Microsoft

In April’s edition of The Monthly Tech-In, we celebrate 50 years of Microsoft innovation. 🎉 From Altair BASIC to AI-powered support from Microsoft 365 Copilot, we’ve had the opportunity to impact industries everywhere. The best part about it? The future is just getting started.

Before MedScribe, every letter was a race against the clock—24 hours to translate clinical notes into clear, compassionate care. In Virginia, Acentra Health tapped Azure OpenAI Service to build a generative AI tool that cuts writing time in half, saves thousands of nursing hours, and helps each nurse process up to 30 appeals a day—without losing the human touch. Now, the letters write themselves—almost.

It’s been a busy few weeks – between today’s earnings and some of our recent announcements. Here are a few things I wanted to highlight: We are riding multiple compounding S curves in pre-training, inference time, and systems design, driving model performance that is doubling every 6 months. Azure is the infrastructure layer for AI, optimized across every layer: DCs, silicon, systems software, and models to lower costs and increase performance. We are delivering more performance per megawatt, lower cost per token, and faster dock-to-live times. Frontier firms are incorporating AI into everyday workflows, transforming work and work artifacts. Microsoft 365 Copilot is now being used by hundreds of thousands of customers across industries, up 3X year-over-year. I’m especially excited about our new Researcher and Analyst agents, like having a highly trained expert on call 24/7. And our customers have created over 1 million agents of their own using SharePoint and Copilot Studio. On the consumer side: Our ad revenue surpassed $20 billion over the past year. Only at Microsoft could that almost get overlooked! LinkedIn continues to grow fast, with double-digit membership gains. And we again took share across Bing and Edge. And we are building daily engagement and successful sessions with our Copilot app, which got a big update earlier this month. And, yes, blocks can be stars: Minecraft weekly active users jumped 75% year-over-year after the movie release. You can read more about our results here: https://lnkd.in/gjWnuT9H

This week we released our 5th annual #WorkTrendIndex report—and the message is clear: intelligence is now on tap.      AI has become abundant, affordable, and capable of transforming how work gets done. With 82% of leaders saying they’ll use digital labor to expand capacity in the next 12–18 months, we’re seeing the rise of a new kind of organization: the Frontier Firm.      These are companies built on hybrid teams of humans and AI—able to scale expertise without scaling headcount, amplifying human strengths and unlocking productivity in entirely new ways.      This is one of the biggest shifts in modern work. And those who embrace it early will shape the future. Read more in my latest newsletter below.

At Microsoft, we firmly believe that Agents + Copilot + Human Ambition can deliver real AI differentiation for our customers.   As the role of agentic AI continues to grow, we are helping organizations across industries put the autonomous capabilities of an agent to work for their business to unlock AI opportunity and realize greater value. Our customers are building their own custom agents with the no-code, low-code features of Microsoft Copilot Studio to extend the capabilities of Copilot and deliver on the unique needs of their industry. Microsoft also offers the best prebuilt agent framework right out-of-the-box, including Sales Agent and general purpose reasoning agents like Researcher and Analyst.   I invite you to take a look back on the quarter to see how agents are driving pragmatic AI innovation for our customers by increasing productivity, creating capacity across every role and function, and improving business processes. You can read my latest earnings blog to learn more: https://lnkd.in/gsvWDVTW   There is immense potential for agents to drive AI-first differentiation, and I look forward to partnering with you to accelerate your AI Transformation journey.

Winning the quantum race will require us to deploy and reinvest in our greatest American strengths: our intellect, our curiosity, and our drive to innovate and build. We propose three strategic actions to ensure our competitive edge in the face of intense global competition. https://aka.ms/Quantum2025

Big day for Microsoft 365 Copilot: I’m really excited about our latest update. Copilot has truly become the UI for AI – and for me, it’s the scaffolding for my workday. Here are four new features I’ve especially been enjoying: 1) Agents: Our new Researcher and Analyst agents have become my go-to 24/7 experts. I use them all the time. With Researcher, the multi-step reasoning aggregates and synthesizes information from the web and all enterprise data and creates super insightful reports on any topic or project. And Analyst can turn raw data across multiple sources into deep insights, forecasts or a great visualization. With our new Agent Store, you can easily find a range of additional agents from our many partners too. And with Copilot Studio you can create your own agents. It’s as straightforward as creating a Word doc or Excel sheet. 2) Notebooks: With Web + Work + Pages, you can ideate with AI and collaborate with other people. It has entirely changed my workflow. And now with Notebooks, I can organize all of my heterogeneous data for a project, whether it’s Pages, docs, websites, team meetings – and Copilot will ground itself just on that content. And this might be the best part: I can turn it all into a new modality like an audio overview. For example, I can collect all the latest things I’m reading about agents and agent frameworks, and then I can listen to it. 3) Search: We have added new comprehensive search capability that spans all your apps, including third-party sources from ServiceNow to Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, Jira, and more, breaking down silos across the enterprise. Search brings back both a Copilot answer, as well as all of the source data from all of these artifacts. 4) Create: This one is fun. Turn a PowerPoint into an explainer video, or generate an image from a prompt in Copilot with just a few clicks. We’ve also added new features to make Copilot even more personalized to you, plus a redesigned app built for human-agent collaboration. Learn more about our update here: https://lnkd.in/g_FGnKZA

Big day for Microsoft 365 Copilot: I’m really excited about our latest update. Copilot has truly become the UI for AI – and for me, it’s the scaffolding for my workday. Here are four new features I’ve especially been enjoying: 1) Agents: Our new Researcher and Analyst agents have become my go-to 24/7 experts. I use them all the time. With Researcher, the multi-step reasoning aggregates and synthesizes information from the web and all enterprise data and creates super insightful reports on any topic or project. And Analyst can turn raw data across multiple sources into deep insights, forecasts or a great visualization. With our new Agent Store, you can easily find a range of additional agents from our many partners too. And with Copilot Studio you can create your own agents. It’s as straightforward as creating a Word doc or Excel sheet. 2) Notebooks: With Web + Work + Pages, you can ideate with AI and collaborate with other people. It has entirely changed my workflow. And now with Notebooks, I can organize all of my heterogeneous data for a project, whether it’s Pages, docs, websites, team meetings – and Copilot will ground itself just on that content. And this might be the best part: I can turn it all into a new modality like an audio overview. For example, I can collect all the latest things I’m reading about agents and agent frameworks, and then I can listen to it. 3) Search: We have added new comprehensive search capability that spans all your apps, including third-party sources from ServiceNow to Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, Jira, and more, breaking down silos across the enterprise. Search brings back both a Copilot answer, as well as all of the source data from all of these artifacts. 4) Create: This one is fun. Turn a PowerPoint into an explainer video, or generate an image from a prompt in Copilot with just a few clicks. We’ve also added new features to make Copilot even more personalized to you, plus a redesigned app built for human-agent collaboration. Learn more about our update here: https://lnkd.in/g_FGnKZA

A great example of what's possible when someone connects their passion with their purpose to make a real difference.   DxGPT, a rare disease diagnostic tool, is now live, showing how AI can be applied to truly improve lives.

This #EarthDay, I’m reflecting on how materials, like single-use plastic packaging, forgotten left-over food, or electronics, impact our environment when they become waste. When waste is not properly managed, it can pollute our land, clog our waterways, and deplete our natural resources. And unfortunately, only 7.2% of the 100 billion tons of materials the world consumes annually is cycled back into the economy. That's why we've embraced a circular economy framework to reach our zero waste goal by 2030, reducing the materials wherever possible, then prioritizing reuse and recovery. Small changes can drive big impact, and I'm excited to announce that we have met two of our waste goals ahead of schedule: ✅90.9% of datacenter servers and components were reused or recycled in 2024 one year early! Thanks to our Circular Centers and recycler partnerships, we tracked materials through the entire process, ensuring only material that was truly reused or recycled—not just collected—was counted toward our goal. ✅85.3% of construction and demolition waste was diverted from landfills and incinerators in 2024, exceeding our 75% diversion target. We reached this goal in part by implementing onsite material sorting to increase reuse and recycling. Our Circular Economy lead, Alessandra Pistoia, and I share insights into our zero waste strategy that helped us reach these milestones—and more—in a special Sustainably Speaking newsletter. Plus, we’ve released a new policy brief the focuses on electronic products and the important role the public policy can play in reducing waste and advancing circularity. https://msft.it/6044SGvK8