use cases observed by Microsoft were focused on productivity.

TechRepublic covered Microsoft Ignite remotely.