Biz Tech: Lessons learned at Microsoft's 'Inspire' conference in Las Vegas

Microsoft’s annual partner conference, Inspire, recently concluded in Las Vegas, combined with the Microsoft Ready internal sales event for the first time. Here are a couple of key take-aways from this year’s event:

“Privacy is a fundamental human right. Our fundamental value proposition for our customers, not just as a company, but as a community, is that we will help them better protect the privacy of their customers.” — Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer at Microsoft.

  In a keynote address, Smith reiterated Microsoft’s commitment to improving privacy and security for customers, while also trying to take a thought leadership role in the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft Teams is the future of collaboration

Teams has been available from Microsoft for over a year but it is much more than a place to Instant Message with groups of people. The way meetings are conducted is changing. The way information is shared is changing. 

Teams gives employees a better overall experience by empowering them to do more. Teams can be used to create spaces where key information can be shared for projects or accounts. With Teams, everyone involved on a project can be on the same page — keeping customers, sales, technicians and remote employees in the loop through the whole process. 

At the 2018 Microsoft Inspire, Teams had the main stage. CEO Satya Nadella brought the wow factor by having a demonstration of a Teams meeting. In the meeting were three people live and one person who attended virtually via augmented reality. 

Each person was identified and welcomed by the room system, utilizing facial recognition and Cortana transcribed the meeting in its entirety — accurately identifying who each speaker was. Cortana even pulls action items from the meeting to the side. This wasn’t a demo of features that are years out; these features are live and available now.

Simply utilizing email and one-on-one Instant Messaging isn’t the most effective solution for optimized collaborations. Microsoft Teams offers much more to help make your company more efficient.

Modernizing the Desktop

Ron Markezich, vice president of Microsoft 365 marketing, stated that 81 percent of business leaders are going to increase their investments in the modern workplace over the next two years — a significant change, he said, noting that having relevant tools is critical to staying competitive and retaining the best talent. 

AI is Everywhere

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown to be more than just a buzzword, and specifically Microsoft has infused AI into every application it creates. Microsoft has created a large footprint with its global computing platform, which encompasses Microsoft Azure, Azure Sphere and Azure Stack. Azure has 52 regions worldwide and is now available in over 140 countries.

“The amount of interconnect cable we have across Azure data centers is enough to go to the moon and back three times over. It’s crazy.” — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

AI helps you and your business every day, even though you might not realize it. If you use Skype, Office 365 or Cortana, you have benefited from artificial intelligence. AI is used in spam filtering, sorting your email before it reaches your inbox and when Cortana provides suggestions for follow-ups after your meetings, AI is to thank for it. 

AI has become a necessity in business today, working alongside humans — and Microsoft has taken the lead in the effort to optimize how we conduct business. 

Nadella spoke about the 2-year-old AI Chatbot in Asia named Xiaoice, which has more than 500 million threads of knowledge. This bot can be called 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year and spoken to in a way that makes it feel like a real interaction with a human. Xiaoice has even written a book of poetry. 

There is a change looming that intends to disrupt how companies that rely on call centers and heavy phone transactional processes conduct business. 

David Black is the director of business development for Wasatch I.T., a Utah provider of outsourced IT services for small and medium-sized businesses.