Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kickstarts Microsoft Ignite 2022

New Delhi : Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella painted a future where businesses and people could do more with less as AI helped to unlock benefits that freed people for more productive work at its flagship Ignite 2022 event on Wednesday.

“When it comes to doing more with less, AI is the ultimate amplifier,” Nadella said during his presentation that was attended by 200,000 people virtually and 7,500 people from satellite locations globally.

For those who have always dreamt of a future where machines did most of their work, the slew of launches that Microsoft announced — some slated for this year and some for later – gave a glimpse into what that future could look like. There is no going back, Nadella said in his address.

AI is now in newer areas like creative design, content, making coding and automation more accessible, and Nadella extended the vision of ‘low code, no code’ and making programming accessible to a wider audience through intelligent automation.

During the event, Satya walked through five key imperatives for every organization:

• Be data-driven and optimize with Azure
• Deliver efficiency with automation and AI
• Innovate with a cloud developer platform
• Reenergizing your workforce
• Protect everything, everyone, everywhere

Here are some key announcements from the event:

Infrastructure that works for every customer.

• Helping customers embrace cloud technologies as the path toward digital and business resilience, Azure Cosmos DB has added support for PostgreSQL, so developers can leverage the speed, scale, and performance of Azure Cosmos DB; while new functionality supports AKS on-premises or at the edge with Azure Arc, and Azure public multi-access edge compute available November 2022 will help operators like AT&T deliver 5G in U.S. cities. Supporting quick iteration and faster go-to-market, we’re introducing Visual Studio images for Microsoft Dev Box in preview to give developers with cloud-based, ready-to-code workstations.

Harnessing the power of AI.

• New enterprise AI capabilities designed to empower people and save time and money include DALL·E 2 in Azure OpenAI Service, available by invitation only, for creating images from text and bringing visual concepts to life in a responsible way; new flow tools in Power Platform for automating repetitive business processes; and content AI by Microsoft Syntex in Microsoft 365 for extracting action-driven insights from documents. We’re also making conversation intelligence free for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and the newly released Viva Sales and end-to-end document processing with no code required powered by AI Builder and Power Automate.

Helping organizations thrive in the new world of work.

• Using intelligence to optimize where work happens, we’re introducing Microsoft Places to help address the unique challenges of hybrid work, as well as AI-powered features to automate meeting tasks, including intelligent recap in Teams. Cisco is now a Teams Rooms Certified Devices partner, and we’re introducing Edge Workspaces in the Edge browser, so everyone working together on a project can view the same websites and files in one place as a shared set of browser tabs.

Comprehensive security means helping protect everyone wherever they choose to work.

Helping to build a safer world together and enabling customers to maximize security investments, the new Defender for DevOps allows organizations to secure applications as they are being built, while Power Platform Managed Environments lets IT admins maintain governance and security capabilities over low-code implementations, and Microsoft Entra introduces identity and access management solutions designed to securely work across multiple clouds.