Month: July 2023

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Bing Chat Enterprise is now available “free” to businesses

Microsoft have unveiled another way for employers to empower their workforce with the announcement and preview availability of Bing Chat Enterprise by giving them better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. Microsoft say it’s “Secure AI-powered chat for work.”

Bing Chat Enterprise | Microsoft

Secured with Microsoft Entra – Conditional Access

Bing Chat brings the power of generative AI to work, however, consumer Generative AI services like ChatGPT and Bing Chat (consumer), are helping people get answers, generate code, content and find things, but using these consumer servers for work, inadvertently puts corporate data at risk since it’s being shared with public AI services which use your data and your searches to train and teach their language models.

This is where Bing Chat Enterprise comes in! With Bing Chat Enterprise, organisations gets all the goodness of “AI-powered chat for work” with the commercial data protection organisations demand. “What goes in—and comes out—remains protected”, Microsoft say, which means employees get secure and managed access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. User and business data is protected and will not leak outside the organisation, and chat data is not saved, viewed or accessible by Microsoft or used to train their language models.

What’s more, access to Microsoft Bing Chat Enterprise is secured and governed for seamless, managed access to using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) and organisations can also customise “Microsoft Search” to build out and map business answers within the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre.

How do you enable Bing Chat Enterprise?

To enable this, you need to ensure that Microsoft Search has not been disabled in your tenant and then go to https://aka.ms/TurnOnBCE as a Tenant Admin in Microsoft 365 and then enable the Bing Enterprise Chat feature as shown below ⬇️. The settings can take up to 4 hours to apply….

Enabling BCE in Microsoft 365 Admin Centre

How does Bing Chat Enterprise Work?

Video (C) Microsoft.

Privacy and Data Protection

Because workplace chats might contain sensitive data, Bing Chat Enterprise is designed with commercial data protection in place to keep organisational data safe.

Chat: When users ask questions in chat, it’s called a prompt. Those prompts can send generated searches (also known as queries) to Bing, and the resulting answer is called a response. User and business data is protected and won’t leak outside the organization. What goes in—and comes out—remains protected. Chat data isn’t saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access to it—no one sees it. And your data isn’t used to train the underlying models.

Search: Any searches generated by Bing Chat have workplace identities removed before they’re sent to Bing. The searches aren’t linked to users or business by Bing and any searches sent to Bing are under the terms of the Microsoft Services Agreement and covered by the privacy statement.

Organisational data: Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t have access to organisational resources or content within Microsoft 365, such as Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Only content provided in the chat by users is accessible to Bing Chat Enterprise.

Plugins: Importantly, Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t have plugin support to prevent any commercial data from being sent to any external providers.

Chat history: Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t retain chat prompts or responses. With Bing Chat history disabled for Bing Chat Enterprise users, no previous chats are maintained or available to users.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing finally been announced.

Back in March, Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI powered service that would bring generative AI features into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the rest of the Microsoft Cloud which has the potential to fundamentally change the way we work with apps, data and services and ever…

CoPilot will work alongside your Microsoft 365 apps and services and leverages the same built in security and privacy in mind so that data is always safe. It respects existing Microsoft 365 security and privacy settings as well as respects individual and group permission policies. This means that you can use it to generate reports, summaries, or other documents without worrying about data leaks or unauthorised access.

How much will Microsoft 365 Copilot cost?

Until now, there has been no indication as to pricing or available (Microsoft 365 Copilot is currently in a closed private preview), but this week, Microsoft used their global partner conference to announced pricing.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for commercial customers will cost an extra $30 per user per month on top of what organisations pay for their Microsoft 365 licenses. There is also minimum base license requirement (for the add on) of Microsoft 365 E3, E5, or Business Standard or Professional, though I expect that large enterprise organisations will be able to get a cheaper rate on Enterprise Agreements.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will cost
$30 per user per month for commercial customers.

What about other Sectors?

Pricing for Public Sector, Healthcare/NHS, Edu and Not for Profit has not yet been announced.

Cheaper than “expectations“?

Rumours of what organisations in the Early Access Program (EAP) had been paying led to speculations that costs could be closer to $40 per use per month so this price is actually lower that what some thought, though other rumours suggested Microsoft “might” bundle it in Microsoft 365 E5.

What do you think – how much were you expecting Microsoft 365 Copilot to cost?

When will Microsoft 365 Copilot be available?

No dates have yet been annouced for wider preview, public preview or General Availability (which is the cycle Microsoft usually follows for new products and services.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is still currently early access preview testing (EAP) with 600 paying enterprise customers.

Bing Chat Enterprise

Microsoft also yesterday announced Bing Chat Enterprise, a new version of the ChatGPT-4 powered Bing Chat service that is now built into their Edge browser and Windows 11 (currently in preview). Bing Chat Enterprise’s main difference will be its privacy model which will ensure user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the boundaries of the organisation.

Bing Chat Enterprise

“Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection,”

Yusaf Mehdi and Jared Spataro |Microsoft

Microsoft said that unlike it’s AI rivals “Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access, which means no one can view your data. And your data is not used to train the models.”

Bing Chat Enterprise will be “free”

Unlike Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise will be available to existing Microsoft 365 customers at no additional cost, and Microsoft also said that they also plan to offer a standalone version for $5 per user per month.

Data privacy has been a major concern for many companies, who are putting in contols to stop employees using generative AI chat tools. Global organisations including Samsung, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs are all among the companies that restricted or banned the use of public verisons of Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard etc. Bing Chat Enterprise’s privacy guard is designed to enable organisation to leverage these AI tools with peace of mind.

When will Bing Chat Enterprise be available?

Bing Chat Enterprise is currently available in preview and is accessible from within Microsoft Edge or bing.com/chat.

When Windows Copilot (not to be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot) is released to the public in a Windows update later this year, Bing Chat Enterprise will also be available from within Windows 11. You can test out Windows Copilot today as a Windows Insider.

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Azure Active Directory is now “Entra ID”

Today, Microsoft have announced the next milestone in their expanded vision for the unified secure access with some huge changes to their unified access and security offering Entra which has now become the brand name for all things identity and access management. Along with that is a name change to Azure Active Directory to Entra ID.

Is Azure AD discontinued?

No… This is a name change that is a result of the shift to a truly end to end multi cloud identity and access solution that spans beyond simply Microsoft 365 and Azure. The name change is designed to reflect it’s new and enhanced capabilities.

In the last 12 months, we saw an average of more than 4,000 password attacks per second, an almost threefold increase from the 1,287 attacks per second we saw the previous year.

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report

With this they have announced they are expanding their Microsoft Entra suite into the Security Service Edge (SSE) category with the launch of two new products.

Microsoft Security Service Edge
  • Microsoft Entra Internet Access and
  • Microsoft Entra Private Access.

Microsoft Entra Internet Access is an identity-centric Secure Web Gateway that protects access to internet, software as a service (SaaS), and Microsoft 365 apps and resources. It extends Conditional Access policies with network conditions to protect against malicious internet traffic and other threats from the open internet.

Microsoft Entra Private Access is an identity centric Zero Trust Network Access that secures access to private apps and resources. Designed to reduce operational complexity and cost by replacing legacy VPNs with simple yet granular security to ensure that any user can quickly and seamlessly connect to private apps across hybrid and multi cloud environments, private networks, and data centers from any device, from any location and from any network.

The goal and vision of Microsoft here is to help organisations secure access to any app or resource, from anywhere. Microsoft say in their security blog that the flexible work arrangements we have become accustomed too, along with continued increase cloud adoption continue to put strain on traditional and legacy corporate networks and network security approaches. Using VPNs to backhaul traffic to the legacy network security stack weakens security posture and damages the user experience while using siloed solutions and access policies leaves security gaps.

Both are now in preview….

The renaming of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to Microsoft Entra ID was also announced which Microsoft say has been done as Microsoft to simplify the product naming conventions and to unify their expanded product family. The change was made as Azure AD now supports multi-cloud meaning the name Azure AD no longer represented the breadth of its offerings.

Azure AD is now Entra ID

Personally not a fan of the name change even though their reasoning makes sense… Everyone knows what Azure AD is (or maybe that’s the problem… they think they do!)… Even Microsoft Teams wasn’t sure about it.!

😂

Microsoft say that that the currently capabilities and licensing plans, sign-in URLs, and APIs will remain unchanged, and all existing deployments, configurations, and integrations will continue to work as before.

You can read more about these recent changes and announcements here.

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What is Microsoft Orca AI?

In late June 2023, Microsoft quietly annouced their new AI language model Orca — a new open-sourced development in the field of Al that can imitate the reasoning of large foundation models in a much smaller footprint, which may revolutionise development of generative AI technology…..

This new AI model is designed to solve many of the limitations of using smaller language models and revolutionise the Al industry.

Orca will do this by “imitating” the reasoning processes of GPT-4 into smaller language models making it more efficient and effective is specific and niche use cases and in more localised instances.

Built in Microsoft and OpenAI partnership

The development of Orca is part of the ongoing collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI, which has led to the creation of a new AI model that can replicate the intricate reasoning and complex instructional processes of GPT-4, and able to house billions of parameters.

Orca is a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs

Microsoft

Microsoft say that with the help of GPT-4, Orca is capable of learning explanations, step-by-step thought processes, and other complex instructions.

What makes Orca AI different?

What makes Orca AI different from other AI models is its unique learning approach. Orca will learn by emulating the reasoning processes of large-scale language models.

This approach will enables Orca AI to understand and replicate the reasoning steps of these models, thereby enhancing its own reasoning capabilities. This learning mechanism is big change from the conventional AI models, and since Orca is much smaller in size, it will not need as much computational resources to operate and is said to be equal in performance with large foundation models (LFM) and Large Language Models (LLM) such as #GPT-4.

The video below explains this in more detail.

Microsoft Orca (source: The Road to AGI)

Orca is the first small parameter model to replicate, not only the patterns and output created by large parameter modules, but also to imitate the reasoning process of these models, all while maintaining a much smaller overhead.

Orca can also be optimised for specific tasks and trained using large language models like GPT-4.

Microsoft is investing heavily in AI and are working on multiple AI projects and tools to further enhance, innovate and differentiate their products and services, and Orca is another step in that direction.

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