Frontline workers are the foundation of every industry—from retail and healthcare to hospitality and field services. Yet for years, they’ve been asked to increase productivity and deliver more value, faster, often with tools that weren’t designed for the specific realities of frontline work. Today, that dynamic is shifting. When AI is applied in practical, governed
Data-driven organizations have a strategic advantage over their competition. They see material growth in worker productivity, top-line revenue, and margin, as well as increased agility around mergers and acquisitions.
Like all businesses, commercial businesses should pursue sustainability strategies because they enable them to respond to rapidly growing market interests. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s smart business. The future of our planet, our society, and our people depend on all of us being good stewards of our environment.
S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, an internationally recognized expert in media, founding director of the Institute for Media Innovation, and the Lead Principal Investigator for UT’s Good Systems Designing AI for Racial Justice research project.
The world is very different today than it was just a year ago. The realities of COVID-19 have challenged us all. The pandemic rearranged our health and wellness priorities while teaching us some valuable lessons. When faced with a crisis, we’ve learned that health systems and health leaders are capable of agile transformation.
The rapid pace of innovation in artificial intelligence has led us to the next stage of AI development, which we call “industry verticalization”: designing AI products to meet the needs of specific industries.
In a webinar entitled “The Art of Possible: Manufacturing Priorities that Will Define 2021,” Çağlayan Arkan, Microsoft’s VP of manufacturing industry shared: “From extreme disruption comes extreme transformation.” His point is well taken. In the aftermath of the pandemic, supply chain has raced to the top of the news and manufacturing is centerstage.
To some extent, the term resilience has become 2020 shorthand for “surviving a global pandemic.” But as technical professionals know well, the goal of resilience long predates the cataclysms we’ve faced this year.
There have been many articles written about how supercomputing in the cloud aids in performing compute tasks faster and more cost-effectively. However, with this new capability, both business and IT decision makers are now focusing more on how to manage the much larger volumes of produced data.
Who would have thought when I made my 2020 health trends and predictions in January that our world would be upended by COVID-19? In a year marked by the health and economic crisis posed by a global pandemic, we’ve seen countless examples of the U.S.
For most organizations, growth is always at the forefront. The pursuit of new service lines, new customers, and new regions motivates business leaders to adopt bigger office spaces, expanded retail locations, and additional franchises. While these aspirations drive each company to bolder aspirations, they do so with a cost.
A future for everyone To meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs—that’s how we at Microsoft define the challenge of sustainable development.
2020 has been a year like none other. COVID-19 has brought about not only a public health crisis, but an economic one as well. But historically, skills training has not reached the people in underserved communities who need it most, such as people of color, people with disabilities, and women.
