Microsoft Ignite 2023: 7 Major Announcements by Satya Nadella

Microsoft Ignite 2023 is the company's annual conference focused on developers and IT professionals, where the company hosts sessions for its developer community to come and experience the new technology Microsoft is working on. The two-day conference began with a keynote session yesterday, November 15, where CEO Satya Nadella typically made several software and hardware announcements relevant to developers and consumers. This year, Microsoft has planned nearly 600 sessions for developers to attend physically in Seattle or online (for registered users). It also made some big announcements, including plans to make its own AI chips, renaming its Bing Chat to Copilot, and new capabilities for its suite of Microsoft 365 Copilots. Let's take a look at the seven biggest announcements of the night.

You can watch the keynote and additional sessions on the Ignite microsite. You can also read the Official Microsoft Blog, highlighting this year’s most significant announcements. Microsoft is introducing about 100 new services and updates detailed in the Book of News. You can also visit the news page for product-specific blogs, stories, and visual assets.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) that also compiles highlights from the event. Posting a short video, he said, "Copilot will be the new UI for both the world's knowledge and your organization's knowledge, but most importantly, it will be your agent that helps you act on that knowledge. Here are highlights from my keynote today at #MSIgnite".

Microsoft Ignite 2023: 7 Major Announcements by Satya Nadella

1. Bing Chat rebranded to Copilot: The company is rebranding the product less than a year after launching its ChatGPT-like chatbot and integrating it with the Bing search engine (later in Microsoft Edge and Windows 11). From now on, it will be known as just Copilot.

2. Copilot Studio: Microsoft introduced Copilot Studio, a no-code platform that allows businesses to create custom copilots or integrate ChatGPT AI chatbots. This new tool is an extension of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a recently launched paid service. With Copilot Studio, businesses can customize Microsoft 365 Copilot.

3. Security Copilot: Microsoft is merging its Sentinel security analytics and Microsoft Defender XDR platforms into a unified security operations platform. This integration includes placing the Security Copilot chatbot at the heart of the system, allowing users to manage various aspects of security operations efficiently. It was initially demonstrated in March, but it is being rolled out on a broader scale now.

4. 3D VR meetings in Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams users can soon hold 3D VR meetings for that in-office feel. The feature comes with customizable avatars, meeting room designs, spatial audio, and audio zones to give the user a realistic physical meeting experience.

5. Microsoft custom AI chips Azure Maia: Microsoft has developed its own custom AI chip, the Azure Maia, and an Arm-based CPU named Azure Cobalt. These chips are intended for use in Microsoft's Azure data centres and aim to provide an alternative to Nvidia's H100 GPUs, which have seen increased demand for training large language models and generative image tools. The Azure Maia AI chip and Azure Cobalt CPU will be deployed in 2024.

6. Microsoft Planner: Microsoft is consolidating its task management and planning tools, including Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project for the web, into a unified experience called Microsoft Planner. This integration will be implemented in the Planner app within Microsoft Teams in early 2024, followed by a web experience later in the year. The existing Tasks by Planner and To Do apps in Microsoft Teams will be renamed "Planner."

7. Windows AI Studio: Microsoft showcased Windows AI Studio, a platform that will provide developers with tools and models from Azure AI Studio and integrate services like Hugging Face. Windows AI Studio offers a guided workspace setup, including a model configuration UI and walkthroughs, facilitating fine-tuning of various small language models.