Data Toboggan Cool Runnings is on Saturday 12 July 2025. Our first Cool Runnings summer event was in 2020. This was one track. Today we have 3 tracks of talks over a 12 hour period.
Bramberg
Pradaschier
Rigi Kaltbad
Agenda: https://bit.ly/DTCR2025-Agenda
Register now: https://bit.ly/DTCR2025-Register
There have been some mind blowing changes released today which will aid the future of work. Microsoft have introduced the first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work.
Researcher
Researcher helps you tackle complex, multi-step research at
work. This will help delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy.
Analyst
Analyst thinks like a skilled data scientist looking at raw data to produce insights in minutes.
Introducing Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Read more about Researcher and Analyst
Deep reasoning and agent flows
Deep reasoning and agent flows in Microsoft Copilot Studio
is in preview and offers a comprehensive platform to create, manage, and deploy
agents matched to business needs.
Deep reasoning
Deep reasoning, agents can perform complex tasks and make more accurate decisions.
Agent flows
Agent flows bring AI workflows into Copilot Studio that enable agents to follow a predefined sequence of actions, ensuring consistent results for structured tasks.
The Microsoft AI Tour in London on 21 October 2024 talked about solving the biggest challenges and uncovering new opportunities to empower your organization. The Opening Keynote was with Clare Barclay, Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro. There were discussions on building an agentic world where personal agents, organisational agents, business process agents and cross organisation agents enable the use of AI in business to assist you with work. An example of this is Pages for AI artifacts that enables you to work with the organisation and AI . The 3 areas of innovations
These innovative areas will increase value and reduce waste and Copilot Studio for autonomous agents was announced.
A very important announcement, for us in the UK, is that Microsoft and UK Government have signed a five-year agreement to support the new era of digital transformation. So a very exciting time for the UK to grow.
There is gravity with data. AI needs to bring all the data together in one platform like Microsoft Fabric, to simplify data and have App servers, AI apps and tools. Microsoft showed its unified data offering in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to unify the data estate, at what ever stage a business is at, for databases and analytics.
Trust is the most important thing in #AI. You must have a set of principles considering Security, Privacy, Safety at the core
AI is redefining Britain. It can take longer to realise value as change and adoption management takes time. It is cheaper to innovate than before so we need to think big, think bold and be ambitious
Satya finished with 4 important points to note: expand opportunity, earn trust, protect fundamental rights and advance sustainability.
The announcement today can be read here
Please join us on Saturday for the #DataToboggan winter edition. We have 32 speakers, 3 tracks, including an AI track. Lots of fun and learning. We also have the amazing Knee-deep in Tech not to be missed and a keynote from Kim Manis
Event Date: Saturday 3rd February 2024
Register now for free: https://bit.ly/DT24-Register
Agenda: https://bit.ly/DT24-Agenda
Adopt, extend and build Copilot experiences across the Microsoft Cloud. Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) . There are various level of expertise and effort required for each type. As with each type they connect to different data sources and require different level of customisations.
A few terms
Temperature - This controls how conservative or adventurous Copilot should be. The higher the temperature, the more adventurous Token – when text is processed in large AI model, it is divided into the smallest units, these are called tokens. So tokens are the finest granularity in natural language progressing for these large language models
Prompt - The text you send to Azure OpenAI Service as an API call. This text is then input into the AI model.
Metaprompts – part of the orchestration layer. A set of instructions that are passed to copilot that are sent to the model on every turn of conversation and where safety tuning happens.
Prompt engineering has recently sprung up. It is how you ask a Copilot to do something. It is like summarizing and explaining what to do. Microsoft have created a set of resources to guide you through the art and science of it.
The full guide on the art and science of prompting. There are useful featured prompts for generating ideas, help me write an email etc.
The Prompting do's and don't can be found here.
I came across this excellent resource, the Microsoft Copilot Studio implementation guide. It covers
a 360-degree review of your project covering
Reference architecture examples
Download it from https://lnkd.in/d5h-binr
An exciting introduction to Microsoft Ignite November 15 - 17, 2023. Two themes that I am excited about are the AI and Microsoft Fabric capability.
Microsoft Ignite 2023: AI transformation and the technology driving change
The full list of changes at Microsoft Ignite are listed in the Microsoft Ignite Book of News.
In the main keynote Satya announced over 100 changes. A few of the announcements discussed in the keynote are mentioned here:
Azure Maia - The Microsoft Cloud accelerator optimized for LLM training and inference
Azure Open AI Service updates
Model catalog - New
Models as a Service - announcing
Phi-2 - Announcing
The Phi-2 model is changing the game in artificial intelligence (AI) and it is designed to make machines think more like humans and do it safely.
Azure AI Search - Deliver accurate, hyper-personalized responses in your Gen AI applications
There was also announcement of Mesh on Microsoft Teams being generally available.
Then finally something different Azure Quantum Elements - purpose built to accelerate scientific discovery.
Microsoft Ignite is next week. There are lots of exciting sessions.
Online: November 15–16, 2023 PT | In Seattle: November 14–17, 2023 PT
The headline Experience AI transformation in action, online from anywhere. The session catalog is packed full of exciting content and the agenda states whether the session will be recorded or not , so helpful when planning your schedule. A few key sessions to watch.
Keynote: Microsoft Ignite opening
Wednesday, November 15 5:00 PM - 5:45 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Satya Nadella will share how Microsoft is creating new opportunity across our platforms in this new era of AI.
Keynote: Becoming an AI-Powered Organization with Microsoft Copilot
Wednesday, November 15 5:45 PM - 6:35 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Join Rajesh Jha, along with Jared Spataro and other leaders to see how Microsoft Copilot will unlock productivity and transform business process for everyone across functions and industries.
Keynote: AI transformation for your organization with the Microsoft Cloud
Thursday, November 16 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Scott Guthrie and other leaders will share how the Microsoft Cloud is uniquely positioned to help our customers transform by building AI solutions and unlocking data insights using the same platform and services that power all of Microsoft’s comprehensive solutions.
Keynote: The Future of Security with AI
Thursday, November 16 6:15 PM - 7:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time
While the new era of AI presents unprecedented opportunities to elevate human potential, it also ushers in a new set of unknowns and risks. In this session, Charlie Bell and Vasu Jakkal will share how Microsoft is delivering AI for security with Security Copilot, and how we are enabling organizations to secure and govern AI with new capabilities.
Keynote: Inside Microsoft AI innovations with Mark Russinovich
Friday, November 17 8:30 PM - 9:30 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Join Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO and Technical Fellow, for an in-depth exploration of Microsoft's AI architecture. Discover the technology behind our massive supercomputers used for foundational model training, efficient infrastructure for serving models, sustainable datacenter design, AI-aware resource management and scheduling, GPU usage optimization techniques, and advancements in confidential computing to safeguard data during processing.
Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks
Wednesday, November 15 7:45 PM - 8:30 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Bring your data into the era of AI with Microsoft Fabric, a powerful all in one AI powered analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, real time analytics and business intelligence. Learn how Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric seamlessly work together to offer customers a modern, price performant analytics solution that helps teams turn data into a competitive advantage.
Upgrading your data estate to Microsoft Fabric and getting started Q&A
Thursday, November 16
9:30 PM - 10:15 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Looking to get started with Microsoft Fabric, but don't know where to start? Join our product experts to discuss everything from basic set up steps to migrating to Fabric from Synapse to starting a POC with departments where you want to gain traction quickly.
There is a one day free event in London on 19 October 2023 to help
developers discover new opportunities with AI and advance their knowledge and
skills to deliver more value faster with AI and Microsoft Azure. I am excited to be attending the event and helping out.
The event is at ExCeL London and the event agenda is full of interesting sessions
Opening Keynote: Learn what developers need to know about AI
today, and explore new paths forward in your organization and career.
Breakout Sessions: Dive into topics like:
Immersive Workshops: Bring your device and join a 75-minute
immersive workshop on topics like building flexible, intelligent apps with OSS
on Microsoft Azure and GitHub Copilot, learn how to use OpenAI models using
Azure OpenAI, and how to automate your cloud application testing.
Connection Hub: Connect and learn with one-to-one meetings
with experts, and spaces to collaborate with other developers and industry
leaders to help solve your technical questions.
Evening Mixer: Come together with speakers, industry
leaders, and the developer community to continue your conversations, mix and
mingle, and have a little fun.
We are in the middle of a massive platform shift with AI . Two areas Natural Language the developer interface and the Reasoning Engine give more power together with Information Management as we digitise the world. Generative AI together with Microsoft Fabric will be transformative.
Five of the key announcements Satya highlighted
There were discussion on how the model effectiveness is the currency of content safety and how prompt engineering with its phrases and symbols was important. All generative AI services are going to change everything.
The Inspire keynote 18 July used an analogy of rooms in the house to describe the various layers of the Microsoft stack services. The Copilot stack was discussed with a way to enable AI transformation.
With this amazing era of AI we need to understanding how to provide that duty of care and ethical advisory. It is more paramount than ever think about data provenance, bias amplification, regulatory compliance and explainability.
