14–17 November 2023, Seattle (hybrid). Five thousand attendees on-site, ~100,000 online. The Ignite where Microsoft showed its own silicon and reframed every product line in the portfolio as a Copilot.
What we took away
- Microsoft-designed silicon. Azure Maia 100 AI accelerator (5 nm, >100 billion transistors) and Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based CPU — Microsoft's first custom chips for hyperscale Azure data centres. The implications for AI workload economics in the EU went onto every customer-architecture deck we own.
- Copilot everywhere. Over 100 updates to the Copilot stack: Copilot for Azure (preview), Copilot for Service, Copilot Studio (public preview for M365 Copilot customers), Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides; Bing Chat rebranded to Copilot.
- Microsoft Fabric GA — the unified data platform built on OneLake finally went GA. Suddenly "yes, we'll standardise your analytics on Fabric" became a real sentence we could say out loud.
- Security Copilot entered broader preview and early-access; Defender XDR and Sentinel got GenAI investigation skills.
- Azure AI Studio preview (precursor to Foundry) for building GenAI apps with safety and evaluation tooling.
Why it mattered for us
Microsoft Fabric going GA closed the loop on a story we'd been telling Mittelstand customers since 2022: that Power BI, Synapse, Purview, and a data lake didn't have to be a four-product mess. Now it was one product on one lake.
"We are the Copilot company. There will be a Copilot for everyone and everything you do." — Satya Nadella, Ignite 2023 keynote, coining "the age of Copilots."
If 2023 was the year Microsoft renamed everything to Copilot, 2024 was the year customers started budgeting for it.
Microsoft Ignite
Azure Maia
Azure Cobalt
Copilot
Microsoft Fabric