This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of work, creating new opportunities and challenges for businesses and workers alike. According to a recent report by Microsoft and PwC, AI could boost the UK economy by £232 billion by 2030, but it also requires a significant upskilling of the workforce to ensure that everyone can benefit from it.
If you are a technology student or a young professional who wants to develop AI skills and prepare for the future of work, here are some tips and resources that can help you: The Microsoft UK AI & Copilot Skills Challenge starts February 20, 2024 at 8:00 AM (8:00) GMT and ends on March 31, 2024 at 23:00 PM (11pm) GMT.
Learn the basics of AI and its applications. AI is a broad field that encompasses many subdomains, such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and more. To get started, you can take online courses, such as Microsoft Learn, edX, or Coursera, that cover the fundamentals of AI and how it can be used to solve real-world problems. You can also explore Learn AI Microsoft Resources learning paths and hands-on labs for various AI scenarios and communities.
Get hands-on experience with AI tools and platforms. To apply your AI knowledge and skills, you need to familiarize yourself with the tools and platforms that enable you to build, deploy, and manage AI solutions. For example, you can use Azure AI Studio, a cloud-based service that provides a comprehensive set of AI capabilities, such as cognitive services, machine learning, and conversational AI. You can also use Power Platform, a low-code/no-code platform that allows you to create AI-powered apps, workflows, and chatbots without writing code.
Join AI communities and events. One of the best ways to learn and grow your AI skills is to connect with other AI enthusiasts and experts, who can offer you guidance, feedback, and inspiration. You can join online or local AI communities, such as the Gobal AI Community, where you can network, share ideas, and collaborate on projects. You can also attend AI events, where you can hear from industry leaders, discover the latest trends, and showcase your work.
Keep up with the ethical and social implications of AI. As AI becomes more pervasive and powerful, it also raises important ethical and social questions, such as how to ensure fairness, accountability, transparency, and human dignity in AI systems. To be a responsible AI practitioner, you need to be aware of these issues and how to address them in your work. You can read books, articles, and reports, such as The Future Computed, AI Ethics, or Responsible AI, that explore the ethical and social dimensions of AI. You can also take courses, that teach you how to design and implement AI solutions that align with ethical principles and social values.
AI is a fast-growing and exciting field that offers many opportunities for technology students and professionals. By following these tips and resources, you can develop AI skills that will help you succeed in the future of work. Remember, AI is not only about technology, but also about people, society, and the world. So, be curious, be creative, and be ethical, and you will be ready to make a positive impact with AI.
Learn and develop essential AI and Copilot skills with the UK AI Skills Challenge
Get ahead with immersive and curated AI, Generative AI and Copilot training content across Microsoft products and services with four engaging themed challenges. Once you complete a challenge, you will receive a Microsoft UK AI & Copilot Skills Challenge badge of completion. For more info refer to the official rules.
As you progress through the challenges, you’ll have the chance to explore additional experiences tailored to your learning preferences and goals. Join the vibrant technical community in your local region, attend live sessions, build a powerful network, and build in-demand AI skills for today’s job market.
Generative AI
This challenge focused on understanding Generative AI and Large Language Models. Discover the fundamentals of generative AI and get started with Azure OpenAI Service. You’ll learn more about prompt engineering, generating code with Azure OpenAI Services, large language models, and prompt flow to develop large language model apps.
This challenge is tailored for IT Pro Administrators seeking to leverage Copilot for Microsoft 365 effectively in their work environments. The series of modules covers a range of topics from basic introductions to advanced management techniques, ensuring a comprehensive learning experience.
This challenge is tailored for developers who want to learn how to build apps for Microsoft Teams and get to know Microsoft Copilot Studio. It includes a series of modules that will give you practical experience and valuable knowledge about creating, launching, and improving apps on these platforms.
Machine learning is at the core of artificial intelligence, and many modern services depend on predictive machine learning models. Learn how to use Azure Machine Learning to create and publish models without writing code. You’ll also explore the various developer tools you can use to interact with the workspace.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are pleased to announce the security review for Microsoft Edge, version 122!
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 122 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement. The Microsoft Edge version 117 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from theMicrosoft Security Compliance Toolkit.
Microsoft Edge version 122 introduced 4 new computer settings and 4 new user settings. We have included a spreadsheet listing the new settings in the release to make it easier for you to find them.
As a friendly reminder, all available settings for Microsoft Edge are documentedhere, and all available settings for Microsoft Edge Update are documentedhere.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Welcome to the first edition of What’s new in Copilot for Microsoft 365. We are continuing to enhance Copilot to provide deeper experiences for users and tighter integration with your organization’s data to unlock even more capabilities. Whether you’re a Microsoft 365 admin for a large enterprise or smaller company or someone who uses Copilot for Microsoft 365 for their daily work, every month we’ll highlight updates to let you know about new and upcoming features and where you can find more information to help make your Copilot experience a great one. In addition to these monthly posts, we’ll continue to provide updates through our usual message center posts and on our public roadmap.
Today, we are highlighting Copilot support in 17 additional languages, expanded resources and coming features in Copilot Lab, the updated Copilot experience in Teams, Copilot in the Microsoft 365 mobile app, and a new feature that provides a single entry point to help you create content from scratch. We’ll also take a look at updates to Copilot in OneDrive, Stream, and Forms plus a new feature that generates content summaries when you share files with coworkers. Finally, we’ll share a bit on what’s new in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Usage report for admins. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month:
Experience Copilot support for more languages
Begin your Copilot journey and build new skills with Copilot Lab
Copilot now available in the Microsoft 365 mobile app
Introducing Copilot in Forms
Extract information quickly from your files with Copilot in OneDrive
Include quick summaries when sharing documents
Get instant video summaries and insights with Copilot in Stream
Try new ways of working with Help me create
Draft emails quicker and get coaching tips for your messages with Copilot in classic Outlook for Windows
Experience the new Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams
Check out the improved usage reports for Microsoft Copilot in the admin center
Catch up on the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Tech Accelerator
Experience Copilot support for more languages
We are adding support for an additional 17 languages, further expanding access to Copilot worldwide. We will start rolling out Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian over March and April. Copilot is already supported in the following languages: English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN), Spanish (ES, MX), Japanese, French (FR, CA), German, Portuguese (BR), Italian, and Chinese Simplified. Check the public roadmap and message center to track roll out status.
Copilot in Excel (preview) is currently supported in English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN) and will be supported in Spanish (ES, MX), Japanese, French (FR, CA), German, Portuguese (BR), Italian, and Chinese Simplified starting in March.
Begin your Copilot journey and build new skills with Copilot Lab
Copilot Lab helps users get started with the art of prompting and helps organizations with onboarding and adoption by providing a single experience that meets Copilot users where they are in their journey. Today, we’re expanding Copilot Lab by transforming the current prompts library into a comprehensive learning resource that helps everyone begin their Copilot journey with confidence and to take greater advantage of Copilot in their daily work.
Start your Copilot journey with ease. We’ve learned from our earliest Copilot adopters that working with generative AI requires new skills and habits. Copilot Lab already shows up in Copilot for Microsoft 365, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote via the small notebook icon that suggests relevant prompts to inspire you. Now, we have consolidated our best resources, training videos, ready-made prompts, and inspiration to make Copilot Lab the single resource to help you get started. To do this, we’ve brought together our own internal best practices, insights from our earliest customers, findings from the Microsoft Research team, and thought leadership published on WorkLab.
Achieve more together by sharing your favorite prompts. With Copilot Lab, we are making it even easier to create, save, and share your favorite prompts with colleagues inside your organization. Now you can share prompts with colleagues to prepare for a customer meeting or to generate ideas for a new product launch. And leaders across your organization can showcase how they’re using Copilot by sharing their favorite prompts to save time or tackle any task at hand, to help improve personal and team productivity and encourage community-centric learning and adoption. This feature is integrated into the Copilot Lab website and in-app experiences will begin rolling out by this summer.
You can access Copilot Lab today at copilot.cloud.microsoft/prompts or directly in app by selecting the notebook icon next to the Copilot prompt window.
Copilot now available in the Microsoft 365 mobile app
We’re extending Copilot to the Microsoft 365 mobile app and to the Word and PowerPoint mobile apps. With the new Microsoft 365 app look and feel, you can easily find Copilot alongside your content, apps, and shortcuts. You can use it to:
Bring your content into Copilot to complete tasks on the go. Summarize documents, translate, explain, or ask questions, and have your answer grounded in the content you select.
Start generating content wherever you work based on your ideas and existing information, and hand over to Microsoft 365 mobile apps to continue working.
Interact with Copilot in Word mobile and PowerPoint mobile to comprehend content better and skim through only the most important slides on the go (requires a Copilot license).
The Microsoft 365 mobile app complements the Copilot mobile app rolled out earlier this month, and licensed users can continue to use the Copilot mobile app to have responses grounded in both web or work data. IT admins can easily deploy both the Microsoft 365 mobile app and the Copilot mobile app to corporate devices using Microsoft Intune or a third-party tool, or users can simply download the Microsoft 365 mobile app on any supported device and sign in.
Copilot integration in the Microsoft 365 mobile app and the Word and PowerPoint mobile apps is rolling out now. You can learn more here.
The iOS layout of the Microsoft 365 mobile app, showing Copilot available on the taskbar.
Create compelling surveys, polls, and forms with Copilot in Forms
Use Copilot to simplify the process of creating surveys, polls, and forms, saving you time and effort. Go to forms.microsoft.com, select New, and tell Copilot your topic, length, and any additional context. Copilot will provide relevant questions and suggestions, and then you can refine the draft by adding extra details, editing text, or removing content. Once you’ve created a solid draft with Copilot, you can then customize the background with one of the many Forms style options. With Copilot in Forms, you’ll effortlessly create well-crafted forms that capture your audience’s attention, leading to better response rates.
An image of a form draft with Copilot prompts displayed
Extract information quickly from your files with Copilot in OneDrive
Copilot in OneDrive gives you instant access to information contained deep within your files. Initially available from the OneDrive web experience, Copilot will provide you with smart and intuitive ways to interact with your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and files. You can use Copilot in OneDrive to:
Get information from your files: Ask questions about your content using natural language, and Copilot will fetch the information from your files, saving you the work and time of manually searching for what you need.
Generate file summaries: Need a quick overview of a file? Copilot can summarize the contents of one or multiple files, offering you quick insights without having to even open the file.
Find files using natural language: Find files in new ways by using Copilot prompts such as “Show me all the files shared with me in the past week” or “Show files that Kat Larson has commented in.”
Alt text: Video showing Copilot in OneDrive with a prompt to extract information from a collection of resumes.
Include quick summaries when sharing documents
Add Copilot-generated summaries when you share documents with your colleagues. These summaries, included in the document sharing notification, give your recipients immediate context around a document and a quick overview of its content without needing to open the file. Sharing summaries helps users prioritize work, increases engagement, and reduces cognitive burden.
Sharing summaries will be available in March 2024, starting when sharing a Word document from the web, with support in the desktop client and the mobile app later this year. Learn more here.
GIF showing AI-generated sharing summary when sharing a Microsoft Word doc.
Get instant video summaries and insights with Copilot in Stream
By using Copilot in Microsoft Stream, you can quickly get the information you need about videos in your organization, whether you’re viewing the latest Teams meeting recording, town hall, product demo, how-to, or onsite videos from frontline workers. Copilot helps you get what you need from your videos in seconds. You can use it to:
Summarize any video and identify relevant points you need to watch
Ask questions to get insights from long or detailed videos
Locate when people, teams, or topics are discussed so you can jump to that point in the video
Identify calls to action and where you can get involved to help
Copilot in Stream can quickly summarize a video or answer your questions about the content in the video. Alt text: Screen shot showing Copilot in Microsoft Stream.
Try new ways of working with Help me create
In March, we’re rolling out a new Copilot capability in the Microsoft 365 web app that helps you focus on the substance of your content while Copilot suggests the best format: a white paper, a presentation, a list, an icebreaker quiz, and so on. In the Microsoft 365 app at microsoft365.com, simply tell Help me create what you want to work on and it will suggest the best app for you and give you a boost with generative AI suggestions. Learn more here.
Help me create dialog box in the foreground, with the Microsoft 365 web app create screen in the background.
Draft emails quicker and get coaching tips for your messages with Copilot in classic Outlook for Windows
Customers of the new Outlook for Windows have been enjoying Copilot features like draft, coaching, and summary which we announced last year. Since November last year, summary by Copilot has also been available in classic Outlook for Windows. Soon, draft and coaching will be coming to classic Outlook too.
Draft with Copilot helps you reduce time spent on email by drafting new emails or responses for you with just a short prompt that explains what you want to communicate. Because you are always in control with Copilot, you can choose to adjust the proposed draft in length and tone or ask Copilot to generate a new message – and you can always go back to the previous options if you prefer.
Coaching by Copilot can help you get your point across in the best possible way, coaching you on tone (for example, too aggressive, too formal, and so on), reader sentiment (how a reader might perceive your message), and clarity. Copilot can provide coaching for drafts it created or drafts you wrote yourself.
An image of a message composed in the classic Outlook for Windows with the Copilot icon being clicked to reveal options for draft and coaching.
Experience the new Copilot in Microsoft Teams
We have recently enabled a new Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams that offers better prompts, easier access, and more functionality than the previous version. Copilot in Teams will be automatically pinned above your chats, and you can use it to catch up, create, and ask anything related to Microsoft 365. Learn more about the new Copilot experience in Teams here.
An image of the Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams, responding to a question based on the user’s Graph data
Check out the improved usage reports for Microsoft Copilot in the admin center
The Microsoft 365 admin center Usage reports offer a growing set of usage insights across your Microsoft 365 cloud services. Among these reports, the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Usage report (Preview) is built to help Microsoft 365 admins plan for rollout, inform adoption strategy, and make license allocation decisions.
The report now includes usage metrics for Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat. This allows you to see how Chat compares with usage of Copilot in other apps like Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and Loop. You can review the enabled and active user time series chart to assess how usage is trending over time. The new metric has been added retroactively dating back to late November of 2023. To access the report, navigate to Reports > Usage and select the Copilot for Microsoft 365 product report. Learn more here.
An image of the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Usage report highlighting the addition of a new metric for Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat
Learn more about the use of Copilot for Microsoft 365 in the Financial Services Industry
Today we are releasing the new white paper for the financial services industry (FSI) with information about use cases and benefits for the FSI, information about risks and regulations, guidance for managing and governing a generative AI solution, and more information about how to prepare for Copilot. Read the paper here.
Catch up on the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Tech Accelerator
In case you missed it, you can catch up on all the sessions from the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Tech Accelerator via recordings on the event page. The event covered a range of topics including how Copilot works, how to prepare your organization for Copilot, strategies for deploying, driving adoption, and measuring impact, and deep dives on how to extend Copilot with Copilot Studio and Graph connectors. Chat Q&A is open through Friday, March 1, 12:00 P.M. PT, so watch the recordings and get any questions you might have answered.
Did you know? The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is where you can get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. Check out what features are in development or coming soon on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. All future rollout dates assume the feature availability on the Current Channel. Customers should expect these features to be available on the Monthly Enterprise Channel the second Tuesday of the upcoming month.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The finance department is the heart of the organization, juggling a myriad of critical, yet complex tasks—from quote-to-cash processes like credit and collections to risk management and compliance. Financial teams are not only responsible for these mandatory, labor-intensive operations, but are increasingly tasked with real-time insights into business performance and recommendations for future growth initiatives. In fact, 80% of finance leaders and teams face challenges to take on more strategic work beyond the operational portions of their roles.¹On the one hand, teams are poised and ready to play a larger role in driving business growth strategy. On the other hand, however, they can’t walk away from maintaining a critical and mandatory set of responsibilities.
Microsoft is introducing a solution to help finance teams reclaim time and stay on top of the critical decisions that can impact business performance.Microsoft Copilot for Finance is a new Copilot experience for Microsoft 365 that unlocks AI-assisted competencies for financial professionals, right from within productivity applications they use every day. Now available in public preview, Copilot for Finance connects to the organization’s financial systems, including Dynamics 365 and SAP, to provide role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and recommendations in Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications—helping to save time and focus on what truly matters: navigating the company to success.
Copilot for Finance
By harnessing AI, it automates time-consuming tasks, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
Leveraging innovation to accelerate fiscal stewardship
Finance teams play a critical role in innovating processes to improve efficiency across the organization. As teams look to evolve and improve how time is spent to support more strategic work, it’s evident there are elements of operational tasks that are more mundane, repetitive, and manually intensive. Instead of spending the majority of their day on analysis or cross-team collaboration, 62% of finance professionals are stuck in the drudgery of data entry and review cycles.² While some of these tasks are critical and can’t be automated—like compliance and tax reporting—we also hear from majority of finance leaders that they lack the automation tools and technology they need to transform these processes and free up time.¹
With the pace of business accelerating every day, becoming a disruptor requires investing in technology that will drive innovation and support the bottom line. In the next three to five years, 68% of CFOs anticipate revenue growth from generative AI (GenAI).³ By implementing next-generation AI to deliver insight and automate costly and time-intensive operational tasks, teams can reinvest that time to accelerate their impact as financial stewards and strategists.
Microsoft Copilot for Finance: Accomplish more with less
Copilot for Finance provides AI-powered assistance while working in Microsoft 365 applications, making financial processes more streamlined and automated. Copilot for Finance can streamline audits by pulling and reconciling data with a simple prompt, simplify collections by automating communication and payment plans, and accelerate financial reporting by detecting variances with ease. The potential time and cost savings are substantial, transforming not just how financial professionals work, but how they drive impact within the organization.
Users can interact with Copilot for Finance in multiple ways. It both suggests actions in the flow of work, and enables users to ask questions by typing a prompt in natural language. For example, a user can prompt Copilot to “help me understand forecast to actuals variance data.” In moments, Copilot for Finance will generate insights and pull data directly from across the ERP and financial systems, suggesting actions to take and providing a head start by generating contextualized text and attaching relevant files. Like other copilot experiences, users can easily check source data to ensure transparency before using Copilot to take any actions.
Copilot for Finance connects to existing financial systems, including Dynamics 365 and SAP, as well as thousands more with Microsoft Copilot Studio. With the ability to both pull insight from and update actions back to existing sources, Copilot for Finance empowers users to stay in the flow of work and complete tasks more efficiently.
Built for finance professionals
Copilot for Finance is well versed in the critical and often time-consuming tasks and processes across a finance professional’s workday, providing a simple way to ask questions about data, surface insights, and automate processes—helping to reduce the time spent on repetitive actions. While today’s modern finance team is responsible for a litany of tasks, let’s explore three scenarios that Copilot for Finance supports at public preview.
Copilot for Finance can also help financial analysts to reduce the risk of reporting errors and missing unidentified variances. Rather than manually reviewing large financial data sets for unusual patterns, users can prompt Copilot to detect outliers and highlight variances for investigation. Copilot for Finance streamlines variance identification with reusable natural language instructions in the enterprise context. A financial analyst can direct Copilot to identify answers for variances, and Copilot will gather supporting data autonomously.
Audits of a company’s financial statements are critical to ensuring accuracy and mitigating risk. Traditionally, accounts receivable managers were required to pull account data manually from ERP records, reconcile it in Excel, and look for inaccuracies manually. With Copilot for Finance, these critical steps are done with a single prompt, allowing AR managers to act on inconsistencies and any delinquencies found with Copilot suggested copy and relevant invoices.
“Finance organizations need to be utilizing generative AI to help blend structured and unstructured datasets. Copilot for Finance is a solution that aggressively targets this challenge. Microsoft continues to push the boundary of business applications by providing AI-driven solutions for common business problems. Copilot for Finance is another powerful example of this effort. Copilot for Finance has potential to help finance professionals at organizations of all sizes accelerate impact and possibly even reduce financial operation costs.”
—Kevin Permenter, IDC research director, financial applications
The collections process is another critical responsibility as it affects company cash flow, profitability, and customer relationships. Collection coordinators spend their time reviewing outstanding accounts and attempting to reconcile them in a timely manner. This often means phone calls, emails, and negotiating payment plans. With Copilot for Finance, collection coordinators can focus their time on more meaningful client-facing interactions by leaving the busy work to Copilot. Copilot for Finance supports the collections process end-to-end by suggesting priority accounts, summarizing conversations to record back to ERP, and providing customized payment plans for customers.
Copilot for Finance can also help financial analysts to reduce the risk of reporting errors and missing unidentified variances. Rather than manually reviewing large financial data sets for unusual patterns, users can prompt Copilot to detect outliers and highlight variances for investigation. Copilot for Finance streamlines variance identification with reusable natural language instructions in the enterprise context. A financial analyst can direct Copilot to identify answers for variances, and Copilot will gather supporting data autonomously.
Copilot will suggest financial context contacts and will provide auto summaries for streamlined tracking of action items and follow ups. Copilot for Finance can generate fine-tuned financial commentary, PowerPoint presentations, and emails to report to key stakeholders.
Our journey with Microsoft Finance
Microsoft employs thousands across its finance team to manage and drive countless processes and systems as well as identify opportunities for company growth and strategy. Who better to pilot the latest innovation in finance? For the first phase, we worked closely with a Treasury team focused on accounts receivable as well as a team in financial planning and analysis—who need to reconcile data as a part of their workflow before conducting further analysis. After trialing the data reconciliation capabilities in Copilot for Finance, the initial value and potential for scale for these teams was clear.
“Financial analysts today spend, on average, one to two hours reconciling data per week. With Copilot for Finance, that is down to 10 minutes. Functionality like data reconciliation will be a huge time saver for an organization as complex as Microsoft.”
—Sarper Baysal, Microsoft Commercial Revenue Planning Lead
“The accounts receivable reconciliation capabilities help us to eliminate the time it takes to compare data across sources, saving an average 20 minutes per account. Based on pilot usage, this translates to an average of 22% cost savings in average handling time.”
—Gladys Jin, Senior Director Microsoft Finance Global Treasury and Financial Services
Microsoft Copilot for Finance availability
Ready to take the next step? Microsoft Copilot for Finance is available for public preview today. Explore the public preview demo and stay tuned for additional announcements by following us on social.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Configuration analyzer in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps you find and fix security policies that are less secure than the recommended settings. It allows you to compare your current policies with the standard or strict preset policies, lets you apply recommendations to improve your security posture, and view historical changes to your policies.
We are excited to announce several updates to Configuration analyzer. This update includes:
New recommendations covering more scenarios.
New flyout which adds more context around the recommendations.
New export button which lets you easily export recommendations to share with your partners.
Clicking on a recommendation will now open a flyout that has brief detail about why we are making the recommendation as well as targeted links to documentation to learn more about.
Exporting the Recommendations:
A new Export button should appear when you select one or multiple recommendations. Clicking on the Export button will download the selected recommendations as a CSV file which can be shared with your external partners who might not have access to your environment.
If you have other questions or feedback about Microsoft Defender for Office 365, engage with the community and Microsoft experts in the Defender for Office 365 forum.
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