At today’s 2023 Build conference, Microsoft announced a large set of updates and new initiatives to help developers build AI.
Microsoft first started building out its AI copilot efforts with GitHub Copilot in 2021 – and now wants to dramatically expand the copilot landscape. As part of this, Microsoft announced new plugin capabilities for its copilot services that enable more AI extensibility to connect with different services.
The new Azure AI studio service will help developers to build and deploy copilots and will also make use of the new Azure AI catalog model that will include both closed and open-source models. Copilot capabilities will also be enhanced with Azure machine learning (ML) prompt flow technology to help build complex chains for prompts for AI workflows.
During a keynote session at Build, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott explained what the new AI capabilities will help developers to do. He said that what makes platforms great isn’t the foundational infrastructure, it’s the things that developers and individuals do with platforms.
During his keynote, Scott delivered a master class in what a copilot is and how to build one.
