Writing this on the flight to Seattle for Microsoft Build 2023. Three Microsoft conferences worth tracking this year, and what to look for at each.
Fun fact: the manhole covers in Seattle show the city map with a “you are here” dot.
Microsoft Power Platform Conference (in-person)
October 3–5, 2023, Las Vegas. Pre-conference workshops October 1–2. Dedicated to Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents, with a bonus Dynamics 365 CE track this year. Conference site.
Microsoft Build (in-person or online)
May 23–25, 2023, Seattle. Pre-day workshops May 22. Online May 23–24 (PDT). The developer flagship: AI, Teams, Windows, and everything in between. Recap and on-demand sessions.
Microsoft Ignite (in-person or online)
November 15–16, 2023. Product news and deep dives across the Microsoft Cloud. Ignite home.
Let's explore
Why Microsoft Build 2023 is the year to pay attention
Microsoft Build 2023 lands six months into the Copilot wave. Between January and March, Microsoft shipped Azure OpenAI GA, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot, and Copilot in Power Platform. Microsoft Build 2023 is where the developer story behind all of that gets filled in: how to call the models, how to ground them on your own data, what shipping on top of Copilot looks like as a product surface. Read the Microsoft 365 Copilot announcement before you watch the keynotes if you have not already.
7 best Microsoft Build 2023 themes I am tracking
- Copilot stack: the reference architecture for plugging your own data into Copilots.
- Azure AI Studio: ground GPT-4 on your own corpus without writing the retrieval layer yourself.
- Plugins for ChatGPT and Copilot: one plugin model across surfaces.
- Windows Copilot: the OS-level Copilot surface and what apps need to expose to be useful inside it.
- Microsoft Fabric: the data platform underneath all of the above.
- Dev Box and 365 Copilot for devs: how the day-to-day developer loop changes.
- Responsible AI tooling: content safety, prompt shields, the bits you will need to ship to enterprise.
Microsoft Build 2023 in the wider 2023 Microsoft conference picture
Microsoft Build 2023 is one of three events worth blocking in the calendar this year. MPPC in Las Vegas (October) is the Power Platform deep dive. Microsoft Build 2023 in Seattle (May) is the developer flagship. Ignite (November) is the product news firehose across the Microsoft Cloud. If you can only pick one, pick the one closest to what you ship: but Microsoft Build 2023 is the one I would not skip in 2023.
Related talks on this blog
- Microsoft Dynamics Partner Day April 2023: the partner-day recap from a month before Microsoft Build 2023, with the same Copilot announcements broken down for the BizApps channel.
- Power Platform Partner Day FY23: the October 2022 partner day that set up the Microsoft Build 2023 storyline.
- ITU Power Platform 2024: a guest lecture covering how the Build 2023 Copilot stack landed in maker tools a year later.
