What to focus on at Microsoft Ignite: Avoiding AI disasters

Microsoft Ignite There is this week. It is the company’s mega event focused on IT professionals. While you can attend the event remotely, you should consider attending in person this year as I still see far more AI failures than successes. When AI is successfully deployed, it has a significant positive impact on productivity, yet quality seems to be going in the wrong direction. But not for everyone.

Shows like Microsoft Ignite are full of product and service information. The event was attended by many IT professionals from various industries, including different levels of AI deployment and different paths to success.

With a keen focus on all things AI, and Microsoft Copilot being one of the most widely used AI tools, being able to talk to people who have had success with the tool, which vendors they’ve worked with to successfully deploy it, and what practices . Their success helps to become golden knowledge.

Let’s discuss why this year’s Ignite is not only important to attend — but also important to show up in person We’ll close with my product of the week: Bluesky, the social media platform I’ve heard is having the best success with people moving away from Twitter/X.

The value of relationships

Building strong vendor and peer relationships is essential to AI success, especially when navigating the complexities of new technologies like Microsoft Copilot, which appears to be the most successful AI offering on the market to date. Increasing it has enormous productivity-improving value for every product.

Because Microsoft is a platform, tools, and cloud company, its tools tend to be relatively undisclosed in terms of industry or geography. This broad applicability does not preclude tuning; This indicates that the tools can be useful for almost every company, from enterprises to small businesses.

While smaller companies will likely use AI as a service, enterprises are increasingly likely to use tools hosted on their own hardware or hybrid systems where sensitive data is retained, AI is accessed on-premises, and less secure information and implementations that do not t can be cloud-deployed requiring low latency.

The problem with solutions is that service providers, OEMs and most companies trying to ramp up AI don’t know enough about it to succeed. However, those who understand AI and have had successful AI deployments (especially the early adopters Microsoft helped) will stay at Ignite. Meeting with these experts can make the difference in whether you overspend on these tools and help avoid common mistakes by learning from others’ mistakes and being able to discern hype from reality.

Exaggerated claims versus true value

I learned this lesson decades ago when Microsoft held an event arguing that its Windows NT Server could replace mainframes. When I had the opportunity to speak with two reference accounts at Microsoft, it became clear that Windows NT was not ready to replace the mainframe for most companies.

The first indicated that it was working very well and effectively replaced their mainframe, but they would never have been able to afford it if Microsoft hadn’t paid for the installation.

The second account didn’t have much time to talk to me because their NT server was down and the CEO was upset. The poor guy probably thought the results of his job wouldn’t last.

Salespeople tend to overpromise and underdeliver. Microsoft is better than most, but it has had this problem in the past. When it comes to the AI, when it comes to Copilot performance, it seems to have a significant adverse effect on quality, which is only a dealbreaker if you can’t mitigate it.

At Ignite, you can learn from early adopters where hype matches reality and where it doesn’t, and how to mitigate losses later. You don’t want to be the poor guy who was the early adopter and possibly lost his job as a result. These people can help ensure that your initial AI implementations with Copilot are something you can be proud of, not something you hide from.

Microsoft Partners

At Ignite, there are always a lot of Microsoft partners and every one of them will tell you that they are your partner. But with these vendors are their customers who have used their services and deployment teams. Even if an OEM or service provider has a successful process, given how quickly they’ve had to ramp up, some teams know what they’re doing and are learning some of the work.

Given that large language models (LLMs) cost nearly $100 million to develop, learning on the job can be incredibly expensive and embarrassing for the individuals or organizations that hire teams tasked with training these models. Asking IT professionals not only about the vendors they’ve used successfully but also the specific teams they’ve used can tell you which vendors are better than others and which vendor teams are better than others.

I once met an executive who accurately identified the best vendor for a specific task only to find out that team was unavailable. So, they passed and went with a different vendor who could provide their most successful team for deployment. The result of the effort was successful, but it might not have been if he hadn’t looked under the covers to ensure the competence of the vendor and critical service teams.

wrap up

AI is in a remarkable feeding frenzy. Most failed deployments appear to be primarily due to immaturity of tools, inexperience of vendors and customers, too much focus on productivity, and insufficient focus on quality. That doesn’t mean AI is crap. It’s not, and it’s working for a growing number of companies.

The problem is the inability to delineate between those products, tools and vendors that are appropriate for your industry and company and those that are not. Because of Microsoft’s leadership in AI, Ignite is one of the few places where you can get the critical information you need to make better choices and ensure the success of your expensive AI deployment.

Bluesky

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X, many users have been looking for an alternative service. Mastodon and Meta’s Threads initially looked like good options, but both products had issues.

While capable, the Mastodon was somewhat difficult to use and didn’t survive the tweeter replacement. Threads got a huge initial push, but it quickly fizzled out because it lacked many of the features people depended on on Twitter. People still use both platforms, but they don’t seem like replacements for Twitter/X.

Blueskyhas gained traction as a viable replacement, at least for now. It’s relatively easy to use, and initially more feature-rich than Thread. I’ve been getting inquiries from all over the world on that platform this week as more and more people around the world abandon or reduce their use of Twitter to use Bluesky.

Social media is one thing, and while not spending as much time on it can be healthy, Bluesky continues to be a more balanced platform, one I and others feel safe using. It reminds me of the early days of Twitter when the tool was fun to use, and you didn’t waste time arguing online with people who seemed absolutely insane.

For me, Bluesky is safer, more fun to use and less full of misinformation than Twitter. It seems to be the best Twitter alternative for now, so it’s my product of the week.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ECT News Network.