The age of AI transformation

The following is adapted from my remarks at Microsoft Build this morning. 

We’ve always been a platform company, and our goal is to build the most complete end-to-end stack—from infrastructure, to foundation models, to data, to developer tools, to extensibility—so you can apply the power of this new generation of AI to build your own applications.

Over the past year, we’ve built three new platforms:

We introduced Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion, which puts knowledge and expertise at your fingertips and helps you act on it.

We delivered the Copilot stack, so you can build your own AI applications.

Yesterday, we launched Copilot+ PCs, the fastest, most AI-ready PCs ever built. And today, we are introducing the Windows Copilot Runtime to make Windows the best platform for AI applications:

And that's just the first of many things we announced today at Build, spanning the entirety of our tech stack.

Infrastructure  

We have the most complete, scalable infrastructure for this AI era. We are building Azure as the world’s computer, with more than 60 data center regions around the globe, and we continue to expand with a focus on sustainability. We’re on track to meet our goal to have our data centers powered by 100% renewable energy by next year. 

At the heart of our AI infrastructure are the world’s most advanced AI accelerators. Our deep partnership with NVIDIA spans the entire Copilot stack across hardware and software. When it comes to AMD, we are the first cloud to deliver the general availability of VMs based on AMD’s MI300X accelerator. And we continue to move forward with Azure Maia. Our first clusters are live, and Maia hardware will soon be used to serve prompts originating from Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service. 

Beyond AI, our end-to-end systems optimization also makes cloud-native development better. Today we announced the public preview of Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs. Cobalt is already being used for video processing and permissions management in Microsoft 365, helping power billions of conversations on services like Microsoft Teams.

Foundation models 

With Azure AI, we offer the broadest selection of frontier and open-source models, including LLMs and SLMs, so you can choose the model that makes the most sense for your unique needs. 

It all starts with our strategic partnership with OpenAI. As OpenAI innovates, our promise is that we will bring all that innovation to Azure, too. In fact, GPT-4o, their flagship multimodal model, is now available in Azure AI Studio. It has text, audio, image, and video as input and output, and it can respond and have a human-like conversation that’s fast and fluid. It can even be interrupted mid-sentence.  

One of the coolest things is that now, any app or any website can essentially be turned into multimodal, conversational canvas:

We also want to support the broadest set of models from every country, in every language. That’s why we’re bringing models from Cohere, G42, NTT Data, Nixtla, as well as many more to Azure AI. 

And we aren’t stopping there. We’re also leading the small language model revolution. Our Phi-3 family of SLMs is the most capable and cost effective available. They outperform models of the same size or the next size up, across a variety of benchmarks. 

And today we are adding new models to the Phi-3 family, including Phi-3-vision, Phi-3-small, and Phi-3-medium. With Phi, you can build apps that span the web, Android, iOS, Windows, and the edge. They can take advantage of local hardware when available and fall back on the cloud when not. 

One exciting use case is in education. And today, I’m thrilled to announce a new partnership with Khan Academy. We’ll be working together to use Phi-3 to make math tutoring more accessible. And I’m also excited to share that they’ll be making Khanmigo, their AI assistant, free to all U.S. teachers: 

Of course, it’s about more than just models. It’s also about the tools you need to build these experiences. With Azure AI Studio, we provide an end-to-end tooling solution to develop and safeguard the copilots you build, as well as tooling and guidance to evaluate your AI models and applications for performance and quality. And I’m excited to announce that Azure AI Studio is now generally available.  

It includes built-in support for what is perhaps the most important feature in this age of AI: AI safety. And today we are adding new capabilities, including custom categories, so that you can create unique filters for prompts and completions with rapid deployment options. 

Data 

Ultimately, in order to train, finetune, and ground your models, you need your data to be in shape. And to do so, we are building out the full data estate, from operational stores to analytics in Azure. We’ve also added AI capabilities to all of our operational stores, whether it’s Cosmos DB, SQL, or PostgreSQL. 

With Fabric, you get everything you need in a single SaaS platform. It’s deeply integrated at the most fundamental level with unified compute and storage, unified experiences, unified governance, and a unified business model.  

And what’s also great about Fabric is that it works with data anywhere, not just on Azure, but on AWS, GCP, and even on-premises. And today, we are taking the next step by introducing real-time intelligence in Fabric: 

Developer tools 

Nearly 50 years after our founding as a developer tools company, here we are, once again, redefining software development. GitHub Copilot was the first hit product of this generative AI age, and today it’s the most widely adopted AI developer tool. 

And with Copilot Workspace, staying in your flow has never been easier. We are an order of magnitude closer to a world where any person can go from idea to code in an instant. You start with an issue. It creates a spec based on its deep understanding of your code base. It then creates a plan, which you can execute to generate the code across the full repo. At every point in this process—from issue, to spec, to plan, to code—you are in control. 

And today, we are taking another big leap forward by bridging the broader developer tools and services ecosystem with Copilot with GitHub Copilot extensions. Now, you can customize GitHub Copilot with capabilities from third-party services like Docker, Sentry, and many others. We have a new extension for Azure, too: GitHub Copilot for Azure. You can instantly deploy to Azure to get information about Azure resources, just using natural language. Today, we showed all of this in action:  

Microsoft Copilot 

We built Microsoft Copilot to help you tap into the world’s knowledge, as well as the knowledge inside of your organizations, and act on it. 

Copilot has had a remarkable impact. It’s democratizing expertise across organizations and having a cascading effect that reminds me of the very beginning of the PC era, when work, work artifacts, and workflow were all changing.  

With Copilot Studio, you can now extend Copilot or customize it for your business processes and workflows. And we are introducing connectors in Copilot Studio, so you can ground Copilot with data from across the Microsoft Graph, Power Platform, Fabric, and Dataverse, as well as third-party SaaS apps. 

We’re also extending Copilot beyond a personal assistant to become a team assistant, with Team Copilot. You’ll be able to invoke it wherever you collaborate—in Teams, Loop, Planner, and more. Think of it as your meeting facilitator—creating agendas, tracking time, taking notes for you—or as an active collaborator, writing chats, surfacing the most important information, tracking action items, and addressing unresolved issues. 

And with new updates Copilot Studio, anyone can now build Copilots that have agent capabilities:  

Critical to all that we announced today is security.  

We’re committed to our Secure Future Initiative, and in the coming months, you will see us make rapid progress against its six pillars and its three core principles: secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations. This work underlies everything we build and everything we do. 

At the end of the day, it’s not about innovation that is only useful for a few. It’s about really being able to empower everyone. And it comes down to all of you as developers and builders of this new world.  

For us, it’s never about celebrating tech for tech’s sake. It’s about celebrating what we can do with technology to create magical experiences that make a real difference in our countries, in our companies, and in our communities.  

Already, this new generation of AI is having an incredible impact, thanks to all of you and the passion you bring and the hard work you put in. And I want to leave you with this one unbelievable example of how you’re all building a more accessible world using our platform and tools: