Microsoft’s AI-Powered IT Transformation
As the IT team within Microsoft Digital, we’ve witnessed significant shifts in how we build, deploy, manage, and support information technology. The recent shift, accelerated by the global pandemic and the move to hybrid work in 2020, reshaped our approach. Now, as employees adapt to this new paradigm, the next evolution—human productivity augmented by generative AI—is once again reshaping everything.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI have ushered in a new era of IT internally. The rapid advancement of AI is compelling us to rethink every dimension of IT. From the applications, workflows, and services that drive our employee experience to the network, infrastructure, and devices powering their productivity, everything is evolving rapidly.
“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless,” says Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s IT organization. “We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to determine how AI can improve outcomes, reduce costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and our customers.”
This article explores how we’re implementing AI and new investments. Our goal is to accelerate our AI-powered transformation, which will hopefully inspire yours.
Resilient and Secure Infrastructure Powered by AI
Ensuring reliable and secure access to corporate resources is a crucial responsibility. This is especially true for a company that has fully embraced flexible work. Our employees depend on reliable network connectivity to access the tools and services they rely on daily. Harnessing the power of AI to maintain employee productivity and ensure network resilience and security is a top priority for Microsoft Digital.
“AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our enterprise infrastructure,” says Heather Pfluger, General Manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in Microsoft Digital. “It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader at Microsoft as we consider all the ways IT can make our services more efficient, secure, and reliable.”
We are infusing data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure, engineering, and operations to eliminate configuration drift, ensure compliance with standards, and reduce operator errors. This way, we will quickly respond to business needs with utmost efficiency. Investments in software-defined networking and infrastructure-as-code are demonstrably improving reliability and network adaptability. AI is helping us automate workflows that deliver network services, detect anomalies, and manage compliance.
We’re using real-time streaming telemetry from network devices to improve operations. We’ve also trained an AI model using data from past incidents. This model will help our network engineers to significantly decrease the time needed to resolve infrastructure issues, with the aim of reducing and even eliminating network outages and boosting employee productivity.
AI and Machine Learning (ML) are crucial elements in enhancing the security and compliance of our cloud and on-premises network. Even though Microsoft already benefits from a Zero Trust security posture, we will use AI and ML to further strengthen our network by automatically assigning devices to the right network, removing the need for IT administrators to do so manually.
We’ve developed a strong access control system for both wireless and wired networks to further improve security and reduce legacy VPN usage. In addition, we are building AI and ML capabilities to automate security workflows including analyzing device vulnerabilities, detecting anomalous firewall traffic flows, and managing incident diagnosis and resolution.
A vast network of interconnected devices, each possessing different operating systems, relies on our network for seamless connectivity. Managing these devices requires considerable time and resources. To get a better handle on them, we’re investing in new AI-powered device capabilities that span the entire device lifecycle.
AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting is a core investment for us right now. We will use AI and ML to efficiently schedule essential maintenance tasks and autonomously fix errors and performance issues. This will reduce downtime, extend device lifespans, and avoid potential problems, ensuring employees have a productive experience.
We’ll also leverage AI to analyze device settings, user behavior, network activity, and vulnerabilities. This will be enhanced with demographic data and location metadata. Doing so will allow us to offer appropriate solutions for common and emerging device problems. Our objective is to help IT administrators become more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios.
Employee Experiences Enhanced with AI
AI presents unprecedented opportunities to simplify the employee experience. Our aim is to improve this experience by providing a single endpoint for the most common tasks. We envision a workplace where AI naturally integrates into employees’ workflows and simplifies the number of systems required to learn and navigate.
We are working to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where employees can access critical data, tools, and insights from one place.
“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, Partner Director of Employee Productivity in Microsoft Digital. “AI enables us to deliver personalized experiences that empower employees to work smarter, faster, and happier.”
With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as a central engagement hub, we’ll redesign the employee experience from an application-centric approach to an employee-centric approach to meet people in the flow of their work.
Navigating with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
Our employees will discover information and services through natural language Q&A to complete tasks more smoothly. Copilot Chat will support various employee experiences like diving into employee benefits, facilitating career planning, processing expenses, finding information, exploring workplace amenities, purchasing devices, or upskilling for a new role.
We are connecting different Copilot features and our internal data to Copilot Chat to reduce the time to get insights or answers by more than half. Employees can still use web or app experiences if they prefer, but Copilot Chat will be a primary entry point for many workflows.
Moreover, Generative AI will change how our employees experience support services. We aim to boost employee productivity by addressing IT issues automatically or remotely through AI-powered chats that often don’t require an agent.
AI-Powered Transformation with Good Governance
We’re striving to strike the right balance with AI: we want to utilize it to transform our work processes and empower our employees while also protecting the company. To achieve this, we’re focused on implementing the right governance measures.
“We’re going to be one of the first organizations to really get our hands on the whole breadth of AI capabilities,” says Matt Hempey, a Principal Group Product Manager in Microsoft Digital. “It will be our job to ensure we have good, sensible policies for eliminating unnecessary risks and compliance issues.”
Our team in Microsoft Digital manages some of the most complex Microsoft productivity tenants in the world, and the governance of those tenants can present challenges. Unmanaged assets like Power BI workspaces, Power Apps, or even Microsoft Teams groups heighten the risk of oversharing sensitive data and can compromise the health and security of the environment.
AI will be instrumental in helping us manage our tenants more effectively by helping us detect issues and by automating time-consuming compliance tasks.
High-quality enterprise data with strong data governance is crucial to our AI-led transformation. We are establishing processes and frameworks to ensure data quality, designating data owners. We are also using tools to measure data quality and generate a quality score. This enhances the confidence and trust of users, encouraging them in AI scenarios.
However, such high-quality data is useless without ongoing governance. We have years of experience managing Microsoft’s vital tenants and have encountered the complexities of governance at a global enterprise scale. AI raises issues around issues of privacy, reputation, and copyright. Responsible and ethical applications of AI, powered by effective data governance, is our main priority. This allows us to innovate without risking security or damage to our reputation. By using tools such as Microsoft Purview, we’ll pay attention to the source, lifecycle, and sensitivity of all data for AI, focusing on its discovery, classification, and protection. Our objective is to handle sensitive data safely, ensuring ethical uses to achieve the right business outcomes.
Transforming Our Approach to IT
At Microsoft Digital, our commitment is to innovate with AI in order to revolutionize our employee experience and rethink IT management. We’ll power this through high-quality enterprise data and consistent governance practices.
“From making our employees more productive to improving their experience in the hybrid workplace, to preemptively anticipating issues with our services, infrastructure, and devices, AI is fundamentally changing how we manage information technology at Microsoft,” D’Hers says.
As we’ve done since the early days of IT at Microsoft, we plan to push boundaries to become a catalyst for AI innovation—for our employees and for our customers.
Just as we helped shape the past three decades of enterprise IT innovation, the next steps we take on our IT journey here at Microsoft will help shape this new era of AI.
We’re excited to continue sharing the insights from our AI-powered transformation journey with our customers and partners. We hope the following insights will help you in your journey to transform your approach to IT with AI:
- AI can revolutionize every facet of IT administration and the employee experience.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat can increase employee productivity by simplifying information retrieval and reducing or eliminating repetitive tasks. This allows employees to focus on more valuable work.
- Enterprise data is your most valuable asset in the era of AI. Invest in data and tenant governance so that you can use your data in support of AI-powered productivity and collaboration workloads using Azure OpenAI and other services.
- Microsoft Purview provides a great solution to protect your organization’s sensitive enterprise data.
We’ll use the power of AI to rethink our entire IT portfolio here in Microsoft Digital. As the Customer Zero for some of Microsoft’s most important products for IT professionals, our insights and product enhancements will result in an improved customer experience. We invite you to get started with Azure AI.
