A preview for Azure AI Content Safety. The general availability of ready-to-use document and conversation summarization for Azure Cognitive Service for Language. And the reveal of Microsoft Fabric.

These are among the biggest Azure announcements during the vendor’s Build 2023 conference. Microsoft is holding its annual developer-focused conference online Tuesday and Wednesday and in Seattle until Thursday.

The investments in generative artificial intelligence come as the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor positions the technology as the next popular user interface, with natural language interactions by users as revolutionary as graphical user interfaces.

“It’s not an autopilot approach, but rather a design ethos that we call ‘copilot’ to tackle the growing volume of digital debt that is taking attention away from innovation and sapping our productivity,” Rajesh Jha, Microsoft executive vice president of experiences and devices, said in a blog post.

[RELATED: Microsoft 365 Copilot Brings Generative AI To Teams, Word And More]

Microsoft Azure News At Build 2023

The generative AI race has mostly focused on Microsoft and Google’s efforts, with vendors including Salesforce, IBM and Palo Alto Networks all incorporating the technology in various offerings to speed up data analysis and boost security, among other use cases.

Solution providers have also experimented with the new technology to find more ways to optimize their business and find new ways to bring in revenue.

In an example of generative AI’s popularity, Azure OpenAI Service is still in preview but has been used by more than 4,500 companies, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Executive Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said on the vendor’s quarterly earnings call in April that Microsoft is already seeing new customers and new money-making opportunities from generative AI.

“Some of the work we’ve done in AI even in the last couple of quarters, we are now seeing conversations we never had,” he told analysts on the call. “Whether it’s coming through even just OpenAI’s APIs, right—if you think about the consumer tech companies … they have gone to OpenAI and are using their API. These are not customers of Azure at all.”

He continued: “Even Azure OpenAI API customers are all new. And the workload conversations, whether it’s B2C conversations in financial services or drug discovery … these are all new workloads that we really were not in the game in the past, whereas we now are.”

Other Azure news from Microsoft at Build 2023 includes:

*Updates to Azure development operations (DevOps) tools

*Advancements in Azure Database offerings

*Upgrades to Azure Infrastructure

Read on for more Azure news from Microsoft Build 2023.