2024 release wave 1: New copilot features to enhance Microsoft Industry Clouds capabilities

Microsoft Industry Clouds continue to bring new innovations that provide significant capabilities to transform your business. The current 2024 release wave 1 contains several new features across Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit.

During this wave, we’ve invested heavily in the development of copilot templates to enhance capabilities and integration across various industries. These customizable templates offer improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and seamless integration with existing technology, all while supporting a diverse, global customer base. Copilots are valuable assets for Microsoft Industry Clouds customers, helping to drive customer and partner success. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends our offerings, with systems integrators and independent software vendors enabling factory data ingestion from different systems and building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Microsoft Azure AI.

Here’s a look at what’s been delivered since the release plans announcement in January 2024.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is introducing new solutions in preview to optimize factory operations. These include manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and a copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions enable manufacturers to ingest and unify data from diverse sources, standardize and enrich data for seamless interoperability, and utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization by unifying information and operation technology data into an open and secure data platform. The copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI enhances responsiveness and streamlines communication across teams and roles.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

This release of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture includes new copilot templates that can empower organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. These templates provide a powerful tool for organizations to use generative AI and data to optimize their operations and engage better with their customers. Customers are bringing generative AI to life for farmers. ITC, a multi-industry enterprise, has created, Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot, developed using Microsoft copilot templates. With this application, ITC seeks to empower farmers by providing them with timely and relevant information that can boost productivity, increase profitability, and enhance climate resilience.

Copilot templates can support use cases based on tillage, planting, crop protection, harvesting, and other types of farm operations. Users can submit queries such as “show me active fields” or “what is the average yield for my field?”. These use cases can help input providers to plan equipment, seeds, applications, and related services and engage better with the farmer.

Using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and other sources, copilots can provide insights on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts, and harvest windows. Enabling seamless retrieval of data and allowing for plugins, embedded data structures, and subprocesses to be selected as part of the query flow allows organizations to extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a solution that helps public sector organizations use the public cloud and advanced technologies while helping meet security, sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty introduces updates and new features to streamline the configuration and deployment of sovereign environments. Guardrails and codified architectures reduce complexity and make the process of building sovereign environments more predictable and repeatable. New preview tools include assessment, policy compiler, and drift detection analysis tools, as well as a new Azure service that allow users to create and deploy Sovereign Landing Zones (SLZs) within the Microsoft Azure Portal. Guidance includes sample reference architectures for using large language models (LLMs) and Azure OpenAI Service with SLZ, as well as guidance on workload migrations and Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse configurations.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

In February 2024, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability announced new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Fabric, providing new levels of speed and efficiency in processing data to help drive faster progress toward sustainability goals. These new features include sustainability data solutions in Fabric and natural language queries with Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, among other AI-powered features now available in preview.

In March 2024, new features were added to Sustainability Manager, including the ability to create calculation models with Copilot using natural language input, a dedicated energy data model to help track energy usage, activity to emissions traceability to link underlying source activity data to emissions records, and the ability to create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import.

Additional release updates to Cloud for Sustainability include enhancements to environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights with what-if analysis to help organizations build the relationship between forecasting and reduction goal planning. Users can link forecasts to existing goals to track actual progress alongside the projected ones. In addition, forecasts with the same historical data can be layered onto a single view, allowing for faster analysis of optimal reduction opportunities.

Another new feature is the ability to import and calculate with product carbon footprint data. This feature allows you to use product carbon footprint data to calculate and understand value chain emissions in Sustainability Manager more easily. Organizations can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a product family and more easily import and manage this data within Sustainability Manager.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is expanding geo availability, adding the Australia east region. This additional region is enabled for both the standard and developer tiers of Azure Data Manager for Energy. Users can now select “Australia east” as a preferred region when creating an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource using the Azure portal.

External data sources (EDS) (preview) allow data from external data sources aligned with the OSDU® Technical Standard to be shared with an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource. EDS is designed to pull specified data (metadata) from OSDU-compliant data sources through scheduled jobs while leaving associated dataset files (such as LAS and SEG-Y) stored at the external source for retrieval on demand.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail now includes new features in its retail data solutions architecture, an industry-specific workload for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be easily configured. Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized partners are available. These capabilities enable the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can’t be achieved in isolation.

One of the new features is the copilot capabilities in Fabric, which bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Fabric and Microsoft Power BI. Another new feature is the Sitecore OrderCloud data connector, which can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Fabric in real time. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to the retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort and accelerating time to insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The 2024 release wave 1 also brings new features and innovations to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. One of the new features is the ability to improve clinical and operational insights by ensuring health data is accessible across provider, payor, and pharma; and facilitating clinical, operational, and performance analytics using healthcare data solutions in Fabric (preview).

Some other new features in the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include support for additional data storage needs, support for availability zones for Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, FHIRLink Power Platform connector, and the ability to use the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) service with Azure Data Lake integration.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is proud to announce the April 2024 release for Fundraising and Engagement. This release brings significant enhancements, mainly to nonprofit gift processors, including valuable enhancements to Fundraising and Engagement Azure services and new Stripe API (payment intents) integration. Customers who rely on Stripe for their payment processing can now benefit from the latest Stripe APIs, addressing the requests of current customers and the requirements of future customers. It is highly recommended that customers upgrade and use the new Stripe API when creating a payment processor associated to a configuration profile. For more details, read more here.   

Learn more about Microsoft Industry Clouds

• Official Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing documentation
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability documentation
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Retail documentation
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit documentation