February 2024

You love tech. We love tech. And this month – as love and old Saint Valentine were celebrated around the world – some of us showed our affections with, yep, technology.  

Maybe you gave your crush an AI-generated valentine. Maybe you offered your sweetie a box of chocolates made with the help of AI. 

Or maybe you asked Microsoft Copilot to churn out a haiku inspired by a candy heart message: 

Welcome to love in the time of AI. In that spirit, this issue highlights some ways that tech and AI are bringing people together – beyond the romance, that is.  

We’ll explore how AI can strengthen our links to people at work, school and home. We’ll tell you about parents who use Walmart’s AI-enhanced shopping experience to plan birthday parties for their kids. And you’ll learn about fifth graders who are becoming smitten with words as they craft their own stories with AI.  

We hope you enjoy this edition. It’s our latest labor of love! 

From partnerships to friendships to family relationships, AI is connecting folks to pursue their big goals – or make the most of smaller moments.  

On the grand scale, scientific collaborations fueled by AI are producing progress in planet-sized quests to treat infectious diseases and find new energy solutions.  

The Global Health Drug Discovery Institute recently joined forces with Microsoft Research to advance the discovery of new drugs that target tuberculosis and coronaviruses. Such breakthroughs typically take years. With generative AI, the team completed its work in five months.  

Another scientific revelation – a better battery to store clean energy – arose from a partnership between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Microsoft. Researchers are now testing a promising new battery material found in weeks, not years, through advanced AI and high-performance computing.  

At home, people are harnessing AI to save precious time – and bolster precious ties. Some are customers of Walmart, which added generative AI to its digital shopping platform to deliver a more intuitive experience. 

Now, if a parent wants to throw their unicorn-adoring child a birthday bash featuring unicorn-style streamers and balloons, they can ask Walmart’s online search to: “Help me plan a unicorn-themed party for my kiddo.”  

At school, many teachers are turning to AI to spend extra time with students. In increasingly crowded classrooms, providing one-on-one attention can be challenging.  

In the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District near Los Angeles, teachers can assess every student’s precise reading speed and fluency by having the kids create their own unique stories with Microsoft Reading Coach, now built with generative AI.  

In India’s Karnataka state, Shiksha copilot is cutting the time teachers need to prepare lesson plans. Those minutes can be reinvested to address students’ learning needs. Shiksha copilot is a generative AI digital assistant that draws up classroom activities, quizzes and more.  

As AI brings folks nearer, it’s also helping bust down barriers that have long kept people apart.��

In the field of cybersecurity, for example, a training program called KC7 is opening doors to encourage a more inclusive industry.  

Free and available to everyone, KC7 offers an immersive gaming experience to boost user involvement. It uses generative AI to ensure that fresh content is always available. More than 2,000 students in 12 countries are now playing the game – all with an eye toward someday defeating real-world cybercriminals.   

Pinpoint your ‘AI personality’ 

Carving out your own generative AI habit is as unique as developing your own writing style. How you AI depends on your temperament – and how you use the tool: Are you “the taskmaster” or “the team player?” Or something in between? 

Take a fun quiz to learn your AI personality. How you respond to 12 questions about you and your work mode will reveal, for example, if you’re “the analyst,” famous for fierce research skills or “the storyteller,” known to elevate emails with electric prose.  

Once you define your AI personality, take another sec to absorb the right way to AI. 

Free to be her true self  

In a past job, Ashley Witherspoon was urged to look, speak and act like someone else – to appear, frankly and painfully, less Black.  

Back then, she was told not to wear her natural hairstyle, not to use “certain language,” not to “seem too aggressive at work, you know, as a Black woman.” 

Now at Microsoft, she works as a customer success account manager – a role in which she’s flourishing largely because, Witherspoon says, she can be “exactly who I am.”  

“I quickly learned that it’s OK to stand up for yourself. It’s OK to bring who you are (to work),” she says. “It’s OK to wear your hair the way you want to wear your hair … and be successful in this space.”  

This Black History Month and year-round, we celebrate employee stories like Ashley’s that explore the wide-ranging experiences of the Black and African American community and the impact we can have when inclusion is made real.

We’ve gotta stop meeting like this

We can name one thing you probably don’t love: meetings. (Our deep apologies to all of you who are truly passionate about action items and agendas.)  

But if your workdays are beset with unproductive, miserable meetings, there’s hope. Whether you gather with colleagues in person or remotely, Microsoft Copilot and AI can help speakers polish their presentations or focus chaotic convos to keep the chat on track. 

If your calendar is so crammed you must choose between bathroom breaks or meeting prep, AI also can help you grasp the talking points and organize your thoughts mere moments before the intros. 

And with that, we have a hard stop. Thank you all for your time today. Let’s circle back next month! 😉 

We hope “The Monthly Tech-In” feeds your digital appetite. Between issues, keep current with the latest Microsoft innovations by following us on LinkedIn or by visiting us at Microsoft Source. 

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