COVER STORY
Microsoft Partners, This Is Your Copilot Speaking
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called the spread of generative AI ‘a collective mission’ for the company and its partners, a mission that in part will be fueled by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Here’s how and where a number of partners are placing their bets.
By Wade Tyler Millward
V ineet Arora’s belief in the promise of Microsoft Copilot and the vendor’s other generative artificial intelligence technology runs so deep he’s betting his job on it. The CTO of WinWire Technologies—a Santa Clara, Calif.-based 2023 Microsoft Partner of theYear finalist and No. 233 on CRN ’s 2023 Solution Provider 500—has transitioned his role to focus on technology from Microsoft and Microsoft- backed OpenAI that can quickly create content, analyses and summaries based on user prompts. Arora heads a small team of WinWire employees—data sci- entists, data architects and data engineers found through an internal hackathon earlier in the year—focused on partnering with Microsoft to provide AI technology to customers.WinWire has more than 1,000 employees worldwide. SinceApril, he’s conducted a seven-city road show with Micro- soft technologists to demonstrate what generative AI can do in health care and has done more than 24 envisioning sessions with customers around the technology. WinWire is already piloting generative AI solutions for health-care and life sciences cus- tomers—all of this before some of Microsoft’s most impressive generative AI tools become generally available. And he even publishes two to three articles a day to a Teams
group chat called “All Things OpenAI.” “The scale of the investment that we have planned is [incom- parable] to anything else that we have done in the last 16 years,” Arora told CRN . “My entire time is going into this. … The opportunity size, the technology, the speed at which it is evolving requires 100 percent—110 percent—dedication from our side. So the scale and the level of focus has been different from anything else that we’ve done in the past.” Tech vendors and solution providers alike are fueling a gen- erative AI gold rush. And Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is certainly considered a leader in generative AI thanks to its reported $13 billion investment in OpenAI—the startup that on Nov. 30 publicly launched the ChatGPT text-generating software—and Microsoft’s own March introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which will bring generative AI to Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and other popular productivity applications. At the vendor’s Inspire conference held online last month, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella called next- generation AI a partner ecosystem opportunity that could span $4 trillion to $6.5 trillion. The most forward-looking of its 400,000-member partner ecosystem have now put their best and brightest employees to work developing generative AI solutions.
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AUGUST 2023
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