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Leading in the era of AI: Driving value and building trust

The era of AI is here, and it’s changing the way we do business. Technology is at an inflection point, offering organizations incredible opportunities to enhance human ingenuity with AI. This is transforming organizations and shaping the future of every industry, unlocking innovation and driving business value. 

Business-relevant AI can realize a quick return on investment (ROI), especially when the intelligence is applied to support high-value use cases, such as security, data insights, and coding assistance. 

AI is also increasing excitement for work by reducing mundane tasks and creating efficiencies that help employees be more productive and creative in their roles. For example, employee-created low-code applications have high adoption rates and provide cost savings. 

These opportunities are timely, as industries need to evolve rapidly to keep up with the pace of innovation, a distributed workforce, and shifting economic drivers. Organizations innovating with AI amid these challenges are emerging even stronger. 

>Discover how AI is unlocking efficiency and excitement for work 

>Learn how to harness AI to maximize value 

>Find out how to innovate with AI to become stronger

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Unlocking efficiency, productivity, and excitement for work


Organizations are turning to AI to increase efficiency across a wide range of areas, including customer service, cybersecurity, customer relationship management, inventory, and content production. Advancements in cloud technology and AI are helping companies stay competitive and ahead of challenges. 

Human ingenuity can be amplified through AI, helping extend employee expertise to deliver compelling results. For example, the Mount Sinai Health System is accelerating its use of AI innovation to identify and ameliorate risks to patients. The results include improved patient outcomes, reduced costs, and increased employee engagement. 

The impact of this amplification is becoming clear as companies find opportunities to increase productivity by applying AI technology almost everywhere—offices, factory floors, field operations, healthcare settings, shops, and classrooms. 

AT&T began using AI to facilitate automation, freeing employees to focus on more complex, higher-value tasks like providing customers with the superior service they expect. Jeremy Legg, Chief Technology Officer at AT&T, says automating more common tasks will significantly change the way the company operates. “There will be meaningful time and cost savings,” Legg says. 

More businesses are discovering that harnessing the potential of AI also unleashes creativity and enhances the joy of work. With 64 percent of employees stating they lack sufficient time and energy to do their jobs, these tools are arriving at an opportune moment. 

“We’re moving from ‘AI on autopilot’ to ‘AI as your copilot,’” says Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager of Microsoft 365 and Future of Work Marketing at Microsoft. “With AI working alongside you, you can spend more time on the important work that fuels innovation. That’s not only going to make a difference to the bottom line, but it’s also more fulfilling.” 

AI is customizable and applicable in new ways every day, providing opportunities to develop and deploy AI exactly where you need it to impact outcomes for your organization. 

Discover how your organization can build cutting-edge applications with large-scale, generative AI models 

Harnessing AI to maximize value 

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Organizations are increasingly using technology to enhance effectiveness across a range of operations. The pressure to create value can make new tools and disruptive processes seem appealing. But with AI, many businesses are realizing exponential value by making better use of the resources they have. 

Companies are harvesting value from data and increasing agility through automation and analytics. AI is increasing the speed and accuracy of insights derived from data gathered across an organization—from areas like finance, supply chain, operations, and management—to positively impact business decisions and forecasting.  

Conagra Brands adopted AI and machine-learning models and created models that accurately predict demand using available data. With this new planning solution, the company can collect and apply current and historical data to turn insights into long-term demand signals and plan far into the future. 

Using AI to support specific high-value outcomes, like employee engagement, risk reduction, and customer satisfaction, optimizes ROI. Companies are finding that giving employees the opportunity to develop their own productivity applications boosts adoption and creates value. These intuitive applications that can be created by the users themselves save costs and increase profitability. 

At Johnson & Johnson, employees without technical training or experience can now build their own bots using an approach that requires little to no code and is faster and cheaper than previous options. The company expects to create $500 million in value as it expands its end-to-end business automation initiatives. 

Smaller organizations can also develop impactful solutions with the Microsoft AI platform and partner network. “Microsoft has shown us that we don’t have to be a gigantic organization with a huge research and development lab to make exciting and meaningful AI applications,” says Josh Brandau, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Nota, a software as a service startup. 

Start building intelligent apps with Azure AI—a portfolio of AI services designed for scale and performance 

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Innovating with AI to become stronger


AI adoption may have once been a hard sell, but it is now a must-have. By prioritizing investments in AI and adopting responsible frameworks, organizations are positioning themselves to innovate, meet challenges, and emerge stronger. 

To better anticipate and respond to market changes and competition, organizations should prioritize investments in the technologies that will deliver the most pragmatic and important business outcomes. 

Over a third of decision-makers credited AI with helping them anticipate and respond to market changes. And 87 percent of leaders responding to an MIT Sloan Management Review survey felt that AI could give them a competitive edge. 

Companies can use AI to strengthen customer relationships by creating meaningful interactions. With AI and infrastructure solutions, “Blip is taking a leading-edge approach to AI that makes us future ready and gives us a competitive edge in the marketplace for customer experience technology,” says Milton Stiilpen, Innovation and Research Director at Blip (formerly Take Blip). 

AI capabilities are being built into cloud solutions that customers already use and trust. “We look to Microsoft as a leader in the development of frameworks for responsible AI,” says Andy Pandharikar, Founder and CEO of Commerce.AI. “The Microsoft brand being tied to products gives us confidence that generative AI is coming to market with proper guardrails in place.” 

That confidence has led companies like CarMax to innovate with AI to boost cost and time savings. “With the help of Azure OpenAI Service, we’re disrupting our industry for a second time by delivering cutting-edge digital tools and capabilities and becoming a true omnichannel retailer,” says Shamim Mohammad, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer at CarMax. 

Organizations can innovate confidently with a responsible, trusted AI partner. Operating in a secure cloud that runs on trust can safeguard your organization, employees, and data.  

Learn more about how you can put AI into action with the same principles, practices, and tools that have made Microsoft a leader in responsible AI 
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