Microsoft Inspire 2018 – The last three days at Microsoft Inspire has been packed with lots of inspiration, modern technologies, and networking.

Today AlfaPeople enjoyed the corenote with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and we attended with high expectations for Satya to consolidate everything into a clear direction moving forward. And he delivered! The 2-hour inspirational corenote was packed with important messages and showcases for Microsoft employees, partners, and end-customers. Below is my view on these four key messages:

Message 1: Ethical Principles

One key message was repeated several times, namely the importance of ethical principles around the new technologies. AI-centered user experience and applications will have to be designed with privacy, security and ethical principles in mind. The importance of this was underlined with the recently signed Anti-Cyber Attach Pledge, that Microsoft, Facebook, and 32 other tech companies signed.

Message 2: People-Centered Experience

The people-centered experience was centralized around the shift from device focused applications to people-centered experiences. The whole area of Modern Worklife was presented by Satya with the applications, that he is using on his different devices in a workday. Demos of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in combination with HoloLens, Remote Assist and Power Apps showcasing the future of fully digitalized processes, with the users centered in the processes.

Another showcase related to people-centered experience was a meeting room powered by IoT, Cortana and HoloLens – all connected to business applications in the back-end. It was impressive how Cortana devices delivered meeting summaries, actions, duplex calls (live language translations) and mixed reality with the participants.

Message 3: Transition to Azure AI

Transition to Azure AI is by far the hottest topic at Microsoft Inspire. During the last two years, Microsoft Research Labs has reached human parity within object recognition, speech recognition, machine reading and machine translation (machine read text and ability to respond to questions to the text).

Microsoft vision is to democratize AI by industries like retail, healthcare, manufacturing e.g. These models can be utilized in business applications by partners and end-customers. To Dynamics 365 partners like AlfaPeople, the following demo was very interesting. Alysa Taylor announcing the Dynamics 365 chat which is powered by AI for sales – an AI model targeted for sales. Alysa was asking questions to her Dynamics 365 data directly from a chat conversation with a colleague. Azure data lakes were also presented with the new capabilities to load Dynamics 365 data and from there create and analyze data models.

Message 4: Ubiquitous computing

The last topic was Ubiquitous computing, where Microsoft is changing the perception of the traditional data centers. Recently, Microsoft deployed the first submerged Azure data center, which is zero emission, and can be deployed in less than 90 days. This brings back memories to when I spend days to deploy a traditional server infrastructure, whereas today it is done by rapid provisioning of VM’s.

The future will bring connected data centers everywhere with both offline and online Azure powered capabilities on ships, hospitals, supermarkets, cars, and houses. Microsoft has below the term Ubiquitous computing, data center technologies named Azure, Azure Stack, Azure IoT, Azure Sphere and Azure Quantum Computing.

“If you want to serve the world – you get to represent the world.” Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft

Finally, Satya Nadella reminded the whole community of three guiding culture principles:

• Customer Obsession
• Diversity and Inclusion
• One Microsoft

Read more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 here.