Real AI value, real business impact

A leader in life sciences for 160 years, Bayer has more than 100,000 employees working toward its mission of “Health for all, hunger for none.” Bayer employees are using emerging technologies, including generative AI and Copilot, to contribute to feeding a growing global population and helping people lead healthier, disease-free lives. After looking into the topic of generative AI at Bayer, more than 700 areas of application were collected, and that number is growing.

Wanting to provide more integrated value across its devices, software, and services ecosystem, HP has been transforming its approach to software development—including the developer toolchain, management platforms and applications that support HP’s developer community as it builds solutions to meet the changing needs of modern consumers.

The marketing teams faced a near-impossible challenge: Create a website or brochure and social media posts for a product, all within 40 minutes. 

This was no regular work assignment for the employees at Lumen Technologies. The products were made up — indestructible clothing for parents, an inflatable car, a dream recorder — and the teams were relying on Microsoft Copilot to spark some quick creativity. As the clock ticked, the teams competing in Lumen’s inaugural “Copilot Olympics” used the AI-powered productivity tool to help with everything from creating images to developing product concepts.

Cineplex Inc. is a leading media and entertainment company that welcomes millions of guests through its 170+ cinemas and entertainment venues. Cineplex operates in three main sectors: Film Entertainment and Content, Amusement and Leisure, and Media. In this story, you’ll learn how Cineplex has begun to digitally transform their business using Power Automate, beginning from one department to becoming an enterprise-wide initiative, achieving:

·  Actuals savings of over 2,600 hours of manual work from 7 automations in production over a 4-month period (over 8,000 hours of annualized savings)

· 40+ automation opportunities identified and under development with an additional 7,000 hours of potential time savings

· Increased process efficiency by 92%

Oregon State University (OSU), an R1 research-focused university, places a high priority on safeguarding its research to maintain its esteemed reputation. In the spring of 2021, OSU experienced an extensive cybersecurity incident unlike what they had seen before. After initiating their first full incident response, OSU found criminal efforts underpinned the incident. This took a large amount of manual work and luck to avert potential problems, highlighting a need for improved security measures. The cyberattack revealed gaps in OSU’s security operations, specifically that their tools were not sufficient against the threats they were confronting. In response to this incident, OSU created their Security Operations Center (SOC), which has become the centerpiece of the university’s security effort.

 In May 2023, ITOCHU Corporation (“ITOCHU”) launched a cross-company task force to promote the use of generative AI across all businesses. This included incorporating generative AI into FOODATA, a data analytics dashboard which the ITOCHU Food Company provides to customers. ITOCHU is using Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio to evolve its data analytics dashboard into a service that provides immediate recommendations by automatically creating evidence-based product proposals. The corporation has already forged more than 70 ideas for using generative AI and has begun developing a data integration platform to bring these ideas to fruition. Microsoft Fabric is a front-runner for this platform for its potential to leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in higher quality generative AI responses.

H&R Block wanted to give online tax filers a better experience. The trusted tax preparation company envisioned using generative AI to create an easy, seamless process that answers filers’ tax questions, maintains safeguards to ensure accuracy, and minimizes the time to file. Valuing Microsoft’s leadership in security and AI and the longstanding collaboration between the two companies, H&R Block selected Azure AI Studio and Azure OpenAI Service to build a new solution on the H&R Block platform to provide real-time, reliable tax filing assistance. AI Tax Assist combines nearly 70 years of trusted tax expertise with the latest advancements in AI technology from Microsoft Azure OpenAI to streamline and simplify the tax preparation process for millions of H&R Block clients.

Part of the European travel leader DERTOUR Group, Apollo is among the Nordic region's leading tour operators planning, booking, and arranging vacation and business trips for more than one million travelers annually. Whether it’s a relaxing beach holiday or an exciting city stay, Apollo’s network of tour operators, hotel brands, destination agencies, and business travel experts pair unparalleled service with expert knowledge to land its customers the trips of their dreams.

United Kingdom–based ASOS is a destination for fashion lovers in their 20s, that continuously explores technology options to enhance the customer experience. The company delivers inspiration to its customers, along with a catalog spanning thousands of products through powerful computing capabilities and a vast recommendations engine built on Microsoft Azure. With the recent prevalence of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, ASOS recognized a triple opportunity to expand its business model, enrich its technology infrastructure, and meet the modern tech expectations of its young customers. ASOS used Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI prompt flow with ChatGPT language models to rapidly develop and test an Azure OpenAI-powered customer experience that helps customers discover new looks.

The modern gaming industry must protect itself against illegitimate activity. Kinectify, an anti-money laundering (AML) risk management technology company, uses its modern AI-powered platform to collect and analyze millions of daily transactions to detect suspicious activity. Kinectify has been able to build its scalable, robust, Microsoft Azure–powered AML platform with a seamless combination of Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Services, Azure Kubernetes Service, and the broader capabilities of Azure cloud services.

Computing has already accelerated scientific discovery. Now scientists say a combination of advanced AI with next-generation cloud computing is turbocharging the pace of discovery to speeds unimaginable just a few years ago.

Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, are collaborating to demonstrate how this acceleration can benefit chemistry and materials science – two scientific fields pivotal to finding energy solutions that the world needs.

Traditional health tests and biomarkers have their limitations, from collection speed to potential biases. Canary Speech aims to address these challenges and revolutionize patient care with vocal biomarker technology and Microsoft Azure. The company uses Azure AI infrastructure and other Azure services to process voice samples from conversations between patients and clinicians within seconds, providing actionable real-time information to assess and monitor for early disease detection. Reaching thousands of patients, Canary Speech can now train new vocal models in as little as two months and handle millions of transactions per month with Azure.