Today, we are thrilled to announce that ChatGPT is available in preview in Azure OpenAI Service. With Azure OpenAI Service, over 1,000 customers are applying the most advanced AI models—including Dall-E 2, GPT-3.5, Codex, and other large language models backed by the unique supercomputing and enterprise capabilities of Azure—to innovate in new ways.

Since ChatGPT was introduced late last year, we’ve seen a variety of scenarios it can be used for, such as summarizing content, generating suggested email copy, and even helping with software programming questions. Now with ChatGPT in preview in Azure OpenAI Service, developers can integrate custom AI-powered experiences directly into their own applications, including enhancing existing bots to handle unexpected questions, recapping call center conversations to enable faster customer support resolutions, creating new ad copy with personalized offers, automating claims processing, and more. Cognitive services can be combined with Azure OpenAI to create compelling use cases for enterprises. For example, see how Azure OpenAI and Azure Cognitive Search can be combined to use conversational language for knowledge base retrieval on enterprise data.

Customers can begin using ChatGPT today. It is priced at $0.002/1,000 tokens and billing for all ChatGPT usage begins March 13, 2023.

Real business value

Customers across industries are seeing business value from using Azure OpenAI Service, and we’re excited to see how organizations such as The ODP Corporation, Singapore’s Smart Nation Digital Government Office, and Icertis will continue to harness the power of Azure OpenAI and the ChatGPT model to achieve more:

“The ODP Corporation is excited to leverage the powerful AI technology of ChatGPT from Azure OpenAI Service, made possible through our collaboration with Microsoft. This technology will help [The ODP Corporation] drive continued transformation in our business, more effectively explore new possibilities, and design innovative solutions to deliver even greater value to our customers, partners, and associates. [The ODP Corporation] is building a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to support our internal business units, specifically HR. The chatbot has been successful in improving HR’s document review process, generating new job descriptions, and enhancing associate communication. By utilizing ChatGPT’s natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, [The ODP Corporation] aims to streamline its internal operations and drive business success. Embracing this cutting-edge technology will help increase our competitive edge in the market and enhance our customer experience.”—Carl Brisco, Vice President Product and Technology, The ODP Corporation

“Singapore’s Smart Nation Digital Government Office is constantly looking to empower our public officers with technology to deliver better services to Singaporeans and better ideas for Singapore. ChatGPT and large language models more generally, hold the promise of accelerating many kinds of knowledge work in the public sector, and the alignment techniques embedded in ChatGPT help officers interact with these powerful models in more natural and intuitive ways. Azure OpenAI Service’s enterprise controls have been key to enabling exploration of these technologies across policy, operations, and communication use cases.”—Feng-ji Sim, Deputy Secretary, Smart Nation Digital Government Office, under the Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore

“Contracts are the foundation of commerce, governing every dollar in and out of an enterprise. At Icertis, we are applying AI to contracts so businesses globally can drive revenue, reduce costs, ensure compliance, and mitigate risk. The availability of ChatGPT on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service offers a powerful tool to enable these outcomes when leveraged with our data lake of more than two billion metadata and transactional elements—one of the largest curated repositories of contract data in the world. Generative AI will help businesses fully realize the intent of their commercial agreements by acting as an intelligent assistant that surfaces and unlocks insights throughout the contract lifecycle. Delivering this capability at an enterprise scale, backed by inherent strengths in the security and reliability of Azure, aligns with our tenets of ethical AI and creates incredible new opportunities for innovation with the Icertis contract intelligence platform.”—Monish Darda, Chief Technology Officer at Icertis

In addition to all the ways organizations—large and small—are using Azure OpenAI Service to achieve business value, we’ve also been working internally at Microsoft to blend the power of large language models from OpenAI and the AI-optimized infrastructure of Azure to introduce new experiences across our consumer and enterprise products. For example:

•    GitHub Copilot leverages AI models in Azure OpenAI Service to help developers accelerate code development with its AI pair programmer.
•    Microsoft Teams Premium includes intelligent recap and AI-generated chapters to help individuals, teams, and organizations be more productive.
•    Microsoft Viva Sales’ new AI-powered seller experience offers suggested email content and data-driven insights to help sales teams focus on strategic selling motions to customers.
•    Microsoft Bing introduced an AI-powered chat option to enhance consumers’ search experience in completely new ways.

These are just a few examples of how Microsoft is helping organizations leverage generative AI models to drive AI transformation.

Customers and partners can also create new intelligent apps and solutions to stand out from the competition using a no-code approach in Azure OpenAI Studio. Azure OpenAI Studio, in addition to offering customizability for every model offered through the service, also offers a unique interface to customize ChatGPT and configure response behavior that aligns with your organization.

Watch how you can customize ChatGPT using System message right within Azure OpenAI Studio.

A responsible approach to AI

We’re already seeing the impact AI can have on people and companies, helping improve productivity, amplify creativity, and augment everyday tasks. We’re committed to making sure AI systems are developed responsibly, that they work as intended, and are used in ways that people can trust. Generative models, such as ChatGPT or DALL-E image generation model, are models that generate new artifacts. These types of models create new challenges; for instance, they could be used to create convincing but incorrect text to creating realistic images that never happened.

Microsoft employs a layered set of mitigations at four levels, designed to address these challenges. These are aligned with Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard. First, application-level protections that put the customer in charge, for instance, explaining that text output was generated by AI and making the user approve it. Second, technical protections like input and output content filtering. Third, process and policy protections that range from systems to report abuse to service level agreements. And fourth, documentation such as design guidelines and transparency notes to explain the benefits of a model and what we have tested.

We believe AI will profoundly change how we work, and how organizations operate in the coming months. To meet this moment, we will continue to take a principled approach to ensure our AI systems are used responsibly while listening, learning, and improving to help guide AI in a way that ultimately benefits humanity.

Getting started with Azure OpenAI Service

• Learn more about Azure OpenAI Service and more about all the latest enhancements.
• Get started with ChatGPT using Azure OpenAI Service.
• Get started with the “Introduction to Azure OpenAI Service” course on Microsoft Learn.
• Read the Partner announcement blog, Empowering partners to develop AI-powered apps and experiences with ChatGPT in Azure OpenAI Service.

Seth Juarez, Principal Program Manager and co-host of The AI Show, shares top use cases for Azure OpenAI Service and an example chatbot for retail using ChatGPT.