Microsoft’s Nadella At Ignite 2024: ‘We Are A Platform-First And A Partner-First Company’

‘Those are the two things, when I think about Microsoft, what’s core to us, core to our DNA and our approach—it’s about building platforms that create partner opportunity, that add value to our customers,’ says Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella made the case for the artificial intelligence era this week at Ignite 2024, touting AI use cases in business and science and the tech giant’s investments as ones benefiting its partners.

“I always say we are a platform-first and a partner-first company,” Nadella said during his partner keynote at Ignite 2024. “Those are the two things, when I think about Microsoft, what’s core to us, core to our DNA and our approach—it’s about building platforms that create partner opportunity, that add value to our customers. That’s it.”

Ignite runs through Friday, with programming in person in Chicago and online. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft had 200,000-plus people register for the event and expected 14,000-plus in-person attendees.

Microsoft CEO Nadella On Partners

Nadella told attendees that Microsoft is building an AI platform for business process transformation, with its Copilot, Copilot Studio, AI agents and newly unveiled Copilot Analytics the components of that platform.

“That’s the ability for every business process inside the enterprise—customer service, marketing, sales, operations, core innovation, anything—all to be completely transformed by the power of AI,” Nadella said. “That represents a tremendous partner opportunity.”

Here’s what else Nadella had to say across his multiple speaking sessions during Ignite 2024.

AI The ‘Lean’ Of Knowledge Work

What ‘Lean’ [a production method to reduce waste and increase efficiency] did in manufacturing, AI is going to be the moral equivalent of that for knowledge work, which is increasing value and reducing waste.

It’s that process mapping, even. Making the case and then showing them the way of how the deployment of these various solutions is going to increase value, reduce waste.

And that’s where even some of the Copilot Analytics tools that we have built are going to be super helpful for us. Because we as a community of partners who are coming together to drive this technology also have to help businesses, business leaders realize the value of all of this technology. … One of my favorite examples is in the PC era.

That was, by the way, the last time you saw at-scale productivity stats in the workplace because PCs started showing up.

If you look back, lawyers bought them first because of Word. And then finance bought them because of Excel. And then after a couple of years, they became standard issue. … Forecasting pre-PC was faxes.

In fact, I met a CEO … he was telling me when he started working in the 1980s, he had to go ask his boss for permission to send a fax. And I said, ‘Oh, wow, was it a compliance issue?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. It was really a cost issue.’

And then everything changed. The PCs came. If I wanted to do a forecast, all I needed to do was put an Excel spreadsheet in email and send it out. … No interoffice memos. No faxes. And, completely, the process changed.

AI Has Changed Nadella’s Workflow

Even my own workflow. … When I’m meeting a customer, I get an account brief [written by multiple humans with multiple reviews]. … That’s a process I’ve lived with for 30-plus years at Microsoft.

Guess what? It’s changed. What I do now, I go to Copilot. I say, ‘Hey, I’m meeting customer XYZ. Tell me what I should know.’ It beautifully creates a brief, by the way, using the latest submission by the account team.

I put it into [Copilot] Pages instantly. Share it with the account team instantly so they’re on the same page with me. … And then I go into the meeting, I edit that in the meeting.

In fact, it’s funny. I was meeting with the CEO of Mastercard [Michael Miebach], and I was copy-pasting from my Pages into Teams and showing him, real time.

We talked about some partner, in fact. And I said, ‘No, it’s not our partner. It is your partner.’ And I’m trying to clarify for them based on my notes that ability in real time to tap into your information and then share it.

I felt, quite frankly, as empowered as I felt the first time when I started using Excel. The goal here is to be able to figure out how you have those moments where people are able to change the way they work. And that’s what you all connected with the partner ecosystem can do, can enable to drive businesses going forward.

Copilot Is AI’s UI

Copilot is the UI for AI. 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. … Those are the three basic concepts of the Copilot ecosystem. … We’re continuously innovating, shipping hundreds of updates since we made Copilot generally available a year ago.

And it starts with work on the fundamentals. In fact, if you think about the Copilot responses today, they’re more than two times faster on average, and the response satisfaction has improved nearly threefold.

And going forward, we think about Copilot adoption in three fundamental ways. The more employees use Copilot and Copilot agents, the faster they’ll be able to realize value.

And the second aspect is, how do you ground Copilot or extend Copilot in your world, in your ecosystem? So Copilot is a platform you can extend with agents to scale what you can do.

So if you have one employee, one Copilot, and one Copilot can have thousands, thousands of agents.

Copilot Pages ‘A Multiplayer Canvas’

[Copilot] Pages is this first artifact of the AI agent. It’s pretty magical. … You can add interactive charts, tables, code blocks, math equations, complex diagrams. … It’s truly this multiplayer canvas that enables you to ideate with AI and collaborate with other people. … Copilot is also not just in Pages, but it’s deeply integrated.

It’s not just about chats and pages, but it’s deeply integrated into the entirety of the Microsoft 365 system. … [In Teams], Copilot can reason over all the past meetings and chats and transcripts and get you quickly up to speed. … Copilot can even answer questions about presentations and documents shared during the meeting as well.

You’re doing a presentation. Here is a Copilot that understands exactly what you’re presenting and answers questions about that presentation.

In Word, Copilot creates a draft based on other Word documents, PowerPoint, PDFs, emails, meetings. You never have to start from a blank page.

In PowerPoint, you can enter a prompt of what you want to do, what your presentation is about, and the Narrative Builder generates, essentially, a spec for your presentation. An outline with topics. And you can edit it, refine it. … And in Outlook, this feature is something that I’ve gotten so used to. It’s the quickest daily habit I’ve built, which is prioritizing my inbox.

It is a total game-changer because it helps you quickly get to the messages that matter, analyzing your inbox based on both the content of the mail but also the role of the sender and the context. It’s just like someone went and labeled every piece of email with a blue arrow and said, ‘Why is this important?’

‘Excited’ About Copilot In Excel

What we’re doing in Excel, though, is perhaps one of my favorite things. Just like what GitHub Copilot did for software developers, Copilot in Excel will do for data analysts.

I can start with a very high-level prompt that in the past, for example, I would have given to a data analyst. Let’s say I’m in a manufacturing plant and I want to figure out how to improve production rate. … Copilot uses these advanced reasoning capabilities to build out a full plan for strategic analysis.

I can easily change the plan, adjust it as I want to. And then it just goes and executes the plan. And throughout, I can see it actually doing the work. It first does visualizations. It generates heat maps, scatter plots, histograms—figures out, in fact, the key drivers of production.

It does a comparison of all those key drivers, figures, it calculates and then summarizes the insights and the actions in minutes. How amazing is that? It takes data analysis and makes it available to everyone who has an Excel spreadsheet.

If you look back and you say Excel was one of those products that, at population scale, improved number sense, I think Copilot in Excel with Python will improve analysis sense across the world. So I’m really, really excited about this.

AI Agents Easy To Build

Sometimes we sort of mystify these agents as things that 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. … I can create a field service agent simply by describing it in natural language, connecting it to a couple of data sources—in this case, a SharePoint site and my Dynamics CRM—I can easily configure it to meet my specific needs. Then 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, even an autonomous agent from time to time will need attention.

And it will need UI. And that UI for interacting with us is Copilot. … After users start using Copilot and all these agents, one of the fundamental things that all business leaders want to do is to figure out how do we measure ROI? … [With Copilot Analytics], if you take, let’s say, a sales territory manager, they can now correlate the specific Copilot usage to a business metric, like their win rate over time.

And it’s not just Copilot. It’s Copilot and all the agents that you’ve built. … Our goal is to show how Copilot usage is ultimately directly translating into business outcomes across sales, marketing, finance and more. … It’s really a question of change management. Think of Copilot Analytics as a tool for all of us to change how work, workflow and work artifacts are all getting done. That, I think, is ultimately how we get ROI.

AI Devices

In the age of AI, even the devices are fundamentally getting transformed with both AI and cloud. … We’re fundamentally taking what’s happening in the cloud with AI to the edge. And think of all of this as one continuous distributed computing fabric.

Over the past year, we’ve introduced an entirely new class of Windows PCs designed to unleash the power of that distributed computing fabric across the cloud at the edge. We call these Copilot+ PCs. And we are working across the entire ecosystem. It’s fantastic.

Just like in the cloud, there’s all the silicon innovation. Silicon innovation is back in a big way in the client—whether it’s Qualcomm, AMD, Intel—all building fantastic systems for PCs going forward. And of course, we’re working with all of the OEMs. … When it comes to the fundamentals of these PCs, also, whether it’s battery life or performance, they’re best in class. … This is not just adding an NPU [neural processing unit], it’s about making Windows and Windows PCs just fantastic on fundamentals.

And of course, ultimately, it’s about developers. I mean, it’s like what happened 32 years ago with [Windows] 3.1 was about applications.

And here we are with Copilot+ PCs, we are back at it with Adobe and WhatsApp, all who are seeing the capabilities of these new PCs. They’re bringing their best applications, leveraging these NPUs to really deliver breakthrough AI experiences.

Windows 365 Link, Windows 11

[Windows 365 Link] is a simple, secure, purpose-built device for Windows 365 [Microsoft’s cloud virtual desktop service].

It’s adminless, passwordless, and security configurations are enabled by default and cannot be turned off.

Windows 365 Link expands the cloud PC category by connecting you directly to your productivity in the cloud with no data or information left on any device. … Form factors like Windows 365 Link give you another choice for Windows endpoints.

But look, we fundamentally recognize how mission critical Windows is. And we are committed to both its security and resilience as first-class priorities.

The latest release of Windows 11 has over a dozen new security features, and most importantly, they’re turned on by default, including device encryption enabled across all devices.

Microsoft Silicon Updates

When it comes to silicon, our Cobalt 100 VMs became generally available last month. And customers and partners, whether it’s Databricks or Siemens, Snowflake, are seeing up to 50 percent improvements in price performance with these virtual machines.

In fact, our own media-processing capabilities in Teams are now 100 percent on Cobalt 100 as well. … [The Azure Integrated HSM, Microsoft’s first in-house security chip] is a dedicated hardware security module that hardens key management, managing encryption and key signing that can remain within the bounds of the device without compromising performance or security.

And starting next year, it will be part of every new server deployed on Azure, enhancing security for both confidential computing as well as general-purpose virtual machines and containers. … Beyond hardening security, ultimately, when we think about systems innovation at the silicon layer, it is about removing bottlenecks … whether it’s performance, latency or resource constraints.

That’s the opportunity we have as a hyperscaler. When you look at the workload, you look at the system, you say, what can we offload to silicon, just to kind of get rid of some of these constraints? And so that’s why today we are very excited about expanding Azure Boost with our first in-house DPU, [which are] processors specifically architected to accelerate data-centric workloads, absorbing multiple components of a traditional server into a single piece of silicon.

It runs, in fact, cloud storage workloads at three times less power and four times the performance.

AI’s ‘Middle Innings’ Fuels Nobel Prize-Winning Work

AI can also drive fundamental business transformation by understanding the language of nature and science. Science itself is becoming computed science. And that’s one of the reasons why we are focusing on delivering the systems and AI innovation to power breakthroughs in material science, chemistry, physics and more.

And our new frontier in AI-powered science is moving from static prediction to dynamic prediction, meaning not just predicting the shape of the molecules, but understanding the dynamics, their motion and how they interact, which is a critical step in developing new materials and new medicines. … This is not theoretical. We are bringing together these advanced AI models and agents to help scientists reason over and orchestrate across the entire scientific method effectively.

And we’re already delivering on this vision of a platform for scientists with customers around the world. Novartis, for example, is using generative AI to design hundreds of new molecules for drug discovery projects, helping accelerate the process. … In fact, at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, scientists are using our cloud to engineer new proteins from scratch that promise to be absolute game-changers in medicine and sustainability in other fields. … Congratulations again to David [Baker, director of the institute], who was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work. … As we enter these middle innings of AI, it’s up to us to empower human achievement.

That’s why, over the past year, we’re out training over 23 million people in AI and digital skills. And we are very committed to working to help millions more learn how to use AI because learning these skills will change people’s lives and, in fact, it already has.