Build your own copilot with Microsoft Azure AI Studio  

In the rapidly evolving world of AI technology, Microsoft Azure AI Studio, now generally available, is empowering organizations to create their own AI copilots. With AI Studio, organizations can customize and build their own copilot to meet their unique needs.  

We’re excited to see organizations across various sectors staying competitive, driving innovation, and transforming their operations.  No matter your use case, AI Studio accelerates the generative AI development lifecycle, empowering organizations to build and shape the future with AI.  

Build a copilot to streamline call center operations 

Vodafone used AI Studio to modernize their existing customer service chatbot TOBi, and to develop a new copilot with a conversational AI search interface, called SuperAgent, to support Vodafone’s human agents when responding to complex customer inquiries.  

TOBi serves customers by addressing common questions like account status and simple technical troubleshooting. SuperAgent involves summarizing call center transcripts, which condenses lengthy calls into brief summaries stored in the customer relationship management system (CRM). This allows agents to quickly understand the reason for a customer’s previous call and detect new issues, improving response times and customer satisfaction. The system is fully automated, with calls transcribed and summarized by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Studio, providing actionable insights for agents. 

Together, Vodafone’s call center is getting impressive results, TOBi manages nearly 45 million customer calls a month, fully resolving 70%. On average, customer call times have been reduced by at least one minute, saving customers and agents’ valuable time.²  

Part of using new technologies is experimentation and the ability to easily collaborate. With Azure AI Studio, you can interact with other people and with projects through a code-first approach to seamlessly explore, build, test, and deploy, using cutting-edge AI tools and machine learning models.” 

—Ahmed Elsayed, CIO UK & Europe Digital Engineering Director, Vodafone Group

Build a copilot to improve customer experiences 

H&R Block built AI Tax Assist, “a generative AI experience that streamlines online tax filing by enabling clients to ask questions during the workflow”, was developed with AI Studio.  

AI Tax Assist addresses individuals’ questions as they prepare and file their taxes and can answer tax theory questions or offer navigation instructions when needed. It can provide answers on tax forms, deductions, and credits to help customers maximize potential refunds and minimize tax liability. AI Tax Assist also answers free-form, tax-related questions, providing dynamic responses to customer questions. 

“Since launching the AI Tax Assist experience, we’ve received positive customer feedback and seen increased usage throughout the 2024 tax season,” says Jody Vanarsdale, Director of Product Management at H&R Block. “We’ve been most pleased to see customers complete the entire filing process quickly and without leaving the app.” 

With Azure AI Studio, our devs can code faster, so they had time to ‘experiment’ to fine-tune features like enabling individuals to ask as many questions as needed conversationally and the ability to revisit previous conversation threads. It’s an approach we’re continuing—to push innovation and deliver the best experiences.” 

—Aditya Thadani, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Platforms, H&R Block 

Build a copilot to boost employee productivity  

Sweco, a leading European architecture and engineering firm, recognized the need for a custom copilot solution to help employees in the flow of their work. They chose AI Studio to build their own copilot, SwecoGPT, which automates document creation and analysis, delivers advanced search, and provides language translation.  

Shah Muhammad, Head of AI Innovation at Sweco, appreciates the “one-click deployment of the models in Azure AI Studio and that it makes Microsoft Azure AI offerings transparent and available to the user.”¹ Since its deployment, nearly half of Sweco’s employees use SwecoGPT and report increased productivity, giving them more time to focus on creativity and helping customers. 

With Azure AI Studio, [we were] able to rapidly develop a proof of concept (POC) to show how a SwecoGPT could look, operate, and benefit our consultants and our business as a whole. This just showcases the power and scalability of Azure AI.” 

 —David Hunter, Head of AI and Automation, Sweco

Build on a foundation of trust  

In the journey of AI integration, trust is table stakes. With Azure AI, you can confidently create a copilot knowing your data is always your data. Your data is never used to train the models.  

We owe it to our clients to handle all their information responsibly. Microsoft has shown a lot of leadership in establishing those principles of responsible AI, maintaining clients’ trust, maintaining privacy, and ensuring that any capabilities we deliver are consistent with our promise of expertise.” 

—Aditya Thadani, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Platforms, H&R Block 

Your organizational data is encrypted in your Microsoft Azure subscription and protected by Microsoft’s comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls.  

We are a company that uses a lot of Microsoft products, and we trust Microsoft for its security, compliance, and leadership in generative AI.”

—David Hunter, Head of AI and Automation, Sweco 

AI Studio is designed with responsible AI principles and practices in mind. Build your copilot with technologies, templates, and best practices to help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance. Safeguard your copilot with Azure AI Content Safety’s configurable filters and controls. 

Beyond the technology, the Microsoft commitment to responsible AI was a differentiator,” says Garcia. “As we work with new technologies to build the inclusive digital communities of tomorrow, this is a critical foundation.”

—Ignacio Garcia, CIO Italy & Global Director Data Analytics and AI, Vodafone Group 

Build for the future 

Azure AI is where innovators are creating the future, and we’re continuing to invest in our AI Studio platform to provide cutting edge services and tools to our customers. As we look ahead to what’s next for custom copilots, we’re excited about how agents, like Azure OpenAI Assistants application programming interface (API) can accelerate and improve custom copilot development. Using Azure OpenAI models, developers can provide specific instructions to tune AI capabilities and access multiple tools in parallel, including code interpreter and file search, or custom tools built and accessed through function calling.   

We’re excited to see what customers build next.  

I can’t wait to see what we’re doing in six months or a year from now. The potential of Azure AI Studio for us—and what we can do with it for our customers—is infinite.”

—Shah Muhammad, Head of AI Innovation, Sweco 

Get started with Azure AI Studio  

• Explore AI Studio.
• Watched the recorded session from Build.
• Learn about the Azure OpenAI Assistants API.

Sources

¹ Microsoft Customer Story-Sweco Group empowers its architects and engineers with a timesaving AI assistant built in Azure AI Studio 

² Microsoft Customer Story-Vodafone amplifies call center innovation, customer service, and employee inclusion with Azure AI