Build 2023: Microsoft Unleashes an AI Tsunami for Developers, Customers

Not surprisingly, AI is the focus at this year’s Build conference, and Microsoft has a lot to say on this topic for developers and its customers.

“In this new era of AI, where developers have even more choices, our focus is democratizing our advancements in AI to help developers be more productive, providing real tools and platforms to make developers’ lives easier, and delivering services they can use today to create tomorrow’s intelligent apps,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Microsoft Build showcases tools and services that developers can use now and with an eye toward the future. With AI dominating the conversation in the technology space, it only makes sense that it plays a key role in this year’s event.”

I’m struggling to make sense of all the news, but let’s dive in. Here are the key AI announcements that Microsoft made this morning on the opening day of Build 2023 that we aren’t covering elsewhere:

Azure AI. Microsoft’s Azure AI Service now has several new capabilities, including enhancements to the Azure OpenAI Service (now in preview), a new service called Azure AI Content Safety that will help businesses create safer online environments and communities, vector search for Azure Cognitive Search, new capabilities for Azure Cognitive Service for Language (now in preview), Document Translation in Language Studio (now generally available), new capabilities for Azure Machine Learning including preview support for foundation models, and more.

Microsoft Fabric. Now in preview, Microsoft Fabric combines capabilities from Power BI, Data Factory, and the next generation of Synapse into a unified software as a service (SaaS) offering that provides moder, AI-powered analytics capabilities that include including data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, applied observability, and business intelligence. Via Copilot integration (preview coming soon), Fabric will also be accessible via natural language and chat experiences that will generate code, generate queries, create AI plugins with low/no-code, enable custom Q&A, tailor semantics and components within the plugin, and deploy to Microsoft Teams, Power BI and web. Microsoft Fabric is based on a unified foundation called OneLake that I’ve not seen referenced before.

Responsible AI. Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator will soon let consumers verify whether an image or video was generated by AI. This capability is expected “in the coming months” and these products will use cryptographic methods to mark and sign AI-generated content with metadata about its origin.

Semantic Kernel. This open-source framework for creating AI apps uses state-of-the-art AI models along with skills, data and logic to help developers add intelligence to their apps the Semantic Kernel SDK. It includes an open-source Copilot Chat starter app that uses conversational interfaces to that leverages Memories (a way to inject business-specific context into AI prompts) and the Planner (enabling the AI to “goal seek”). The Semantic Kernel SDK now supports both C# and Python versions and is generally available.

LLM-powered Teams bots. Developers can now create custom LLM-powered Teams bots using the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio (in preview). These set of libraries provides a Teams-centric interface to large language models (LLMs) and user intent engines, which makes it easier to write and maintain custom conversational bot logic that integrates with LLMs.

Microsoft Dataverse improvements. Part of the Power Platform, the Microsoft Dataverse helps customers create turnkey data-to-app capabilities at scale, and it’s being updated with Excel to app (a way to integrate Excel data sources with drag and drop), custom PowerFx plug-ins, the ability to query Dataverse tables in Power Apps using SQL, and an IP firewall.

Co-pilot in Power Pages. Now in preview, Co-pilot for Power Pages helps users generate text, create complex forms, contextual chatbots and web page layouts, and create and edit image and site design themes using natural language input and intelligent suggestions. Microsoft describes it as “a digital web copy editor,” where users simply describe the kind of form needed and Copilot will build it and auto-generate tables in Dataverse. It also supports one-click chatbot activation, allowing users to quickly build entire websites.

Power Virtual Agents improvements. Power Virtual Agents are being updated with more AI capabilities, including dialog and action generation (in limited preview) and Azure conversational language understanding (CLU) integration (in preview), which lets customers use custom language models to create and map CLU intents and entities to Power Virtual Agents topics that can be used alongside prebuilt Power Virtual Agents entries. Conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents now feature SharePoint and OneDrive URLs, plus multi-turn conversations. There’s a new automated Teams Bot creation capability (in preview). And Copilot in Power Virtual Agents is now generally available.

Power Automate improvements. Power Automate gets its own Copilot (in preview), a refreshed cloud flow designer (in preview), a Custom actions SDK (in preview), work queues (in preview), “Describe it to design it” (now in preview), and Format data by examples, which is generally available.

Common AI plug-in model. In the same way that Microsoft’s embrace of the Chromium web browser underpinnings for Edge allowed it to take advantage of Chrome’s extensive extension ecosystem, the software giant is adopting the open plugin standard that OpenAI created for ChatGPT and using it across all of its Copilot offerings, including Bing Chat. This means that developers can build a single plug-in that works across ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot (preview) and Microsoft 365 Copilot (preview), and that existing ChatGPT plug-ins will just work with Microsoft’s Copilots. And the firm is expanding the available plug-ins for Bing to include Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin and Zillow, and others, in addition to the previously-available OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha.

Catalog in Power Apps. This new feature, now in preview, provides developers and makers with a place to publish and share the building blocks that underly their apps. The catalog can be maintained and governed by IT in keeping with their organization’s compliance and security policies.

AI training and documentation for developers. Developers interested in harnessing the power of AI can head over to Microsoft Learn and access a new wealth of training and documentation for topics like Azure OpenAI, Power Apps AI models, AI-powered chatbots created with Power Virtual Agents, GitHub Copilot, and much more.