Microsoft Ignite: AI capabilities double every six months

During his keynote presentation at the start of Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference in Chicago, CEO Satya Nadella discussed artificial intelligence (AI) scaling, through which the capabilities of the tech is doubling every six months.

“Just like Moore’s Law, we saw the doubling in performance every 18 months with AI. We have now started to see that doubling every six months or so,” he said. 

He believes a new scaling law will emerge for AI based on the amount of computational time needed to run AI inference. This ability to scale is leading to three major shifts in technological development, according to Nadella. 

The first is what he describes as a universal multimodal interface universal interface, which supports speech, images, videos, for both input and output.

Second, he said: “We have new reasoning and planning capabilities, essentially neural algebra to help solve complex problems and can detect patterns involving people, places and things. You can even find relationships between people, places and things using this new algebra.”

The third is what Nadella calls support for “long term memory-rich context”, adding: “If you put all these things together, you can build a very rich agentic world defined by this tapestry of AI agents, which can act on our behalf across our work and life across teams, business processes, as well as organisations.”

The company kicked off the Ignite event announcing previews of new AI capabilities. Among these is Copilot Actions, now in private preview, which is designed to enable anyone to automate everyday tasks in Microsoft 365 using simple prompts.

Microsoft also unveiled new agents in Microsoft 365, including a natural language AI assistant for Sharepoint for finding and querying content more quickly, and a new Teams agent provides what Microsoft describes as “real-time, speech-to-speech interpretation in meetings”. According to Microsoft, meeting participants will also have the option to have the agent simulate their personal voice.

Another new agent is for employee self-service. Available on Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat in private preview, this can be used to expedite answers for common policy-related questions and, according to Microsoft, simplifies action-taking on key HR and IT-related tasks, such as helping employees to understand their benefits or request a new laptop. The agent can be customised in Copilot Studio to meet an organisation’s unique needs.

Other agents in public preview take real-time meeting notes in Teams and automate project management from start to finish in Planner.

On the developer support side, Microsoft has introduced Azure AI Foundry, which it said gives customers access to all existing Azure AI services and tooling, plus new capabilities. Among these is the Azure AI Foundry software developer’s kit. Available in preview, this provides what Microsoft calls “a unified toolchain for designing, customising and managing AI apps and agents”.

According to Microsoft, the Azure AI Foundry provides enterprise-grade control and customisation. It offers 25 prebuilt app templates and can be accessed from familiar tools such as GitHub, Visual Studio and Copilot Studio.