Microsoft Corp. is dedicating this year’s virtual Microsoft Ignite 2021 conference starting today to showcase how its cloud technologies are at the cutting edge of digital transformation across organizations large and small.

The company is announcing more than 90 new products and services at this year’s event, focused on what it believes are four major new trends sweeping the business technology world.

In a blog post, Microsoft Communications Corporate Vice President Frank X. Shaw said Microsoft’s newest products and services are designed to optimize businesses for the new world of “hybrid work” and help customers to build a “hyperconnected business.” At the same time, Microsoft has ambitions to help every business become a digital business, while ensuring all of their data, assets and interests are protected with end-to-end security, Shaw said.

A key enabler of those new hybrid work and hyperconnectivity trends will be the so-called “metaverse,” a concept that has been popularized by Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg. In his post, Shaw defines the metaverse as a “persistent, digital world that is connected to many aspects of the physical world, including people, places and things.” He said the metaverse will be a place that enables shared experiences across both worlds, where people can adopt individual avatars and meet in a digital environment to collaborate on all kinds of projects.

Crucially, Shaw stressed that he believes there will be more than one metaverse that evolves, so it won’t necessarily be Facebook, now named Meta Platforms Inc., that dominates them all. Shaw points out that Microsoft already has a wide range of resources to power metaverses, including its “internet of things” capabilities that can be used to create digital twins of physical objects in the cloud. Others include Microsoft Mesh, which enables the creation of a “shared sense of presence on device,” Shaw said, and various artificial intelligence-based tools that can be used to create natural interactions through speech and vision machine learning models.

At Ignite 2021, Microsoft is announcing what Shaw says will become two more key elements of the metaverse. They include Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, now available in preview for users of Microsoft’s suite of customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning apps. Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces promises to deliver a new perspective on the way people move and interact in almost any space, such as the retail floor or factory floor, and how health and safety can be managed safely in hybrid work environments.

The second metaverse-enabling product announced today is Mesh for Microsoft Teams, described as a “bridging of communications methods” that makes human presence the ultimate connection, Shaw said. It thus becomes possible for everyone to be present in a team meeting even if they’re not physically at the location, through personalized avatars and immersive spaces that can be accessed from any device.

Nurturing AI breakthroughs

Microsoft is also pushing to help organizations integrate more advanced AI models in every aspect of their business. Shaw said a lot of progress has already been made with AI, and that some large-scale models have now effectively become platforms with “ambient intelligence” that are both responsive and aware of a user’s needs.

“These AI breakthroughs can be used by organizations in a variety of ways, from deploying intelligent agents to aid in customer service to extracting information from volumes of unstructured data,” Shaw said.

Companies still need help to do that, though, which is why Microsoft is announcing a new Azure OpenAI Service for select customers that provides access to powerful GPT-3 models for language understanding and generation, created by its partner OpenAI LLC. The service is at this time pretty experimental and for that reason is currently invitation only. Those select users will be give access to various tools to ensure the outputs of the models they train are business appropriate, and Shaw said Microsoft will monitor what customers are doing to ensure those models are being used correctly.

Building security with trust

Any hyperconnected business exploring the world of hybrid work will need reassure that its digital assets will stay secure, and Microsoft is responding to this by building what Shaw insists will be the “identity system of the future.”

The company envisions a system that will be able to connect and enable people, apps, devices and entire organizations to make real-time decisions safely and securely. The foundation of this “trust fabric,” as Shaw calls it, will be Azure Active Directory – the company’s cloud-based identity and access management service that now extends far beyond securing and managing access, to assisting processes across external collaboration tools.

At Ignite, Shaw said this trust fabric is being expanded with innovations including Teams Shared Channels, which makes it possible to invite an external team to join a channel within Teams, schedule shared meetings and collaborate on files. Also new is the Chat with Teams feature, which allows users to chat with Team’s users from outside their work network, while staying secure and adhering to their company’s compliance protocols.

A few other tidbits from Shaw included a mention of a new app that “moves freely across application, enabling teams to think, plan and create together,” called Microsoft Loop. With Loop, it will be possible to organize all of the files, links and data for a project from various applications, into a single workspace.

Also new is the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, which is a marketing tool that gives organizations greater control of customer data so they can personalize and automate customer journeys. Lastly, Shaw said there are new “Context IQ capabilities” coming to Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Teams will help to integrate collaboration, sharing and communications across all three platforms.

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