November 16, 2023, 03:50 PM EST

“It’s really about bringing the value of AI and specifically Copilot to Windows 10,” says Aaron Woodman, vice president of Windows marketing.

Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro users are getting Copilot, the AI assistant that was previously only available in Windows 11, the company announced Thursday during its annual Microsoft Ignite event.

“The general orientation right now inside the company is how do we accelerate the value of AI and bring it to as many customers as humanly possible, for their benefit, but also our selfish benefit as we kind of learn and better understand where we can help customers along the way,” said Aaron Woodman, vice president of Windows marketing.

[RELATED: Microsoft Ignite 2023: The Biggest News In Data, Cloud, Security ]

Microsoft wants more Copilot users, both to bring the functionality of the AI-driven bolt-on product for Windows to more customers, but also to collect more information about how to use AI at work, he said.

Woodman said the conversations within Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft are centered around the belief that AI can help serve customers “en masse” and that Microsoft can be a leader in doing that. The version of Copilot that is now coming to the broad Windows 10 base holds on to much of the performance that users experience within Windows 11, Woodman said.

“There are going to be some functional differences and certain skills or actions that you can take in Windows 11 that do not exist in Windows 10,” he said. The bare minimum system requirements are four gigabytes of RAM and the ability to push out graphics at 720 dpi, or greater.

“We’re going to initially support this only with Windows 10 Home and Pro SKUs, with a plan to share more information on what this means for our managed commercial and enterprise customers soon,” Woodman said, adding that it won’t yet be available for “managed SKUs.”

The end of support for Windows 10 remains Oct. 14, 2025.

Another change will supply Windows 10 users a toggle switch that lets them turn on notications for updates and as soon as the update is available, rather than hunting for updates, Woodman said.

Microsoft said in an April blog post that there would be no more updates to Windows 10, however Woodman said these changes do not modify this version of Windows so much as to make it more usable for Copilot customers.

“It’s really about bringing the value of AI and specifically Copilot to Windows 10,” Woodman said.

On Thursday, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella called this moment the “age of Copilots” and hopes the products introduced at this show will make Microsoft a leader in artificial intelligence from the infrastructure layer to data and applications.

Copilots—Microsoft’s name for its generative AI tools that can generate text, code and other content—are the new user interface “that helps us gain access to the world’s knowledge and your organization’s knowledge,”

“Microsoft copilot is that one experience that runs across all our surfaces, understanding your context on the web, on your device and when you’re at work, bringing the right skills to you when you need them,” Nadella said. “Just like, say, today you boot up an operating system to access applications or a browser to navigate to a website, you can invoke a copilot to do all these activities and more—to shop, to code, to analyze, to learn, to create. We want the copilot to be everywhere you are.”

November 16, 2023, 09:50 AM EST

‘You invited Nvidia’s ecosystem, all of our software stacks, to be hosted on Azure. … And as a result, we’re ecosystem partners. … There’s just a profound transformation in the way that Microsoft works with the ecosystem,’ says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while sharing the stage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Ignite.

One of the standout speakers at Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference this week wasn’t even a Microsoft employee.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang had some bold proclamations on the importance of generative artificial intelligence in computing and praised Microsoft as “much more collaborative and partner-oriented” while sharing the stage with Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella during the latter’s Ignite 2023 keynote speech.

“You really deserve so much credit for transforming Microsoft’s entire culture to be so much more collaborative and partner-oriented,” Huang told Nadella on stage. “You invited Nvidia’s ecosystem, all of our software stacks, to be hosted on Azure. … And as a result, we’re ecosystem partners. … There’s just a profound transformation in the way that Microsoft works with the ecosystem.”

[RELATED: Microsoft Azure Gets New Nvidia Service For Developing Custom GenAI Apps]

Nvidia CEO Huang Praises Microsoft CEO Nadella

Huang told the audience at Ignite that the partnership has benefited the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker’s 7 million Cuda developers and the approximately 15,000 startups worldwide that work on Nvidia’s platform.

“The fact that they could now take their stack and without modification run it perfectly on Azure—my developers become your customers,” Huang said. “My developers also have the benefit of integrating with all of the Azure APIs and services, the secure storage, the confidential computing.”

Nadella told the audience that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft has also benefited from the Nvidia partnership. For example, he said that “the largest install base on the edge of very powerful AI machines happens to be Windows PCs with GPUs from Nvidia.”

During Nadella’s keynote, the Microsoft CEO said that he built “the most powerful AI supercomputing infrastructure in the cloud using Nvidia GPUs.”

OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed creator of text generator ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E, “has used this infrastructure to deliver the leading LLMs [large language models] as we speak,” Nadella said.

Nadella also said that Microsoft will add Nvidia’s H200 AI accelerator to its fleet “to support even larger model inferencing with the same latency, which is so important as these models become much bigger, more powerful.”

“The ability for us to have this new generation of accelerators is a big deal,” he said.

Microsoft has a preview available of Azure Confidential GPU virtual machines co-designed with Nvidia. With these VMs, “you can run your AI models on sensitive data sets on our cloud,” Nadella said.

“If you’re doing what is referred to as retrieval augmented generation, or RAG … running on this confidential GPU VM, you can enrich, for example, your prompt with very query-specific knowledge from proprietary databases, document archives, while keeping the entirety of the process protected end to end,” he said.

As part of the Azure models-as-a-service offering Nadella detailed during his keynote, he told the Ignite crowd that Nvidia’s Nemotron-3 family of models are part of the Microsoft model catalog for users to build general-purpose AI applications.

Microsoft, Nvidia Partnership

Huang was on stage to announce that Nvidia Omniverse—a stack originally on-premises—is now available on Azure Cloud and that Nvidia offers a new service called AI Foundry, which aims to supply businesses a collection of commercially viable GenAI foundation models developed by Nvidia and third parties.

On the importance of GenAI in computing, Huang called the technology “the single most significant platform transition in computing history.”

“In the last 40 years, nothing has been this big,” he said. “It’s bigger than PC. It’s bigger than mobile. It’s going to be bigger than the internet.”

GenAI is not just a technology wonder, but also good for business and grows companies’ total addressable markets, Huang said.

“This is also the largest TAM [total addressable market] expansion of the computer industry in history,” Huang said. “There’s a whole new type of data center that’s now available. Unlike the data centers of the past, this data center is dedicated to one job and one job only. Running AI models and generating intelligence. It’s an AI factory.”

AI factories are a new segment in computer hardware, Huang said, just as copilots—Microsoft’s term for tools that can generate text, code and other content from user queries—are a new segment in software.

If startups are the first wave of GenAI and copilots and enterprise technology are the second wave, GenAI in heavy industries represents the third and “largest wave of all” for the technology’s potential.

“And this is where Nvidia’s Omniverse and generative AI is going to come together to help heavy industries digitalize and benefit from generative AI,” Huang said. “So we’re really, quite frankly, barely in the middle of the first wave. Starting the second wave.”

Nvidia will benefit as a full site license customer of Microsoft copilot, the CEO told the crowd. “If you think that Nvidia is moving fast now, we are going to be turbocharged by copilot,” he said.

What Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) did for chips, Huang wants Nvidia and Microsoft to do that for users building proprietary LLMs to power GenAI applications, he said.

WHEN: Today, Wednesday, November 15, 2023

WHERE: CNBC's "The Exchange"

Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on CNBC's "The Exchange" (M-F, 1PM-2PM ET) today, Wednesday, November 15. Following is a link to video from CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/11/15/we-will-be-compliant-with-the-u-s-government-on-tech-in-china-says-microsofts-satya-nadella.html

Additional footage from the interview will air during the "CNBC Leaders: Satya Nadella" special on Monday, November 20^th at 8pm ET.

All references must be sourced to CNBC.

JON FORTT: Thanks for having me back here in Seattle. You just got off the stage minutes ago.

SATYA NADELLA: Thank you so much, Jon. And thanks for coming out here. It's sort of becoming a great habit for you now to be showing up multiple times. We love it.

FORTT: It is indeed – well to talk to you, of course. Big announcements here. A year ago, open AI put out chat GPT and your stock is up around 50% since then. What's been the most significant first wave of adoption in AI for you? You talked a lot about copilots today. general public and investors probably don't think about those as much but strategically for you, has that been the most significant?

NADELLA: Yeah I would say both Jon. I mean the two real breakthroughs in some sense with this generation of AI, one is this natural user interface that shows you know, the first time people really got a sense for it was when chat GPT launched right. There is a complete new way to relate to information, whether it's web information or information inside the enterprise. And that's what we mean streaming with our copilot approach, and that definitely has caught the imagination, it's becoming the new UI pretty much for everything or the new agent to both not just get the knowledge but to act on the knowledge. But the other thing that's also happening is a new reasoning, just like say in the past, we thought about databases, we now have a new reasoning capability, which is not doing relational algebra, but doing neural algebra. And that, you know, you can take an API and you can continue or send you know, a paragraph or you can do summarization or predictions. That's a new capability that's going to change pretty much every software category. So between both of these, you can see a lot more mainstream deployment of AI and the benefits of it and GitHub Copilot perhaps is a good example of that.

FORTT: What I think a lot of people outside of the developer community don't necessarily get is that there's this AI tool that's helping developers to write code. Jensen Huang, we'll talk a little bit – he was on stage with you a few minutes ago. He was talking about that even accelerating the speed at which Nvidia is able to innovate. What's the breakthrough there?

NADELLA: Yeah I mean, for me, even when – my own confidence about this generation of AI being different is when I first started seeing, when I think GPD 3 and 3 5, GitHub Copilot because that was the first product in fact before chat GBT, we built GitHub Copilot and deploy these models. And the fact that developers now can just do you know, code completions and get you know, and even then, you know, one of the things we've done is we're taking the joy out of some of the software development. You know, we bring back the joy, the flow to stay in it… It's unlike anything we've seen in the past when you're taking the most knowledge work task, which is software development and seeing 50 plus percent improvement. And so that's what we're trying to replicate with Copilot for the broad knowledge work and information, I mean frontline work. In fact, what Jensen is saying, they're deploying both GitHub Copilot for the developers but deploying Microsoft Copilot for all the employees at Nvidia so he's saying watch out. Now Nvidia, if you think it's fast now, let's see what happens in a year from now.

FORTT: So there's a scramble happening right now across enterprise software. So many companies I'm talking to are trying to add AI into their portfolios, enhance their existing product offerings with it and then see kind of how much their customers are gonna be willing to pay that added boost and perhaps productivity. You've been early on this and have some data showing how Microsoft customers feel about, you know, this AI being built into your software. Where do you find it so far?

NADELLA: It's very, very, very promising. I mean, obviously, the developer one is the one that where we have conclusive I would say data and it's becoming – the brand went from sort of ah, well this is a good idea to mainstream just like that because of the obvious benefits both individually and for organizations. I do believe like farm level performance, you will start seeing divergence if you are adopting or not adopting some of this technology. The next place I think, is even things like customer service. We are self-deployed our Copilot for customer service, in fact, for Azure support. It turns out when you're a customer service agent, by the time you're trying to solve a problem, it's already a very hard problem to solve because the automatic bot didn't solve it, it's been escalated to you so you have an irate customer on one in a tough problem. So Copilot helping you there it's fantastic.

FORTT: But then the idea being that the AI can go into a database, figure out when did they call before, what were their problems?

NADELLA: All the knowledge bases and bring the sort of the solution to use will speak versus you going around it. But here's the interesting thing, we've realized that it's not just that that was hard but it is also the pain every customer service agent had of summarizing everything they did to solve the problem at the end of the call, which took like half hour with all the artifacts, the logs and what have you and well that's automated, right? So that's real productivity gains. So we are seeing massive throughput, same thing is happening in sales. Same thing is happening in finance. So broad strokes, I think we do you know, this conference, we are launching all the data we have already with the co pilot, it's early days, but we're very optimistic that this is probably the thing that we've been looking in fact the last time where information technology showed up for real in productivity data was when PCs became mainstream in the late 90s and early 2000s because work and workflow changed. I hope that that's the same thing that gets replicated in the AI era. That's

FORTT: Yeah it's a generation ago. How long do you think before the data is conclusive enough that you'll know on the demand side, the customer benefit side kind of what the calculation is, and that'll be able to aid your sales effort?

NADELLA: That's a great question. In fact, one of the things we're also developing is a bit of a methodology on how we go about measuring because it's kind of one of the things right, what's the productivity measures here? By cohort, can you think about some evals some tasks and really look at, deploy the software, look at and follow the cohort, you know, in a month in three months, look at your own data. And that's one of the other things to be realizing is it's big, every business is different. Every workflow is different. Every business process is different and zones are different in time. And so that's why even having these customization tool, so we're really excited about the Copilot studio because you need to be able to tailor these experiences for your specific business process needs. And so I think all of these will add up, and I'm hoping that in 24, I think of calendar year 24 is the year where we will have, I call classic commercial enterprise deployment and deployment data for all of us.

FORTT: Well, I wanted to start there because that's sort of the top line, right – customer demand, what are the problems that it's solving. But I also want to talk about the bottom line and costs and that's where some of your chip announcements come in. You talked about Azure Maia, Azure Cobalt. Start with Maia. AI accelerator, ARM based. This is not competing with Nvidia necessarily or Jensen wouldn't have been onstage with you. But running – starting with you said Microsoft's own workloads. The software that Microsoft is offering out in the cloud, this is going to help run that more efficiently. What kind of savings – what kind of efficiency is possible do you think with your own designed chip versus what you can get off the shelf?

NADELLA: Yeah, I mean, the thing Jon, that we are seeing is – as a hyper scaler, you see the workload and you optimize the workload. That's sort of what one does as a hyper scaler.

FORTT: Hyper scaler meaning it's you –

NADELLA: Us –

FORTT: -- it's Amazon, it's Google, you're the cloud. You got billions and billions of dollars spent on these data centers.

NADELLA: That's right.  I mean, so you've got a systems company at this point. I mean, everything from sort of how we source our power to how we think about the data center design, right? The data center is the computer. The cooling in it, everything is all optimized for the workload. So the fact is, we are now what – we saw these training workloads and inference workloads quite frankly first, right? We have three, four year advantage of trying to sort of learn everything about this workflow. That's kind of to me in a systems business, you have to be early to the next big workload that's going to take over so to speak. And that's what we got right. And so we've been hard at work on it. The other thing is we also and I think about you're talking about AI, for us, Open AI's models are the ones that are deployed at scale. Both, obviously, those are the models that we are training at scale and deploying for inference at scale. It's not just a bunch of models, but it's this one model. So we now have a great roadmap for how we think about Maia, how we think about AMD, how we think about Nvidia –all in our fleet. Like right now as we speak, we have some of the Maia stuff powering GitHub copilot for example. So you will see us deploy our own accelerators and also take advantage. I mean, the other announcement today was the AMD announcement. We're gonna introduce MI300 into the fleet. It's got some fantastic memory characteristics and memory bandwidth characteristics which I think are gonna make –and GPT-4 is already running on it. So we're excited about obviously our cooperation and partnership which is deep with Nvidia, AMD and our own

FORT: Custom chips are the new black, right. AWS has Inferentia, Trainium. Google has its TPUs. What does it take to make yours better and get more benefit out of your systems working?

NADELLA: Yeah, I think the way I look at it and say is you don't enter the silicon business just to be in the silicon business. I think of the silicon business as a means to an end, which is ultimately delivering a differentiated workload. So for example, that's why I don't even think of the silicon itself. I think about the cooling system. I don't know if you caught that. What we did was we built an entire rack which is liquid cooled for Maia. And everything – the thermal distribution of that entire rack is very different from a traditional rack. Guess what? We built it because we can then deploy these in data centers we already have, as opposed to saying let's wait for the next big data center design which is fully liquid cooled, which by the way, is also coming. So that's the level when I think about the advantages we will get is not just going to be about one sort of silicon, but it's going to be the entirety of its system, optimized for high scale workloads that are deployed broadly like something like Open AI inferencing.

FORTT: Now let's take a global perspective. Not long after we're done talking to here, you're getting on a plane going to San Francisco. Chinese President Xi is there. He would like access to all of these innovations that Microsoft has been talking about, that Nvidia has been talking about. President Biden says no. What should happen from here that both allows trade to take place and protects intellectual property?

NADELLA: I think that's a great question. I mean, at the end of the day, nation states are the ones who define their policies. I mean, it's clear that the United States has a particular set of policy decisions that they're making on what it means to both have trade and competition and national security. And so as the states decide, and in this case, obviously, we are subject to what the USG decides, we will sort of really be compliant with it. And at the same time, we do have a global supply chain. The reality of tech as an industry today is it's globalized. And the question is, how does it sort of reconfigure as all of these new policies and trade restrictions all just play out? Whereas at least for today, the majority of our business in the United States and Europe and in the rest of Asia, and so we don't see this as a major, major issue for us, quite frankly, other than any disruption to supply chains.

FORTT: The AI piece?

NADELLA: That's right.

FORTT: That separation –

NADELLA:: That's right because most of our businesses in fact, a lot of the Chinese multinationals operating outside of China are our bigger AI customers perhaps. But China is not a market that we're focused on, per se, as domestically. We mostly focused on the global market X China.

FORTT: For the customers, though, who have to operate in all of these different regions, all these different fields – as a hyper scaler, you've been building out data centers in those places so that you can abide by the rules. Does this friction make it more complicated? Or in a way, does it benefit Microsoft's more diverse global footprint that you have more options to serve customers as these conflicts arise?

NADELLA: I mean, I think I've always sort of felt that in order to be a global provider of something as critical as compute, you just need to localize. And that's why we have more data center regions than anybody else. I always felt that data sovereignty the legitimate reasons for why any country would want it for their public sector, critical industry, was always going to be true. Also, let's not forget the speed of light issues. You need to have a global footprint in order to be able to serve everyone in the world. And so yes, I think at this point, having invested, having gotten here and now gotten ahead on AI, it's going to work to our competitive advantage. But I think that this is also about the you know, the maturity that one needs in order to deal with the world as is, as opposed to it's not like we're building one consumer service that's reaching, you know, 2, 3 billion people. This is about reaching every enterprise public sector workload in the world with all of the compliance and security needs. And that's a very different business than just having one hit consumer service.

FORTT: Now, it's been about 25 years since Microsoft lost a big case versus the government. Where it looks to some like Microsoft was about to get smaller. And yet we're talking here Microsoft just won a big legal case where you're getting bigger with the addition of Activision Blizzard. So I guess in a way, congratulations. But also, there's some work in the AI context here. And now to integrate this, particularly in AI, you talked about this a little bit on stage. What's the challenge of integrating this into Microsoft, into Azure, into your status as a hyper scaler in a way that you get the full benefit of all of that content, of the gaming developer community and of AI?

NADELLA; Yeah, I mean to us at the end of the day, you know, when I think about AI, it's not about just this has another technology you add on the side. It's about sort of changing the nature of every software category, right? Whether it's gaming, whether it is core Azure or Windows – all redefining every software category where AI is going to be core to what we do with the value props we develop. The other important consideration is also to not think of safety as something that we do later. But to really shift left and really build it into the core. Like for example, when we think about Copilot, we built all the responsible AI and guardrails right at the very beginning so that when people are deploying the Copilot, they know that they have the best safety around the Copilot built in. And so these are the things that we're going to do up and down the stack. And that's why I walked up today. You know, from infrastructure to data to Copilots. We're thinking of AI as the main thing with safety, as opposed to one more thing.

FORTT: With the stock recently at all-time high. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Thanks for joining us here on CNBC.

NADELLA: Thank you so much, Jon.

Microsoft announced significant upgrades to Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise as part of the new Copilot AI Companion, with planned integrations with OpenAI GPTs and plugins.

An important new feature for enterprises is the incorporation of commercial data protection for all users signed in through Microsoft Entra ID.

In addition to security improvements for enterprise users, Microsoft is introducing a dedicated platform for Copilot. The new website provides a specialized chat experience, serving as a central hub for Copilot interactions.

The goal: to supply more people access to the benefits of advanced artificial intelligence, which Microsoft data revealed to increase productivity and quality of work.

Meanwhile, Bing.com will continue to feature AI chat, offering AI search assistance for those who prefer the conversational approach.

Included in the announcement is upcoming support for OpenAI GPTs within Copilot, enabling users to customize Copilot for specific tasks.

Combining GPTs with previously announced OpenAI schema widens the scope for developers, opening the door to new users experiences that are more aligned with individual needs and preferences.

In addition, Microsoft announced plugin support for Copilot, based on the OpenAI schema.

These plugins will appear across various Microsoft applications featuring AI Copilot, including Bing, Edge, Windows, and Microsoft 365.

Developers will soon be able to publish Copilot plugins through the Microsoft Partner Center.

Microsoft also provides a testing environment to ensure high-quality experiences for its Copilot users, giving developers the tools to refine chat responses across various scenarios.

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, joined OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman on stage during the keynote of the DevDay conference to explore their continued partnership and development of new AI tools.

Featured image: Poetra.RH/Shutterstock

TINTON FALLS, N.J., Nov. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Commvault, a leading provider of cyber resilience and data protection solutions for hybrid cloud organizations, today announced its participation in the Microsoft Security Copilot Partner Private Preview. Commvault was selected based on its proven experience with Microsoft Security technologies, willingness to explore and provide feedback on cutting edge functionality, and close relationship with Microsoft.

"In the context of security, AI's impact is likely to be profound, tilting the scales in favor of defenders and empowering organizations to defend at machine speed. At Microsoft, we are privileged to have a leading role in advancing AI innovation, and we are so grateful to our incredible ecosystem of partners, whose mission-driven work is critical to helping customers secure their organizations and confidently bring the many benefits of AI into their environments," said Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Security.

Commvault is working with Microsoft product teams to help shape Security Copilot product development in several ways, including validation and refinement of new and upcoming scenarios, providing feedback on product development and operations to be incorporated into future product releases, and validation and feedback of APIs to assist with Security Copilot extensibility. To learn more, read the announcement.

"Commvault's participation in the Microsoft Security Copilot Partner Private Preview aligns with our focus on delivering exceptional data intelligence to customers and partners via our recently announced cyber resilience platform, Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic AI," said David Ngo, Chief Technology Officer, Hyperscalers, Commvault. "Together with Microsoft, we're leveraging AI to supply customers the upper hand to take action and keep data safe, whether that's detecting ransomware sooner, accelerating recoverability, or automating reporting."

Security Copilot is an AI-powered security product designed to enable security professionals to respond to threats quickly, process signals at machine speed, and assess risk exposure in minutes. It combines an advanced large language model (LLM) with a security-specific model that is informed by Microsoft's global threat intelligence and more than 65 trillion daily signals.

About Commvault
Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT) is the gold standard in cyber resilience. The company empowers customers to uncover, take action, and rapidly recover from cyberattacks – keeping data safe and businesses resilient. The company's unique AI-powered platform combines best-in-class data protection, exceptional data security, advanced data intelligence, and lightning-fast recovery across any workload or cloud at the lowest TCO. For over 25 years, more than 100,000 organizations and a vast partner ecosystem have relied on Commvault to reduce risks, Boost governance, and do more with data.

View original content to get multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/commvault-is-a-proud-participant-in-the-microsoft-security-copilot-partner-private-preview-301989423.html

SOURCE Commvault