Microsoft will also be offering CaLLM Edge, an automotive-specific, embedded SLM developed by Cerence. CaLLM Edge enables drivers to control functions such as navigation and climate control, and is designed for use in conditions where vehicles might have limited or no cloud connectivity, like remote areas. Rockwell Automation is adding FT Optix Food & Beverage to the Azure AI catalog as well. This SLM helps frontline workers in manufacturing troubleshoot food and beverage assets. It provides factory floor workers and engineers with recommendations, explanations, and knowledge about specific manufacturing processes, machines, and inputs. Two addition manufacturing-aligned SLMs have also been announced, including a co-pilot for Siemens Digital Industries Software’s NX X industrial design software. The SLM enables users to ask natural language questions, access detailed technical insights, and streamline complex design tasks in an effort to streamline complex tasks prone to human error. source

By Nadia Dreid ( November 22, 2024, 6:25 PM EST) — The District of Columbia’s case accusing a slew of landlords of using property management platform RealPage to fix the price of rentals is proceeding on schedule, but the judge who has been overseeing the case is going to be handing the matter off to another at the end of the year…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

By Nadia Dreid ( November 22, 2024, 9:24 PM EST) — The European Union’s antitrust enforcer is dropping its probe into whether Apple’s requirement that e-books and audiobooks be bought through in-app purchases in its App Store broke the bloc’s competition rules…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Microsoft Ignite 2024, held Nov. 19 – 22 in Chicago, featured nearly 100 announcements and software updates, including an AI feature in Teams that can translate speech and replicate an individual employee’s voice. This year’s overarching theme was expanding generative AI’s summarization and rewriting capabilities to address more niche use cases. AI translator agent can replicate your voice in Teams Microsoft is going all-in on AI “agents” in an effort to further abstract the workings of large language models. Ideally for Microsoft, this would make those models more capable of autonomous, sequential actions. Microsoft Copilot Studio will enable autonomous agents soon, with this feature now in preview. Other major announcements around agents at Ignite 2024 include: Agents in SharePoint, available now, can answer questions about files, folders, or sites. A Teams Facilitator agent, which takes notes and summarizes meetings, is now in preview. An Interpreter agent in Teams, which can replicate a user’s voice in up to nine languages for real-time translation, will be in preview in early 2025. Copilot Studio will soon include images and voice content Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry will be more closely linked, with a Microsoft Agent SDK available for both developers to create custom agents. The Agent SDK, available now in preview, can draw from Azure’s large AI model catalog. Soon, Copilot Studio users can experiment with multimodality in the agents they build. Image upload and analysis are now in preview, and voice is in private preview. (Private preview in Azure is invite-only.) SEE: As of this Patch Tuesday, Copilot PC users can remap the AI button. More must-read AI coverage Azure AI Foundry offers new capabilities Microsoft announced a new way to access AI in the Azure AI Foundry, a hub for AI models and solutions. Azure AI Foundry is accessible in preview through either an SDK or online portal and interoperates with GitHub and Visual Studio. Both offer slightly different options: the SDK helps admins and app developers evaluate AI models and test apps before deploying them. The portal replaces the former Azure AI Studio and offers management of AI apps, models, and services. Redmond also announced a service allowing developers to make and deploy AI agents. Azure AI Agent Service will be in preview in December. In other Azure news: Azure AI will offer an AI scorecard containing “model cards, model versions, content safety filter configurations, and evaluation metrics.” The goal of AI reports is to help development teams complete audits and compliance reports. Risk and safety evaluations for image content will flag harmful content generated by AI. The go is to help with data-driven assessments of how often such content might appear. Cloud professionals can now map out AI adoption in the Cloud Adoption Framework. AI workload guidance has also been added to the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Azure AI Content Understanding, now in preview, is a streamlined workflow for turning unstructured text, images, and video into a corpus of data. It packages together templates, grounding mechanisms, and confidence scores to help developers and enterprises release AI solutions. Developers can run AI workloads on serverless GPUs in Azure Container Apps, which are currently in preview. Security Exposure Management tool enters general availability In the security world, Microsoft introduced a new service: Security Exposure Management. This service works in concert with Extended Detection and Response, Microsoft Defender XDR in Microsoft Security. It provides insight into an organization’s security posture. Now available to all users, Security Exposure Management had previously been in preview only. Deploying Security Exposure Management helps raise awareness of an organization’s attack surface, analyzes attack paths, and aggregates security posture data into “Unified Exposure Insights.” These insights, in turn, are translated into metrics to measure security initiatives. In other security news, Security Copilot in Intune for workflow management will be expanded. Security Copilot will now be able to weigh in on a broader range of scenarios across Intune, the Intune Suite, and Windows Autopatch. Intune admins can now add iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux devices to their hardware inventory. Microsoft announced several similar updates for Microsoft Purview, but we won’t cover them exhaustively here. See Microsoft for more information about the 90-plus announcements from the Ignite event. Copilot+ PCs add flexibility to Windows Search Starting in early 2025, Search will look different in File Explorer, Windows Search, and Settings. Users can search for documents and photos using natural language, and an internet connection isn’t required. Microsoft encourages business customers to show off prompts to coworkers In today’s AI infrastructure, companies tend to produce tools that make adopting their AI products easier. For example, Copilot Analytics, set to expand its features in early 2025, offers insights into adoption and usage trends to measure business impact. Additionally, Microsoft is gamifying AI adoption by enabling easy prompt sharing and introducing a prompt leaderboard. Both features will be part of the Copilot Prompt Gallery — formerly Copilot Labs. Prompt sharing will roll out with Microsoft 365 Copilot later in 2024, while an organization-wide “new and trending prompts” list is expected in early 2025. One new feature, generative AI controls in Microsoft 356 Copilot, encourages caution with generative AI. The controls will notify users if prompts or responses in Microsoft 365 Copilot contain information that might be sensitive or put an organization at risk. Admins can configure Microsoft Purview Data Loss protection individually to match the sensitivity of their organization’s data. Is AI ROI panning out? In a recent survey, Slack revealed that AI adoption might be slowing down. Why? Some people feel the technology hasn’t lived up to the hype, that AI use is considered “lazy,” or that they don’t know how to use AI. However, in a November 2024 study, Microsoft reported a 10x ROI increase among “top” business leaders using generative AI. Most AI use cases observed by Microsoft were focused on productivity. TechRepublic covered Microsoft Ignite remotely. source

By Christopher Cole ( November 21, 2024, 7:10 PM EST) — From shortening license terms to working with federal law enforcement to protect underwater telecom infrastructure, the Federal Communications Commission launched an effort to shield submarine cables from ever-increasing national security risks on Thursday…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

With President-elect Donald Trump set to return to the White House in January, Americans are narrowly divided over his policies and plans for the future. A narrow majority of U.S. adults (53%) say they approve of his plans, including 27% who strongly approve. 46% say they disapprove, including 30% who disapprove strongly. Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over the president-elect’s plans. 88% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they approve of Trump’s plans, with more than half (54%) saying they strongly approve. 82% of Democrats and Democratic leaners disapprove of Trump’s plans. About six-in-ten (59%) strongly disapprove. Confidence the presidential transition will go smoothly In contrast to 2020, most Americans (70%) today are at least somewhat confident the transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration will go smoothly, including 26% who are very confident. Four years ago, only about a quarter of Americans (26%) were confident that there would be a smooth transition from the Trump administration to the incoming Biden administration. Both Republicans and Democrats are more confident in an orderly transition now than they were in 2020. 79% of Republicans are very or somewhat confident in a smooth transition, up from 32% in 2020. Democrats are less confident than Republicans that the transition will go well (64% say they are very or somewhat confident), but the share who say this is about three times higher than it was in 2020 (21%). Trump’s conduct since the election seen more positively than in 2020 Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris receive similar marks from the public for their conduct since Election Day. 53% say Trump’s conduct has been good or excellent in the post-election period, while 45% say his behavior has been only fair or poor. 56% say Harris’ conduct has been excellent or good, while 42% rate her conduct as only fair or poor. Both Trump and Harris receive somewhat lower marks for their conduct than President Joe Biden did after the 2020 election, when 60% of adults said Biden’s conduct was excellent or good. Ratings of Trump’s conduct are significantly more positive now than after the 2020 election. The share of Americans who rate his conduct as excellent or good is 25 percentage points higher than it was in the 2020 post-election period, when just 28% viewed his behavior positively amid his campaign’s legal challenges to the vote and ballot counting in several states. Today, the overwhelming majority of Republicans (85%) give Trump positive marks for his behavior since Nov. 5. Four years ago, slightly more than half of Republicans (54%) characterized Trump’s behavior as excellent or good. Democrats are overwhelmingly negative about Trump’s post-election conduct. Still, 22% give positive ratings, which is up from just 6% four years ago. Trump’s outreach to Harris supporters Most Americans – regardless of political party – say it is at least somewhat important that Trump reach out to Harris’ supporters to try to bring the country together. Overall, 22% say it is extremely important that Trump reach out to Harris’ supporters, while 30% say it is very important. Three-in-ten say reaching out is somewhat important, while just 17% say it is not too (10%) or not at all (7%) important for Trump to try to unify the country. Democrats (58%) are somewhat more likely than Republicans (48%) to say it is very or extremely important for Trump to reach out to Harris’ supporters. Voters see Trump’s efforts to reach out to Harris’ supporters as lacking so far. Overall, just 31% of Americans rate Trump’s efforts at reaching out to Harris’ supporters as excellent (6%) or good (25%). About two-thirds say his efforts have been only fair (28%) or poor (38%). Republicans are more positive about Trump’s outreach than Democrats: 54% in the GOP say he’s done a good or excellent job reaching out, while only 9% of Democrats say this. Two-thirds of Democrats say Trump’s efforts have been poor; just 10% of Republicans say the same. Expectations for bipartisan relations in Washington Nearly half of Americans (45%) expect relations between Republicans and Democrats in Washington to get worse in the coming year. By comparison, just 14% except relations between the two parties to get better, while 41% expect them to stay about the same. A greater share of Americans expect worsening party relations now than after the 2020 election (45% today vs. 37% then). Pessimism about relations between the two parties is now roughly on a level with where it was after the 2018 midterm elections, when 44% expected them to get worse. Democrats (69%) are far more likely than Republicans (23%) to say they expect things to get worse between Republicans and Democrats over the next year. About half of Republicans (53%) expect things to stay the same, compared with 27% of Democrats. And while about a quarter of Republicans (23%) say partisan relations will get getter next year, just 5% of Democrats say this. source

As industries continue to evolve, the integration of digital technologies to streamline service processes is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. In today’s digital age, automation, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) have moved from supporting roles to driving fundamental shifts across industries. In today’s hyper-competitive environment, organizations are harnessing technology to innovate and maintain relevance. A key advancement lies in the convergence of services and technology, designed to capture, organize, and share critical information in real time. This convergence enhances decision-making and sparks innovation across the enterprise. In this landscape, knowledge becomes a strategic asset, and with the right tools, it fuels continuous improvement and future-ready business strategies. Smart service transformation The future of the service supply chain lies at the intersection of technology, services, processes, and people, creating a connected environment where each element works together to drive greater value. At the heart of this transformation is data and analytics, enabling organizations to extract meaningful insights from vast amounts of information. By harnessing this data effectively, businesses can unlock new opportunities, drive innovation in service delivery, and enhance both operational efficiency and the customer experience. This shift goes beyond trend—it’s a reimagining of how business process’ function, with seamless collaboration and interconnected systems providing clear, actionable insights. With this connectivity, decision-makers can move from reactive problem-solving to proactive strategies—anticipating challenges, seizing opportunities, and consistently exceeding customer expectations. For tech-forward service supply chain influencers and innovation-driven service leaders, these insights are game-changers. The ability to leverage data, analytics, and automation is now essential to unlocking the full potential of their supply chains. A few key insights to keep in mind: Unlocking the power of data and analyticsThe potential of data and insights cannot be overstated. Access to previously unknown data, combined with advanced analytics, reshapes not only how we think but also how we act. Data becomes a strategic asset, driving innovation and continuous improvement. With real-time data sharing and decision-making enabled by converging services and technology, organizations can achieve proactive inventory reallocation strategies and reduce unnecessary touches, thereby driving proactive decision-making across the service supply chain ecosystem. Merging data and business-impacting insights for informed decision-makingWhen data and analytics are integrated across all business functions, momentum is created. This synergy, enriched by cohesive visibility across disparate and siloed processes and activities, drives informed decision-making that delivers impactful results and aligns with overarching business goals. The use of AI-based decision-making not only strengthens this combination but also ensures that strategic initiatives contribute to reducing supply chain vendors and enhancing overall operational efficiency. Leveraging digital technology and automation for long-term successDigital technology and automation are no longer optional; they are essential for businesses seeking to thrive in a fast-evolving marketplace. Purpose-driven solutions enable organizations to shape their long-term success by increasing efficiency and positioning themselves to meet future demands. By merging services and technology, businesses can ensure that data is continuously leveraged as a strategic asset to foster continuous improvement and innovation. This approach supports proactive, data-driven decisions that solidify the organization’s readiness for future challenges. As service supply chains evolve, organizations that embrace the right technologies and insights will be positioned not just to adapt but to lead—unlocking new opportunities, driving continuous improvement, and delivering lasting value in a dynamic, ever-changing market. To learn more, visit us here. source

By Ashish Sareen ( November 22, 2024, 8:24 PM GMT) — A junior lawyer at Squire Patton Boggs LLP has died in Laos, the law firm confirmed Friday, amid reports in the media that she was the victim of a suspected mass poisoning incident…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

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