Ever since I started at Microsoft in August 2023, I was more than excited for Microsoft Build 2024, which wrapped up last week. Why? The achievements of our customers leveraging Azure AI to drive innovation across all industries are astounding, and I’ll happily take every opportunity to showcase and celebrate them. From enhancing productivity and creativity to revolutionizing customer interactions with custom copilots, our customers demonstrate the transformative power of generative AI and truly, brought Build 2024 to life. So, how’d they do it?
Fostering creativity and innovation
By creating Muse Chat, a copilot for coding and documentation, Unity Technologies showcases how AI can foster creativity in the gaming industry. This tool, developed with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Content Safety, allows developers to create and perfect their own video games. At Build, Unity gave a live demo on Muse Chat during the Multimodel, Multimodal and Multiagent Innovation with Azure AI, which resulted in a video game prototype based on prompts, without typing a single line of code. Unity also provided a gaming station at our event celebration and gave out Unity trial subscriptions to developers.
Figure 1: Live demo of Unity Muse Chat, powered on Azure OpenAI Service, to create a space-inspired video game.
Pushing the boundaries of creative expression and efficiency, WPP explores the use of video, images, and speech to accelerate content creation with Azure OpenAI Service (GPT-4 with Vision). Generative AI and multimodality are central to their innovation. Additionally, WPP is a leader when it comes to accessibility. Featured in the Day 1 keynote and the Accessibility in the era of generative AI, WPP showcased their solutions with Seeing AI.
Azure AI
Where innovators are creating the future
The New York City Department of Education is leveraging generative AI through Azure OpenAI Service to create a specialized teaching assistant capable of providing instant feedback and addressing student inquiries. This solution is developed using the Azure platform, ensuring seamless integration and enhanced educational support. During the Build session, safeguard your copilot with Azure AI, event-goers learned how NYC built this solution and how they are keeping the experience safe for teachers and students alike.
Figure 2: New York City Department of Education uses Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Content Safety to safeguard their educational generative AI tools.
Enhancing productivity and efficiency
Utilizing AI Tax Assist with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio, H&R Block is helping tax professionals and filers reduce the time and effort needed to file taxes. The integration of Azure AI Search for RAG exemplifies how AI can streamline complex processes to enhance productivity.
Featured in the Azure AI Studio—creating and scaling your custom copilots session, Sweco focused on freeing up time for more creative solutions in client projects by developing SwecoGPT using Azure AI Studio. This digital assistant automates document creation and analysis, allowing consultants to quickly find critical project information and deliver more personalized services. As a result, consultants report increased productivity and added client value.
By leveraging the full Microsoft Azure stack, Sapiens International enhances developer creativity and streamlines the development of automated customer solutions. The use of Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure-managed databases significantly improves tasks like underwriting, claims processing, and fraud detection.
For PwC, the creation of ChatPwC, a scalable and secure GenAI solution using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, and Azure AI Document Intelligence, has been a game-changer. This tool helps employees summarize, assess, and identify themes in client data, benefiting hundreds of thousands of employees daily.
Transforming customer interactions
Revolutionizing customer interactions, Vodafone introduced TOBi, a public-facing virtual assistant which efficiently handles calls and empowers agents through context-aware conversations and call transcriptions. SuperAgent, a company-wide internal conversational AI search copilot, enhances agent efficiency, helping customer journeys.
To transform their MBUX Voice Assistant and dashcams, Mercedes-Benz integrates GPT-4 Turbo with Vision via Azure OpenAI Service. This technology enables the car to understand its surroundings and provide context for speech assistance with the ‘Hey Mercedes’ cue. In the new multimodal vision AI models and their practical applications breakout session, Mercedes showcased the power of multimodality by demonstrating the capabilities of ‘Hey Mercedes’ including the ability to add DALL-E generated images to vehicles’ dashboards by a simple voice command.
Figure 3: Mercedes-Benz utilizes Dall-E to display an image of Olympic National park on the car’s dashboard using a simple voice command.
Offering an immersive in-car infotainment system, TomTom utilizes Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, and CosmosDB. Their Digital Cockpit demonstrates the impact of advanced technologies in creating a seamless and enriched driving environment. In the TomTom brings AI-powered, talking cars to life with Azure session at Build, staff data scientist Massimiliano Ungheretti showcased how he led the development of the Digital Cockpit.
Detecting suspicious activity by analyzing millions of daily transactions, Kinectify uses its AI-powered anti-money laundering (AML) risk management platform. Built with Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Services, and Azure Kubernetes Service, the platform is scalable and robust.
Elevating business operations
Featured in the Build sophisticated custom copilots with Azure OpenAI Assistants API breakout session, Coca-Cola aims to improve the productivity of its 30,000 associates by leveraging the Assistants API with GPT-4 Turbo for KO Assist, their genAI copilot. These standardized assistants help with enhanced business intelligence, data synthesis, strategic planning, and risk management across all departments.
Figure 4: Cola-Cola demonstrates the power of their KO Assist chatbot, powered by Azure OpenAI Assistants API.
Increasing productivity and enabling more intuitive app development, Freshworks uses Freddy Copilot to provide conversational assistance and informed insights to employees and customers. This tool is supported by the Assistants API. Freshworks showcased Freddy Copilot in Build sophisticated custom copilots with Azure OpenAI Assistants API.
Featured in the Day 2 keynote, the fastest growing consumer experience in history, OpenAI, now offers enhanced features like GPTs for customizing ChatGPT with external knowledge and Assistants API for developers to create AI-powered assistants with scaled-up external knowledge integration using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Leveraging Azure AI Search, OpenAI API users can now upload 500 times more files, transforming it into a powerful retrieval system, solving significant present and future challenges.
Thank you
We are proud to celebrate the remarkable achievements of our customers at Microsoft Build 2024 and beyond. These examples underscore the transformative impact of Azure AI across various industries, showcasing how innovative solutions can revolutionize the way we act, think, and work.
As we continue to develop and support cutting-edge AI technologies, we are excited for even more groundbreaking advancements to come from our customers, driving the future of digital transformation and setting new standards for excellence. Together, we are shaping a smarter, more efficient, and more connected world.
Curious how your enterprise can unleash their potential with generative AI? With Azure, the opportunities are endless.