Top news from Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft Ignite just opened and already there is exciting news. We provide you with the latest insights and assessments of the products and functionalities recently announced at Ignite.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Microsoft Syntex as a new product and Content AI as a new product category during the Microsoft Ignite Opening. Microsoft Syntex uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to augment human expertise, automate content processing and transform content into knowledge. The product is ideally suited to create highly scalable solutions for content-centric business processes – in ways that have so far not been possible.

• Do more with less: in times of skills shortages and inflation, this is not a "nice to have" for many organizations, it´s existential.
• AI is a key technology, yet companies are often hesitant to use it, as evidenced by the Artificial Intelligence Experience Report by Campana & Schott and the Technical University of Darmstadt.
• Content AI empowers employees to achieve more in less time. To do so, it leverages modern cloud power and combines it with AI functionality. It addresses a use case that is characterized by particularly high data volumes "in-house": content management.
• Recent studies predict that by 2025, 130 billion terabytes of data will have been created by organizations in the form of quotes, invoices, plans, and so on. However, the content is often unstructured and distributed in silos - and must be processed manually, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive.

• Microsoft Syntex, like Microsoft Viva, seamlessly integrates with the M365 platform and Teams, thus integrates with employee workflows.
• It uses the platform functionalities of M365 and provides extensive automation functionalities for content management via the AI Builder and Power Automate.
• The functionalities enable automated reading and indexing of high-volume, unstructured and structured content as well as linking and providing it in searches or applications. They can be divided into three areas:
   

• With Microsoft Syntex, AI is making its way into what has long been a fairly non-innovative but large content management market.
• For organizations, Syntex offers great automation leading to efficiency potentials.
• The use of the product requires a certain cloud maturity of organizations. It is particularly interesting for organizations that already map collaboration and communication via cloud technologies today.
• For Microsoft 365 customers who have already achieved a corresponding adaptation of the basic functionality, Syntex is highly relevant for increasing productivity and saving costs.

Overall, the range of functions has been significantly expanded with "Syntex 2.0". It all started with one main use case: upload unstructured or structured documents, let an AI model extract the relevant content and store it as metadata in the SharePoint library.

This is still the basic idea, but it has been greatly extended so that it can no longer be easily replicated with Power Apps and SharePoint: on the one hand, the extension goes in the direction of content management (e.g., the integration into search or the automation of security & retention policies). On the other hand, it also goes in the direction of business processes (e.g., the integration of electronic signatures). This means, Syntex as a product is really a hybrid, combining the best of two worlds.

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Artificial Intelligence Experience Report
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