Microsoft Build 2024 - Keynote Key Takeaways

Microsoft Build 2024 - Keynote Key Takeaways

Microsoft Build 2024 is running from May 21-23 in Seattle and Online. Over the weekend, I will look to distil something more detailed around the Fabric and/or AI sessions from Build, but following a Keynote session that lasted over 2 hours, I thought I’d share my top 5 takeaways below. For those interested, the full Day 1 is available here, and Microsoft also posted a 90 second recap.

Key Takeaways

  • Copilots everywhere! Unsurprisingly, Copilot was front and centre for a significant portion of the keynote and there’s a lot to unpack. Outside the announcements, Satya also equated the Copilot runtime to being a fundamental shift similar to what Win32 did for GUIs, and shared that nearly 60% Fortune 500 companies using copilot as well as calling out around half a dozen organisations with over 10k seats. I’ve included links to the announcements below, but I’m particularly interested to use Team Copilot
  • GPT-4o is Generally Available in Azure OpenAI (demo). LLMs and SLMs (namely GPT-4o and Phi-3) were peppered throughout the keynote, including a number of product launches and case studies (link). Recurring themes seemed to be around optimisation and efficiency in either cost or performance, and multi-modality including image, text, and speech. It’s also worth calling out a moment where Open AI CTO Sam Altman made a point of referencing AI as an enabler. I’ll take any opportunity to reiterate the importance of focusing on providing value through solving business problems (customer / user first), not using specific technology “just because”
  • Khan Academy announced a partnership with Microsoft focused on utilising AI to support educators, and Sal Khan highlighted that teaching will be an area that will see real change through the use of technology, something that I was interested to see during the keynote having recently been involved in a STEM Learning roundtable with many industry and education leaders on exactly this topic. A big part of the Khan Academy presentation was around the intention to make Khanmigo available to all teachers in the US for free 
  • Fabric Real Time Intelligence is in preview- I’m excited to see more detail on this, but integrating with sources like Kinesis, Blob Storage Events, Kafka, CDC Events from Cosmos DB, and Fabric Workspace Events in real time will be critical to a number of prospective and existing Fabric customers, and opens up a number of new use cases
  • Continued investment in AI infrastructure through AMD MI300X Instinct accelerators and Cobalt VMs

I would also add that it was fantastic to see Kevin Scott (Microsoft CTO) on stage, he was a wonderful addition, and his personal anecdotes around the use of technology and AI having the power to enable real change in fields of medicine and education were poignant reminders of why I love working in this space.

As someone who’s played video games my whole life, there was one added bonus - Copilot might finally help me understand the world of Minecraft!