Microsoft Build 2020 was, as always, an amazing event showcasing tons of new technology that will impact the world in the coming months.  Given all that’s happening in the world and the fact that this was the first time Build was 100% virtual, you may have missed some of these announcements.  

Don’t worry. We’ll share our notes! 

We were fortunate enough to support quite a few technologies showcased at Build, so we have seen many of these up-close and in action. Here are four key technologies from Build 2020 that we believe will have lasting business impacts over the next few years: 

1. Autonomous systems
2. Edge AI for healthcare
3. Azure Synapse Analytics
4. Azure MLOps

Autonomous systems

Autonomous systems have a lot of potential in manufacturing, but it also has applications in defense, robotics control, process optimization and more. Check out this video from Microsoft Research to see autonomous systems in action:

As one of Microsoft’s selected partners for autonomous systems, Neal was thrilled to see Project Bonsai released for public preview. You can learn more about our perspective on autonomous systems here.  

Do you wonder if this technology is applicable to your manufacturing customer? We’d be happy to share with you our experience working together with Microsoft Autonomous Systems (i.e. Bonsai) engineering team, on a real-life PoC at a leading US food and beverage company.  

Edge AI for healthcare

Working with the Azure Edge team, we announced StockView, our Azure Stack Edge-based solution that helps pharmacy managers detect out-of-stock medical supplies with AI vision analytics at the edge.  

The solution is also showcased in the Azure Stack blog. Check out this cool demo video we built in our office despite the COVID-19 lockdown. Shout out to Edwin for visiting the empty offices to record it!  

StockView is also a great solution for out-of-stock detection in retail. Check out the Retail of the Future demo at Ignite 2019

Azure Synapse Analytics

Neal has years of experience building and deploying Azure Data Warehouse solutions. As a Synapse launch partner, we’ve worked closely with the Synapse team on the ”unmatched” campaign for over a year now, so we’re super excited about the Synapse Insights announcement at Build.  

Check out our latest blog post on Synapse for the key features we’re most excited to see! 

Azure MLOps

What is MLOps?  Find out in Edwin’s blog post here and learn how you can use the mentality of DevOps to boost your machine learning capabilities.  

MLOps is becoming a vital element of many ML/AI projects. At Neal, we’ve been using Azure MLOps tools for years to manage our customers’ projects.  

Now, we’re leveraging our management consulting roots to help all customers build up their MLOps chops. Learn how you can scale workflows, create mission-critical roadmaps, and do more with MLOps here.