The year 2023 has been a remarkable, memorable, life-changing and transformative one for a lot of people around the world. The breakthrough of artificial intelligence, the expansion of digital platforms, the emergence of new forms of collaboration and creativity, and the advancement of social and environmental causes have shaped our lives, our work, and our society. As we approach the end of this year, it is good to look back and appreciate what we have discovered, and how the world has changed. What will await us during 2024? It will be an interesting year for sure! Let us get started by looking back to my year of 2023.
Events A bit of fame Year of the AI Meshing forward! What else was on during 2023? Looking at 2024
Events
During this year I did less public speaking than during 2022. A lot of events were in-person only, which of course limits who can speak or attend such community activities, or many people can fit the speaker’s roster. But there are still webinars and user groups that do a lot of online meetups. With Teams Finland we continued the way it was established 2019, which is online + a few hybrid meetings during a year. Meeting people face to face is of course always the best thing – especially when you get to spend time with community and friends informally during the evening. It does create a stronger network and relationship than what happens when meeting people just online. But for this there are also some exceptions – you can have a great online community and stay connected with people without meeting them very often, or at all. Is this something new? No, this has been the way since IRC and early web (25+ years ago) – at those times it just was not common. After that, an online-gaming culture started which formed communities, friends, and relationships.
Without sidetracking any more, I have great friends who I have not met in person for some time, except online. And I have met a lot of people in person who are just acquittances. And I met in person with my friends (and made new friends too) during in-person events and we had lots of fun – and grew stronger and more lasting friendships. In person events do open an opportunity for people to meet speakers and ask questions – there are a lot of people who do not want to write their questions to the chat or open mic during an online event. When meeting people face to face, it is much easier to initiate a chat about a topic you want to ask about. And on the opposite side: if all events are in-person, it limits the number of people attending and speakers traveling to those events. I love that there are both online and in-person opportunities to share knowledge, learn and meet people. It is a hybrid world for sure.
I noticed that online tiredness was very present during this year. Online events did get less attendees and there was less noise in the social during those events, while in person events seemed to get a lot of hyping up. There were also less online events than in 2022. I suppose this was due to backlash from previous years. Despite all this, when we organized Metaverse One 2023 we did get an impressive number of attendees (500-600) to attend the event during the day. No, it was not Teams Nation’s 5k, but I think we did well with Metaverse One 2023. It was a happy achievement for me, to be the main organizer of the Metaverse One 2023.
In total I did 22 public speaking events during 2023, including webinars. Most of those were online (15) but I did manage to speak in 7 in-person events. On top of that I also organized, with the team, Teams Finland meetups (online & hybrid) for 9 times. I also managed to visit Microsoft Redmond HQ two times during 2023: first the MVP Summit during spring and then Mesh Dev Kitchen in autumn. I do love visiting there and meeting product group people in person – both at the formal and informal parts of those visits. Speaking of product groups, as Microsoft MVP and working at Microsoft Partner I also did quite a lot of product group meetings, at best it is possible to shape the future of products when sharing your views and opinions with product team members.
For 2024 my first speaking event will be Cloud Technology Townhall Tallinn 2024, where I speak about how to use AI to supercharge Microsoft Teams: how AI can help you to make your apps and Teams experience smarter. Key blocks here include Azure OpenAI, Copilot Studio and Power Automate. Let’s meet at Tallinn!
A bit of fame
What was also fun, is to see Sulava & myself featured at Microsoft Ignite video (in two: Microsoft Mesh and Microsoft Loop) and in Teams Premium customer story. Then there is also a Teams Premium Sulava Customer Story video.. Yep, it was a busy year for sure. And it was great working with Microsoft team when creating those videos. Having seen a lot of customer stories earlier, it was indeed a great fun to be in one.
Year of the AI
A year ago, it was not so obvious that the year 2023 would be the year of AI. ChatGPT was out and it was causing ripples and hype, but its game-changing potential was not realized until a month or so later during start of the 2023. When Azure OpenAI Services became available a big tide of change started. Bing Chat (and Bing Chat Enterprise -> Microsoft Copilot) changed the way I searched for information from the web. Microsoft 365 Copilot was announced during March 2023, and I remember to be thinking that “no, we won’t see that in live action during this year”. How wrong I was… Now I have been using Microsoft 365 Copilot since October, over two months already. No, you cannot do everything we saw in announcement videos 9 months ago but with this evolution rate it will not be that far away either. In the end you can great surprising (in a good way) results with proper prompting. Always describe your need to AI, it helps to get better results.
Early 2023, I started to use AI (Stable Diffusion first, then Midjourney and now mostly DALL-E 3.) to generate my pictures for blog articles, presentations and more. While creating images with AI is fun and gives me an endless supply of pictures to add to my presentations, articles etc. But it is not all GenAI can do – not even near. Text to anything is close, because you can already create music, 3D objects, some 3D spaces and so on. Indeed – my own words are the UI of the future. Or it will be. Today AI and me sometimes have (often) a different view on what I want from the picture. And sometimes it gives me better results than I even thought.
It was fun to create some Fallout –game themed pictures using Dall-E 3 in Bing Create. Dall-E did a big jump in quality when it went from 2 to 3.
Now I can go and use AI (Copilot) to help me generate new Copilots with Copilot Studio, Power Automate Flows and more. I cannot do everything yet, but both AI and I are learning. And as a consultant I am learning all the time what is feasible to do with AI and what not. I have used AI (Large-Language Models LLM / GPT) to generate text drafts for me. Into presentations, blog posts, session descriptions – and especially session titles. With AI you have a sparring partner / coach available 24/7 and you can get a lot of ideas from what it says. Sometimes it is a kind of drunken space pirate, but sometimes it is a very smart visionary. You need to learn how to talk with AI, to get more out of it. And it is rare that the AI can produce the final version right away. Usually, I do talk with AI about the topic a few times, until I get the draft to the direction I want it to be.
Do I use AI all the time? No, because there are still some texts that are more productive to create without using an AI to generate draft-texts. AI can boost your productivity and save a lot of time. If you let it and you learn how to use it (and when not to). It is also easy to go onto AI-loop, where you want to produce the text or image with AI, but none is ok… So, you keep on prompting and prompting… It is good to understand that you should stop after a few times and write the text by yourself. Or change your approach: instead of a complete text, create a list of ideas. Describe a different role what AI has. Use AI to generate prompts you use with AI… If the last one sounds silly, it is not – in fact, Microsoft 365 Copilot does just that: it is using user’s prompt and rewriting it to a better one.
Meshing forward!
We finally saw Microsoft Mesh to go to private preview during spring 2023 and emerge onto public preview October 2023. Early 2024, Microsoft Mesh is scheduled to be GA( generally available). Having been involved with Mesh for years (almost since it was announced at Ignite 2021 Spring edition), this has been quite a ride. It was also special to be at Mesh Dev Kitchen, with Mesh Product Group, during the day when Mesh went for public preview. I doubt there will be another occasion like that for me. The development of Microsoft Mesh will not stop at the GA announcement. Quite the opposite, now the fun starts and we can see it evolve over time! Already today, it is possible to create amazing experiences with Microsoft Mesh and I am happy that I can be involved with Mesh projects with our customers.
On Mesh part, the coming of AI boom did leave it out of spotlight and it is quite understandable since there are limits how much people and organizations can assimilate in a short period of time. The future is AI x Metaverse, and AI will be making Mesh a better one. At Ignite 2023 we did saw Mesh Copilot in videos in action. I can’t wait to be able to try it out!
What else was on during 2023?
2023 change and tech evolution was faster than ever. The foundation for the future of work is there, and the road is being paved with AI support. This is opening lots of new opportunities and jobs (AI whisperers / prompt engineers are just one example) for organizations and people to improve productivity, performance, and wellness. I saw already that AI can help me to perform better at work – if you are aware of its limitations.
AI also brought other matters to the table: responsible AI is needed to prevent wrongdoing and make working with AI secure. Organizations need to think about what they do with productivity and performance gain that is caused by harnessing AI. Not everything can go to productivity or expecting people to do more work for more profit as it will not be helping our wellness, not at all. Smart companies can grow with AI and keep investing on employees, wellness and with that they can achieve much more than they can today.
There has been big advancements in the metaverse, hardware, quantum computing, robotics, cybersecurity, you name it. It has been a year of rapid evolution in about all tech areas.
I am not going to talk about world politics or situations in this article. There are a lot of dreadful things happening in the world, and we can read about them and their effects on the world, people, and economies from news about every day. Sadly, it seems that these news will carry on to the year 2024. I am not looking forward to what more will emerge to the world during 2024, that does not drive humanity forward.
Looking at 2024
What will happen during 2024? What will we experience and see? For sure we are seeing AI evolve faster and getting more skills and capabilities at work and life. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be seen in many many more workplaces. We will see tailored Copilots, tailored skills and plugins for Copilots, Copilots for every M365 App, embedded AI everywhere. We saw Dynamics 365 Guides Copilot at Ignite 2023. It will enable and empower frontline workers with future of work tools. Speak to your Copilot, receive information, marks task done, and so on. That is making the UI easy. Mixed Reality will also be more widely – and easier – used than today. I am really looking forward what is happening in Mixed Reality!
Microsoft Mesh will be generally available early 2024 and we can expect it to evolve with new features and capabilities. I really hope for guest and external access to Immersive Meetings and Mesh spaces. Guest is more realistic for now, but Mesh does need external access also if organizations want to use it for public events or metaverse presence. Avatars hopefully get camera support, so we could interact with avatars without having to click on reactions menu… Or at least bring shortcut keys there – with Stream Deck integration on desktop. I am sure Mesh team has surprises for us in their sleeves. Perhaps Copilot for Microsoft Mesh will come to preview – or even GA – during this year. It would be really something that would be making customized spaces easy for various needs. As I have said many times: AI will enable the metaverse.
New Teams will be the Teams during 2024. I am happy to see how New Teams gained features, performance and users during the end of 2023. Next year we can expect to have a feature parity with the old Teams – and see the old Teams go away – leaving us with just Teams. There is constantly development on Teams and I will be sharing news about those during 2024 as I did this year. With Whiteboard evolution, Copilot and Loop – there is much for me to write to you.
Artificial Intelligence will be racing forward. I would not be surprised to see GPT-5. We already are at GPT-4 Turbo with vision so the next step should not be too far away, as one year ago GPT-3 was just out. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) however is something I do not believe seeing 2024. Generative AI will be evolving, and we can expect to see imaginative and creative ways how it is used. I also predict that using GenAI for generating 3D spaces will be happening 2024. There are already first steps on that, but results are not what I want from those. Image and video understanding (that is already here with GPT-4 Turbo with vision) will be utilized and it opens a lot of business scenarios where AI can be used. Photorealistic Avatars will be increasingly common. Just think about the pace we are advancing: one year ago, photorealistic avatars seemed to be quite far away.
And while technology advances, we can expect Responsible AI & Metaverses requirements and capabilities advance as well, at least on Microsoft Cloud. There is a solid base already and we can expect new innovations there more. Then there are topics like Robotics, Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity where we can see much activity, development, and real-world use. What I learned from 2023, is that I will, highly likely, underestimate what will happen in 2024. It is an exciting time to work in this world!
Happy Holidays & Exciting Year 2024!
I’ll be back January!
