Reimagining our world together

This week, we celebrate Microsoft’s global partners at our annual Inspire conference. As partners from nearly every country gather together virtually, I’ve been reflecting on our collective opportunity and responsibility to reimagine what comes next.

As I shared with our partners today, while the start of a new decade typically brings hope and optimism, we quickly saw the world come to a standstill, confronted by both a public health and an economic crisis, as well as systemic issues of racial injustice and inequity in our society. These are global challenges that called on us as an ecosystem to take action. And we are.

Over the past five months, united with our partner ecosystem, we've focused on acting as digital first responders to the world's first responders, supporting those on the front lines of this pandemic, from healthcare, to education, to public sector, to critical manufacturing and grocery and retail. 

Our ecosystem has navigated the response, recovery, and reimagine phases, helping organizations of all sizes maintain continuity, remain open, and create new business models in the most difficult of circumstances.

Reimagination is a mindset, one built on the empathy that comes from a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities people and organizations experience. Together, we need to develop an acute sense of what should be rebuilt, what should be reimagined, and what should be left behind.

While this pandemic has taught us that no business is 100 percent resilient, those fortified by digital technology are more resilient and more capable of transforming when faced with secular structural changes in the marketplace.

We call this tech intensity, and every organization in every industry will increasingly need to embrace it in order to recover faster and emerge stronger from this crisis. The last five months have made it clear that tech intensity is key to business resilience.

There are two aspects to tech intensity; I think of it as a simple equation. First, every organization needs to be a fast adopter of best-in-class technology. Second, they need to equip their people to build their own digital capability. Trust is foundational to this equation – both trust in technology and trust that they have a partner whose business model is aligned to their success.

Working with Harvard Business School, we are developing a framework and scorecard to gather an in-depth understanding of how companies across industry sectors use technology to drive business innovation and transformation.

In our early findings, we see that tech intensity enables organizations to create a new operating architecture – breaking up traditional silos to expose technology, data, and business-process workflow in modular platforms. This enables citizen developers in collaboration with digital and IT teams to respond to new opportunity with agility.

Our collective opportunity is to channel this intelligent cloud and intelligent edge era into tech intensity for every business on the planet.

Our tech stack – spanning Microsoft Azure, GitHub, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365, all built on a foundation of security, compliance, and identity – is the building block for our partners to reimagine the world and have impact in their communities. Together, these tools and platforms offer unparalleled integration, architectural coherence, and extensibility.

And we are going further, introducing new capabilities to help organizations build digital resilience and transform during a time of massive change, from new capabilities in Azure that help organizations bring the cloud to their datacenters; an end-to-end Power Platform return to the workplace solution; new solutions in Dynamics 365 that help retailers keep employees and shoppers safe; a new category of enterprise-grade apps and bots in Teams; and new security capabilities to help organizations protect sensitive information across their endpoints. 

We’re seeing organizations apply these tools and platforms to make a difference and digitally transform. In agriculture, Land O’Lakes, along with our partner Tavant Technologies, is bringing together the art and science from generations of farmers and cutting-edge technologies, like AI, to help generate new insights and improve sustainability in farming.

In the public sector, the state of California has built 90 percent of its COVID-19 infrastructure with GitHub and Azure DevOps, reducing the amount of time it takes to stand up a new website from 18 months to just three hours.

In communications, two business analysts at T-Mobile used Power Platform to build an app that helped the company keep retail associates employed and keep customers, including first responders, connected.

In retail, Patagonia, along with our partner Sunrise Technology, is using Dynamics 365 to ship inventory from a store or from a warehouse, optimizing to get a single shipment to the customers, while reducing the load on all locations.

In education, the University of Texas at Arlington is exploring using new Teams features, like Together mode, so students feel like they’re together in a classroom even when they’re apart this fall.

This applies to smaller organizations as well. Serenitas, which operates housing communities for those over 55 throughout Australia, is working with our partner Vigilant IT to take a comprehensive Zero Trust approach.

And we’re seeing the ingenuity of individuals in what they reimagine for their own organizations. Professor Amanda Randles at Duke University is doing lifesaving work, using the power of Azure to help get more people access to critical ventilators.

And Foyin Olajide-Bello, a manager at Sterling Bank in Nigeria, without having any development background, was able to identify a problem in her business and take action using Power Platform – and has gone on to inspire and teach others to do the same, growing their own career opportunity.

It’s impact like this that grounds us in our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

And it reminds us of the purpose of a corporation: to create profitable solutions to the challenges of people and planet – in every community and every country. This is what our customers, partners, and colleagues expect, and it’s what the world demands from today’s corporations.

There are four interconnected pillars that require our combined efforts to reimagine a better future:

First, we must ensure that this economic growth is inclusive, for every country, developed and developing; every community, urban and rural; every business, small and large; every worker, first-line and knowledge workers; and every person, including the 1 billion plus people with disabilities.

Second, we are committed to building trust in technology and its use, spanning data privacy, cybersecurity, responsible AI, and digital safety.

Third, we unequivocally support fundamental rights of people, from defending democracy to addressing systemic racial injustice and inequity.

Fourth, we must protect our most finite resource – the planet – by working toward a more sustainable future. That’s why we’ve committed that by 2030 we will be carbon-negative across our direct emissions and our supply chain. This week we announced our first two carbon fund investments, focused on carbon and waste.

Success is not about one leader or one company. It’s about all of us working together to address these challenges.

And our partners are embodying this sense of purpose in their own businesses. For example, our Canadian partner RedBit is working to address food insecurity by helping scale Second Harvest, the country’s largest food rescue organization.

I love how Mark Arteaga puts it in the video: “To use technology to be able to help our community and Canada-wide is just a really great feeling.”

This exemplifies the impact our ecosystem can have on our customers, our communities, and the world. More than ever, they’re counting on us, and I’m looking forward to seeing how together we apply technology to reimagine our world.