What to Expect at Microsoft Build 2023

Every year, Microsoft hosts Microsoft Build, a massive tech conference that brings together software developers and tech professionals from all over the world. This event offers a unique platform for attendees to gain insights from keynote speakers, participate in workshops, and discover the latest tools and technologies in Microsoft's development arsenal.

Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your journey, Microsoft Build 2023 is sure to provide valuable information and inspiration to fuel your innovation. Over 5,000 people are expected to attend in-person and an additional 200,000 are expected to attend online.

This year's MS Build conference will showcase the increasing adoption of AI-powered tools and platforms. APIs and SDKs provide a set of functions that can be called by other applications to leverage the AI model's capabilities. AI plug-ins and extensions add new functionality to existing products, while custom integrations can be tailored to the specific needs of the application or use case.

Microsoft is likely to unveil some exciting developments at MS Build 2023 as they look to maintain momentum and integrate their products, including 365, Teams, Azure, and partnerships with OpenAI. The convergence of these technologies promises to revolutionize the way we work and collaborate, and we can expect to see some cutting-edge innovations at the forefront of this movement.

Setting the Stage

At the beginning of the year, Microsoft made a bold move by investing a whopping $10 Billion into OpenAI. This news was followed by several interviews with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. During a discussion with Nilay Patel from The Verge, Nadella was asked about the potential impact of this investment on Microsoft's relationship with Google in the realm of search technology. Nadella responded by expressing his admiration for Google's search team, calling them the "800-pound gorilla" in the field. However, he also referenced Microsoft's determination to innovate and challenge Google's dominance, stating that he hopes their innovations will push Google to "show that they can dance." Nadella's words suggest that Microsoft is ready to take on the competition and make a lasting impact in the world of search technology. We expect to see this theme continue throughout the year across all of Microsoft’s major events.

The Microsoft Build conference 2023 comes on the heels of Google I/O. This is Google’s developer conference where they focused on making AI technology more accessible and integrated across all areas of application development. Major highlights include the PaLM API and MakerSuite for AI app development, Studio Bot for Android Studio, support for Kotlin and Dart in WASM for the web, and the launch of Duet AI, a generative AI-powered assistant for developers. Google also emphasized the potential of Android foldables & tablets with new device announcements and continued support for mobile and web machine learning with MediaPipe Studio.

Key Themes and Topics

Artificial Intelligence, OpenAI, GPT-4

In the technology industry, companies strive to innovate and push boundaries despite fierce competition. Microsoft is leading the charge in this movement by investing heavily in AI technology and incorporating it into their suite of products. This has brought renewed energy and excitement to the company as they set new standards for the industry. At Build 2023, Microsoft is expected to showcase some groundbreaking developments, and we can't wait to see what they have in store.

The Microsoft Build event will place a significant emphasis on integrating AI capabilities with Microsoft's suite of tools, with a focus on enhancing the end-user’s experience. While many of us have seen the impressive capabilities of AI-powered tools, such as ChatGPT, we're still unsure about how AI will affect our day-to-day lives.

Microsoft has a unique opportunity to address these questions and demonstrate how AI will be incorporated across their products and tools through Azure OpenAI's powerful language models including the GPT-4, Codex and Embeddings model series for content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language to code translation. As Build is a developer conference, we can also expect to see some significant enhancements to Microsoft's existing suite of developer tools.

New Bing

Given Bing's latest advancements in AI-powered search capabilities, it's highly likely that Microsoft will showcase these innovations at the upcoming Build conference. Microsoft has a long-standing reputation for pioneering new technology, and Bing's new features perfectly align with the company's mission to enhance user experience through the power of AI.

At the conference, Microsoft may demonstrate how Bing's new features can seamlessly integrate with other Microsoft products and services, such as Microsoft 365, Teams, and Azure. This could involve showcasing the benefits of using Bing's new search engine as a tool for generating creative ideas or solving complex problems, and how it can be utilized across different industries and professions.

Furthermore, Microsoft Build Announcements may include highlights on how these new features have been developed and implemented, providing insights into the AI algorithms and programming behind the search engine's capabilities. This could be of particular interest to developers attending the conference, providing them with valuable information and inspiration to build better software.

Bing's latest advancements in AI-powered search capabilities have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with search engines. It's exciting to anticipate how Microsoft will present and leverage these capabilities at the Build conference to enhance user experience and set new standards for the industry.

Microsoft 365

In March, Microsoft announced that the M365 suite would be enhanced with Copilot for 365, a language model-based AI tool that can help users work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps. Copilot can generate suggestions for text and layout, automate repetitive tasks, summarize email threads and suggest actions in real time during meetings.

It can also learn new skills and tasks as it works, while benefiting from Microsoft's approach to security, compliance, and privacy. The technology is currently being tested with a small group of customers, with pricing and licensing to be announced at a later date. Build would be a great stage to roll this out more broadly and provide customers with compelling demonstrations. After all, the point of these developer conferences is to “show the future.”

Microsoft's AI capabilities have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology and enhance productivity across various industries. It will be fascinating to see how Microsoft leverages these capabilities at the Build conference and what new innovations they bring to the table.

Developer Tools | Teams + Pieces for Developers

This year, Microsoft Teams unleashed the power of AI and released new features in Teams Premium. Seeing as the MS Build conference is for developers, Microsoft is sure to unveil additional capabilities tailored to developers. This will set Teams apart from other collaboration tools commonly used by developers and data scientists.

One particularly notable partnership is with Pieces for Developers, an advanced snippet manager and productivity helper designed to optimize developer tools and eliminate the chaos of context switching. Pieces uses the latest from OpenAI in tandem with their own in-house machine learning to power their AI experiences. This provides the best material enrichment for developers, whether connected to the internet, or working offline and on-device.

Pieces is deeply integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem of developer tools. Whether you're browsing in the new Bing search engine with Edge, working in VS Code, importing Gists from GitHub, or collaborating in Teams, Pieces for Developers enriches your snippets with relevant context, related links, summaries, tags, related people, and more. Pieces allows you to backtrack through your workflow via a powerful feature called Workflow Activity Stream. This serves as an event tracker for your workflow and enables high-fidelity save, search, share, and reuse capabilities.

Pieces works directly in Teams by extracting code snippets from a conversation and allowing the user to open a Teams conversation directly from VS Code, GitHub, the browser, or the Pieces Desktop App. The Pieces Desktop App also features a Global Search view that makes it easy to search your code and receive highly relevant related tags, links, and additional snippets served directly in the app.

The Pieces for Teams application will give developers access to new powerful tools directly in Microsoft Teams. Users will be able to share code snippets and discover new snippets from their Teams window with simple slash commands. They will then be able to access those snippets in the Pieces Desktop Application with all of the relevant contextual metadata, related people from the Teams conversation, and links back to the original message.

Additional slash commands will bring the powerful enrichment capabilities directly into the Teams window. This means enriched, usable snippets will be available directly in the Teams window. These features becoming available in Teams are the first step in what will be an extensive partnership with Teams and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The goal is to bring the developer closer to their tools and integrate the save, search, share, reference, reuse, and transform capabilities from Pieces with all of a developer’s favorite tools.

With this partnership, Microsoft Teams is positioning itself as a powerful tool for developers, offering a seamless experience that integrates with popular developer tools and platforms. As a result, we can expect to see some exciting developments from Teams at MS Build conference 2023 that will further enhance the developer's workflow and drive innovation in the industry.

See you at Build!

Bing, Microsoft 365, Teams, and Pieces for Developers are just a few examples of the exciting partnerships and initiatives we expect to be featured at Build this year. One thing is certain: AI will be center stage. Microsoft has made it clear that AI is the future. As technology continues to evolve, Microsoft Build 2023 is your opportunity to stay ahead of the curve and become part of a vibrant community of innovators and thought leaders. Don't miss this chance to be a part of the future of technology — Register Today and join us at Microsoft Build 2023!