Microsoft Inspire 2023 Hero Announcements

Customers’ cloud adoption needs have rapidly evolved over the last couple of years. AI is here now and partners are already driving innovation and transformation with customers across industries to help them realize the benefits of integrating AI capabilities into every level of their organizations. The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program is how we are investing in partners to enable them to capitalize on the economic opportunities that Microsoft AI presents. 

Keep reading to learn more about this year’s Microsoft Inspire Hero Announcements and our commitment to accelerating AI transformation, driving customer success, and fueling partner business growth and profitability.  

Fueling partner growth and profitability in the era of AI 

We’re excited to announce the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of our partner program empowering every partner to deliver customer value leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud, as well as other key investments including new Solutions Partner designations, general availability of ISV Success and its expanded benefits, and investments in the commercial marketplace. To learn more, read the blog post by Nicole Dezen, Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Solutions. 

• The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program brings together everything across the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling. Partners get all the value and benefits of the previous program plus access to new offerings and benefits specific to AI. And there is no action for a partner to take to move to the new program—we’ve moved all our existing partners into the new program effective immediately and partners maintain their existing benefits and designations.   

• AI-focused announcements to help partners adopt technology to deliver customer success and in their own organization include: 

• Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate offerings: We announced an unprecedented 3x investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize and a new dedicated $100M investment in response to the incredible AI & Analytics demand—Azure Innovate. Now partners have everything they need in one place to be successful. More details below.  
• The new AI Transformation Playbook with guidance so partners can build their own AI practice. 
• The Build & Modernize AI Apps specialization for partners to demonstrate their deep technical expertise in building intelligent apps. 
• Expanded benefits for ISV Success, including access to GitHub Copilot (coming by end of 2023) so ISVs can use an AI pair programmer to spend less time on repetitive code and more time on building innovative applications. 

• Key marketing resources, including the new “Era of AI” marketing campaign in a box.  
• The Security Copilot design advisory council is a new way for partners who are interested in building their own solutions and services powered by Security Copilot to engage early with Microsoft. 

• We’re expanding Solutions Partner designations to provide opportunities for partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success. This includes a new training services designation for learning partners, ISV designations for partners building solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and our industry clouds, and a support services designation.  
• General availability of ISV Success within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program—a curated path purpose-built for organizations building B2B applications. ISV Success empowers all ISVs to build innovative applications across the Microsoft Cloud and sell with us through our marketplace. ISV Success provides free benefits for a year, such as Azure credits, GitHub and Visual Studio as well as Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 seats. Participants also get free technical consults to advise on architecture design, marketplace publishing, and accelerate business growth with proven marketing benefits. These investments are strategically aimed at helping ISVs meet customer needs, accelerate innovation, facilitate go-to-market strategies, and cultivate a thriving business environment. Read Anthony Joseph's blog post to learn more. 
• The Microsoft commercial marketplace is central to our partner go-to-market strategy. We recently aligned co-sell to marketplace to support our field sellers to sell alongside you and we continue to introduce new features, like multiparty private offers, empowering partners to come together to construct custom deals, and for eligible solutions, sales count towards a customer’s cloud commitment. 

• In FY24 the Industrial Metaverse (IMV) will be joining the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program as a new offering. We have a new industrial metaverse learning path curated for partners, and this is now available. This curated learning path includes content like how to use services like Azure Mixed Reality Services, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, the AI engineer certification for AI, and more.  

Announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing, and new AI capabilities across Microsoft 365 

We’re excited to share next steps in our journey to empower every person on the planet to work in a new AI-powered way.  

First, we’re announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, delivering AI-powered chat for work, and available in preview. Second, to help commercial customers plan, we're sharing that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be priced at $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers, when broadly available. To learn more, read the blog post by Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work. 

• Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. With Bing Chat Enterprise, user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the organization. What goes in—and comes out—remains protected. Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access—which means no one can view your data. And, your data is not used to train the models. Whether researching industry insights, analyzing data, or looking for inspiration, Bing Chat Enterprise gives people access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. Bing Chat Enterprise has rolled out in preview and is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium—which means that more than 160 million people already have access. And in the future, it will be available as a standalone offering for $5 per user, per month. Read the blog post by Jared Spataro and Yusuf Medhi to learn more. 

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing: Bing Chat Enterprise unlocks generative AI for work. And Microsoft 365 Copilot brings a whole new way of working, using just your own words. It reasons over all your business data in the context of your enterprise, including the ability to ask questions and get answers from the web. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers when broadly available.  
• New AI capabilities across Microsoft 365: We’re continuing to innovate across Microsoft 365 with new AI-powered capabilities to empower people however and wherever they work to be productive and engaged in new ways. 

• Copilot in Teams Phone will quickly generate summaries of phone conversations, capture action items, and answer your questions about their phone calls. When summarizing calls, Copilot will highlight key points, such as names, dates, and numbers, and can also recommend next steps based on the discussion.  
• Copilot in Teams Chat helps you quickly get up-to-speed and synthesize key information across all their Team chat threads.  
• Microsoft Viva updates include the launch of  Viva Glint, which will help customers understand employee engagement through organization-wide surveys and connected actions, and Viva Pulse, which helps managers and project leads get real-time, confidential feedback in the flow of work. 

• Windows 365 Frontline makes it easy and affordable to extend the power of Cloud PCs to frontline, shift, and part-time workers, enabling them to securely access their personalized Windows experience on any device no matter where they work. 
• Microsoft 365 Backup backs up and quickly restores an organization’s data to a prior point-in-time at unprecedented speeds after a catastrophic event or unforeseen data loss. Microsoft 365 Archive offers you a cost-effective, long-term storage of inactive or aging files that they still want to maintain for compliance or retention requirements. 

Reshaping the future of business with Microsoft Sales Copilot, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and new cloud migration program 

Since March when we introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot—the world’s first Copilot for both CRM and ERP—and Copilot in Power Platform, we’ve seen an incredible customer response from customers including Campari Group, Leatherman Tool Group, and Northrop & Johnson who are transforming how work is done, from the front office to the back office. Copilot assists employees wherever they are working, surfacing valuable business data and delivering business insights so they can focus on the most meaningful parts of their job. And with this momentum in AI, there has never been a better time for our customers to move to the cloud. Read the blog post by Emily He, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Marketing, to learn more. 

• Microsoft Sales Copilot, a role-based copilot designed for sellers, empowering them to increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction so they can close more deals. It is experienced in the applications where sellers work, whether that is Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems like Salesforce.  Since February, we’ve been adding new generative AI capabilities to help sellers be more productive with capabilities like email drafts and email thread summaries with sales-specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data. Within Teams, sellers receive coaching tips during meetings, helping them reply to customer inquiries, and meeting summaries with action items that are automatically converted to tasks in CRM, saving sellers time and personalizing customer interactions. These capabilities from Viva Sales are now part of Sales Copilot and available within Dynamics 365 Sales, along with new functionality like AI-generated opportunity summaries for sellers to quickly catch up on pipeline and meeting preparation which summarizes customer details, past interactions, and related news. Sales Copilot is generally available now both as a standalone subscription and included as part of customers’ existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise & Premium licenses at no additional cost. 

• The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights solution and new copilot capabilities: To help organizations increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalized customer journeys, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution. The new solution has a different pricing and licensing model and will be available to transact starting September 1, 2023. We are also announcing new copilot capabilities that will be in preview in August: use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys and easily style your email, forms, and event registration pages to perfectly match brand guidelines. 
• Introducing Microsoft AIM for the future program: a brand-new program that offers a tailored path for our customers to move from on-premises to cloud-first Dynamics 365 business applications. AIM (Accelerate, Innovate and Move) is a comprehensive offering that unlocks the potential of AI-powered business systems while reducing costs, providing agility for business model innovation, and operating securely with resilience. AIM provides access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, assessments, offers, tools, and support to give customers a faster route to innovation and success.  

Announcing Power Automate Process Mining and Power Platform licensing update 

We’re excited to announce new ways to simplify innovation by using AI on a single, cost-effective platform for all your low-code development. To learn more, read the blog post by Justin Graham, General Manager, Process Insights. 

• AI Powered Process Mining in Power Automate provides AI-powered insights that enable customers to optimize existing processes and drive efficiencies with low-code automation. Power Automate Process Mining offers two industry standard capabilities, task mining and process mining, that break down barriers that might make it difficult for an organization to identify inefficiencies in their workflows and where to improve. Process Mining includes functionality such as the Process Mining desktop app with advanced analytics and Power BI customization. Download the Partner Starter Guide.  

• More value than ever in your Power Platform licenses: With the general availability of Process Mining, Microsoft further expands its low-code offering, providing customers with not only the most complete hyper automation offering in the market, but the most comprehensive low-code platform including copilot in Microsoft Power Platform.   Customers are increasingly standardizing on Power Platform as their low-code platform to modernize at scale and build innovative solutions that amplify business value. To that end, we want to share changes that optimize our portfolio and align to our customers’ buying habits. The following updates will take effect on August 1st, 2023: 

• We are optimizing the Power Automate and Apps SKU lineups with a focus on Power Automate Premium per user and Power Apps Premium per user. 
• We are launching Process Mining in Power Automate Premium per user and announcing an add-on for additional capacity. 
• For the full details, read the announcement on the Power Platform Blog. 

Turn vision into impact with Microsoft Azure 

Organizations are turning to Microsoft and our partners to achieve efficiency by securely migrating and modernizing on Azure, maximizing value by optimizing cloud investments and innovating with agility by embracing technology. We are announcing new capabilities around our Azure technologies and investments to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize, along with the launch of Azure Innovate, an all-new dedicated investment we are making in response to the heightened demands for analytics and AI. Read the blog post by Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Azure & Industry, to learn more.  

• Meta Llama 2 models available on Azure AI: During Microsoft Inspire Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family of large language models on Azure. Llama 2 is a LLM designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered experiences. With the addition of Llama 2 to our Azure AI model catalog, we are providing our customers with more choice in the types of models they build on having previously announced support for Open AI, Hugging Face and many more. We are excited to be Meta’s preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time. Now customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and more safely on Azure.  
• Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate offerings: We announced an unprecedented 3X investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize and a new dedicated $100M investment in response to the incredible AI and analytics demand—Azure Innovate. These offerings are built to work together to address every customer’s end-to-end cloud journey on Azure. Whether customers are migrating to gain a secure and AI-ready foundation or are ready to build their own AI solutions—now you have everything you need in one place to be successful. For partners, these comprehensive offerings help them increase deal velocity and reduce time to value with funding that ranges from pre-to-post sales, like assessments, POCs and implementation right within Partner Center. Furthermore, with automated approvals, partners can go from nomination to customer approval in just minutes. 
• Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc: With Windows Server 2012/R2 and SQL Server 2014 end of support approaching, customers can remain protected by upgrading or using Extended Security Updates, available for free in Azure or purchasable for on-premises deployments. For customers who cannot meet the deadline, we are announcing Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, customers will be able to purchase and seamlessly deploy Extended Security Updates in on-premises or multi-cloud environments, right from the Azure portal.  
• Announcing the preview of Azure Boost: a new system that offloads virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS onto next-generation hardware infrastructure, delivering new levels of performance and security for your workloads. This marks a significant leap forward for Azure. With Boost, we provide remote storage throughput of up to 10GB/s and up to 400K IOPS, enabling the fastest storage workloads in the market today.   

• Azure AI momentum: We’re excited to showcase continued momentum for partners and customers:  

• Vector search in Azure Cognitive search, now available in preview, offers pure vector search, hybrid retrieval, and sophisticated reranking. Use vector search to create Generative AI applications that combine your own data with large language models, or to power novel semantic search scenarios such as image or audio search.  
• Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI Service work together, bringing powerful generative AI to document processing. With the Document Generative AI solution, you can ingest documents for report summarization, value extraction, knowledge mining, and new document content generation.  
• Whisper model, coming soon to Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Speech, offers capabilities to transcribe and translate audio content as well as produce high-quality batch transcriptions at scale. 
• We are also excited to announce new features in Azure AI Speech: Custom Neural Voice, now generally available, and Real-time Diarization in preview. 

The future of security with AI: Partner resources to support the customer journey  

Cybersecurity is one of the most pressing challenges of our times. There has never been a more important time for specialized cybersecurity expertise, and our partners are critical to preparing customers for the era of AI by deploying end-to-end security solutions. We are announcing ways for partners and customers to engage with Microsoft Security Copilot. Read the blog post by Vasu Jakkal and Alym Rayani to learn more. 

• Security Copilot Early Access Program: When Security Copilot was initially announced in March, the new solution was available via a private preview. We’re excited to announce that starting this fall, we will make Security Copilot accessible to more customers through our Early Access Program. 

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing updates 

Further, we have exciting updates for manufacturing and mobility customers and partners. To learn more, read the blog post by Dominik Wee, CVP for Manufacturing and Mobility. 

• The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is open for business and ready to tackle our customers' biggest challenges with a robust ecosystem of partner solutions, complemented by the security and scalability of the Microsoft Cloud. 
• ISV designation for manufacturing solutions: Within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program we are expanding Solutions Partner designations to provide opportunities for additional partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success. Coming in this fiscal year, ISV designations represents our commitment to bringing the best partner solutions to our customers and provides a way for customers to identify proven partner solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and our industry clouds. The designation validates that our partners’ solutions meet the high standards of data accessibility specific to our industry.  

Actions 

• Make the most of your partnership. Whether you’re building your first app, developing complex integrations, or exploring new services offerings, we offer opportunities to innovate, scale, and differentiate your business:  https://partner.microsoft.com/partnership/maximize-your-partnership. 

• Watch Microsoft Inspire sessions live and on demand and browse the session catalog to explore all the available learning opportunities: https://inspire.microsoft.com. 
• Build your technical skills. Access role-specific learning paths and build your skills on Microsoft products and solutions. Discover your path: https://partner.microsoft.com/training/training-center.   
• Achieve more with the commercial marketplace. Increase leads and grow revenue by publishing and selling your solutions in the commercial marketplace online catalog. Find out how: https://partner.microsoft.com/solutions/the-commercial-marketplace.   
• Sell with Microsoft. Create a winning sales strategy, scale your reach to global customers, and prepare for co-selling with Microsoft sellers: https://partner.microsoft.com/partnership/sell-with-microsoft.  
• Join the partner community. Connect with partners, find out about upcoming events, and crowdsource solutions: https://www.microsoftpartnercommunity.com/  

• Join ISV Success. https://www.microsoft.com/isv.