As synthetic intelligence (AI) continues to remodel industries throughout Europe and past, Microsoft has unveiled improvements that promise to reshape the whole lot from cloud sovereignty to environmental forecasting. Here is a more in-depth take a look at 4 main developments from Microsoft and its collaborators.
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1. Microsoft Expands Sovereign Cloud Choices to Strengthen Digital Sovereignty in Europe
Microsoft has unveiled an growth of its Sovereign Cloud portfolio, reinforcing its dedication to digital sovereignty, knowledge privateness, and operational resilience for European prospects. In line with Microsoft, the announcement builds on its 42-year presence within the area and aligns with its European Digital Commitments to supply better management, compliance, and option to governments and controlled industries.
“With Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, we’re dedicated to providing probably the most complete set of sovereignty options for patrons throughout Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Non-public Cloud, and the Nationwide Associate Clouds operated by our European companions,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced on platform X on Monday, June 16, 2025.
“Right now, we’re asserting new choices that carry digital sovereignty to all European organizations within the public cloud and unlock new methods to run personal sovereign clouds too:
Relating to the general public cloud, we’re introducing Information Guardian, which ensures all distant entry by our engineers to the techniques that retailer and course of buyer knowledge in Europe is accredited and monitored by European resident personnel in real-time and logged in a tamper-evident ledger.
In addition to Exterior Key Administration for customer-controlled encryption, offering an extra assure of knowledge safety.
We’re additionally introducing Sovereign Non-public Cloud, which incorporates Microsoft 365 Native, which brings collectively our productiveness server software program into an Azure Native surroundings that may run totally in a buyer’s personal datacenter, with full management on safety, compliance and governance.
These new choices construct on a long time of pioneering work in sovereign cloud options by ourselves and our companions, and replicate our ongoing dedication to providing you with extra selection, management, and safety,” Nadella introduced.
The expanded choices embrace new capabilities inside Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud, the introduction of a Sovereign Non-public Cloud with Azure Native, and enhanced Nationwide Associate Cloud preparations in France and Germany. These options are designed to offer European prospects with the flexibleness to run workloads in both public or personal environments, guaranteeing full alignment with European legal guidelines and knowledge residency necessities.
Among the many key options introduced is Information Guardian, a service that enforces European-only personnel management over distant entry to buyer knowledge, supported by real-time oversight and tamper-evident logging. Exterior Key Administration, one other addition, allows organizations to make use of their very own {Hardware} Safety Modules (HSMs)—both on-premises or hosted by trusted third events—for full encryption management. Microsoft is working with main HSM suppliers together with Futurex, Thales, and Utimaco to help the combination.
The corporate additionally launched Regulated Setting Administration, a unified interface for managing sovereign configurations, insurance policies, and audit logs. This service simplifies the deployment and governance of delicate workloads in compliance with nationwide and sector-specific laws.
Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud, an evolution of its Cloud for Sovereignty, will now be obtainable throughout all European datacenter areas. It permits enterprise prospects to retain management over their knowledge with out requiring migration to separate environments, whereas nonetheless benefiting from the capabilities of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Safety, and Energy Platform.
In parallel, Microsoft has introduced launching a Sovereign Non-public Cloud, at present in preview, to help workloads that should stay in absolutely customer-controlled environments. Constructed on Azure Native infrastructure, it allows deployment of key Microsoft cloud providers, together with compute and storage, inside on-premises or in-country datacenters. Complementing this, Microsoft 365 Native brings acquainted productiveness purposes like Alternate and SharePoint to customer-operated environments, providing full management over knowledge, safety, and governance.
In France and Germany, Microsoft continues to associate with nationwide entities to ship sovereign cloud capabilities. In France, Bleu—a three way partnership between Orange and Capgemini—operates a “cloud de confiance” for the general public sector and significant infrastructure suppliers, compliant with SecNumCloud necessities. In Germany, Delos Cloud, a subsidiary of SAP, manages a sovereign cloud answer tailor-made to the German authorities’s platform wants.
To help prospects in implementing these options, Microsoft can also be previewing a Sovereign Cloud specialization inside its AI Cloud Associate Program. This initiative highlights companions with verified capabilities in deploying sovereign workloads. Preview companions embrace Accenture, Arvato Programs, Atea, Atos, Crayon, Capgemini, Dell Applied sciences, IBM, Inspark, Infosys, Lenovo, Leonardo, NTT Information, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone.
“The launch of Microsoft Sovereign Cloud marks a pivotal second in empowering European establishments and industries with the management, compliance and innovation they should thrive in at the moment’s digital economic system,” mentioned Aiman Ezzat, CEO of Capgemini Group.
“As a shareholder of Bleu, we now have already arrange a Nationwide Associate Cloud in France with the intention to ship Microsoft applied sciences in a sovereign surroundings that respects the French State necessities. With a long time of expertise in Microsoft applied sciences and deep experience in regulated sectors, we’re uniquely positioned to assist our shoppers harness the complete energy of Microsoft’s sovereign private and non-private cloud options. Collectively, we’re enabling a trusted digital future for Europe.”
Microsoft’s Sovereign Cloud portfolio, the corporate says, now represents probably the most complete suite of sovereignty-focused options out there. It combines productiveness, safety, and cloud infrastructure with built-in compliance and transparency, aiming to make sure that European prospects can function with confidence in an more and more advanced regulatory and geopolitical surroundings.
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2. Albert Heijn’s AI Assistant Steijn Transforms Grocery Buying and Meal Planning for Clients in Netherlands
Dutch grocery store big Albert Heijn has launched an AI-powered assistant named Steijn to assist prospects make smarter, more healthy, and extra environment friendly meals selections. Built-in into the Albert Heijn cellular app, the assistant is already altering the way in which customers plan meals, scale back meals waste, and store for groceries, in response to Microsoft.
“You already know AI is transformative when it’s at your dinner desk. Within the Netherlands at the moment, I met the Albert Heijn workforce who’re utilizing Azure AI Foundry to assist prospects navigate on a regular basis selections, like what’s for dinner,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared in a put up on X on June 16, 2025.
Steijn is constructed utilizing Azure AI Foundry and powered by OpenAI fashions, providing prospects real-time recipe solutions primarily based on their preferences, dietary wants, and even the contents of their fridge. The instrument attracts from a database of greater than 20,000 recipes from Allerhande (Every kind), the model’s meals journal, and supplies dietary insights, preparation suggestions, and personalised suggestions.
Sjoerd Holleman, Senior Vice President for Technique, Product and Analytics at Albert Heijn, emphasised that the assistant was designed to reply the on a regular basis query: “What’s for dinner tonight?” Whether or not customers are in search of vegetarian, gluten-free, or 20-minute recipes, Steijn can shortly generate appropriate choices tailor-made to particular wants.
Steijn additionally consists of picture recognition options. Customers can take a photograph of the within of their fridge, and the assistant will recommend meals utilizing the elements obtainable. This performance has confirmed notably helpful for patrons like Sander van Straaten, a advertising freelancer and father of two in Amsterdam. It saves me time and helps scale back meals waste, he mentioned. It even remembers my preferences for fast, wholesome meals.
Developed in three months by an eight-member workforce led by product supervisor Norman van Ameyden, Steijn is likely one of the first large-scale customer-facing purposes developed with Azure AI Foundry within the Netherlands.
“The instruments of Microsoft gave us the chance to actually construct Steijn with a small workforce in a brief period of time,” van Ameyden mentioned.
He mentioned his workforce examined totally different potentialities utilizing the chat playground in Azure AI Foundry portal whereas constructing Steijn, which is powered by OpenAI in Foundry Fashions and Azure AI Search. Azure AI Foundry is a platform designed to assist builders and corporations design, customise and handle AI purposes and brokers with relative ease at a big scale. Playground is a testing space inside Foundry.
“We needed to ensure we will do fast POCs (proofs of idea) and experiments, and that actually helped us, as a result of we did quite a lot of testing simply earlier than we went to manufacturing,” he mentioned. “And Azure AI Foundry was good for that.”
Information privateness and security are a key focus. Conversations with Steijn are anonymized and deleted each 30 days. Moreover, Microsoft’s Azure AI Content material Security instruments are used to watch and filter any dangerous content material.
Albert Heijn, which operates 1,200 shops throughout the Netherlands and northern Belgium, serves roughly 5 million prospects weekly. The app itself additionally helps self-scanning and personalised reductions, whereas superior forecasting algorithms make as much as one billion predictions a day to optimize inventory and pricing. Digital shelf labels in shops alter reductions robotically as merchandise close to their expiration date, serving to additional scale back waste.
Trying forward, Albert Heijn plans to broaden Steijn’s capabilities to additional help its sustainability targets, together with a 50 p.c discount in meals waste throughout your entire meals chain by 2030.
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3. Barclays to Roll Out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 100,000 Workers Globally
Barclays Financial institution (Barclays) and Microsoft introduced that Barclays is to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 100,000 colleagues globally, remodeling the worker expertise by AI brokers and giving them entry to the data they want most.
The deployment will combine Microsoft 365 Copilot into Barclays’ proprietary colleague productiveness instrument, making a single agent that permits workers to entry the financial institution’s ecosystem of collaboration instruments, portals and on-line sources all from one place, making it easier to search out data, enhance productiveness, and improve worker expertise, Microsoft mentioned on June 9, 2025.
“Barclays is scaling Microsoft 365 Copilot to 100,000 workers, placing AI in each worker’s fingers. It will simplify how they entry data, get issues performed, and make Copilot the UI for Barclays AI,” Satya Nadella shared in a put up on X on June 9, 2025.
As a part of the rollout, Barclays workers will achieve entry to a brand new AI-powered Colleague Agent by Microsoft 365 Copilot. This instrument will present self-service capabilities built-in with Barclays’ inside techniques and third-party connectors. Workers will be capable of full a spread of duties—equivalent to reserving journey, checking coverage compliance, or discovering HR-related data—with ease and effectivity.
A brand new semantic content material search function will additional help productiveness by delivering related, personalised outcomes primarily based on consumer profiles and site. As well as, a dashboard often called the “Colleague Entrance Door,” constructed on Microsoft Viva, will function a central hub for high-priority actions like desk bookings or annual go away requests, whereas additionally serving personalised information and bulletins.
Commenting on the settlement, Craig Vivid, Group Chief Data Officer and Deputy Group Co-Chief Working Officer, Barclays, mentioned: “At Barclays, we’ve been leveraging the facility of AI, and now GenAI, to drive deeper insights, enhance effectivity and create extra intuitive expertise throughout the organisation.
“Our roll-out of Copilot, built-in with our colleague productiveness instrument, is a major step ahead in simplifying the way in which we work, making it simpler to get issues performed.
“It additionally highlights the collaborative partnership with Microsoft – the place innovation is formed by sensible utility at scale.”
The announcement follows a profitable pilot involving 15,000 Barclays workers and builds upon the financial institution’s adoption of Microsoft Groups for collaboration and Microsoft Viva Interact for worker engagement.
Darren Hardman, CEO, Microsoft UK, added: “The adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot to be the UI for Barclays AI will assist them to ship on their daring imaginative and prescient of placing AI within the fingers of each worker, and we look ahead to working intently with Barclays to assist its colleagues maximise the advantages from utilizing this transformational know-how.”
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4. Microsoft Says AI Mannequin Aurora Predicts Excessive Climate with Extra Accuracy
As local weather change intensifies the frequency and severity of utmost climate occasions, Microsoft has unveiled an AI mannequin able to remodeling world environmental forecasting. In a brand new paper printed in Nature, Microsoft Analysis launched Aurora, a basis mannequin skilled on the most important assortment of atmospheric knowledge, able to predicting not solely climate patterns however a wide selection of environmental phenomena — together with hurricanes, air air pollution, and ocean wave exercise.
“Developed by Microsoft Analysis, Aurora additionally forecasts this vary of atmospheric occasions with better precision and velocity and at a lot decrease computational price when in comparison with conventional numerical forecasting and former AI approaches,” Microsoft mentioned in a weblog put up, noting that the muse mannequin leverages the newest advances in AI to extra precisely predict climate and a spread of environmental occasions.
“Aurora is a brand new basis mannequin from Microsoft Analysis that goes past climate forecasting, delivering quicker, extra correct predictions of environmental occasions. Superior to see this breakthrough printed in Nature,” shared Satya Nadella in a put up on X on Could 21, 2025.
“Aurora first learns easy methods to generate forecasts in simply seconds by coaching on normal climate patterns from over a million hours of knowledge derived from satellites, radar and climate stations, simulations and forecasts. Microsoft researchers consider it’s the largest assortment of atmospheric knowledge ever assembled to coach an AI forecasting mannequin. Benefiting from its distinctive versatile structure, Aurora is then ‘fine-turned’ to carry out quite a lot of particular duties equivalent to predicting wave top or air high quality, utilizing modest quantities of further knowledge,” Microsoft defined.
Not like conventional AI fashions restricted to particular duties, Aurora leverages a foundational structure that enables for high-performance generalization throughout a number of forecasting challenges. Aurora delivers medium-range climate forecasts — as much as 14 days — with accuracy, velocity, and computational effectivity.
In line with Microsoft, Aurora outperforms standard numerical climate fashions and current AI techniques throughout 91 p.c of forecasting targets when fine-tuned to a decision of 0.25 levels. Crucially, it additionally delivers forecasts as much as 5,000 occasions quicker than conventional fashions, producing leads to seconds utilizing high-bandwidth GPUs, whereas working at a considerably decrease price as soon as skilled.
Though the preliminary coaching of Aurora is dear, its operational bills are considerably decrease than these of conventional climate prediction techniques as soon as it’s absolutely practical, the authors wrote in Nature.
Predicting the Unpredictable
In line with Microsoft, Aurora’s capacity to anticipate excessive climate occasions has already proven tangible promise. In a retrospective evaluation, Aurora precisely predicted Hurricane Doksuri’s landfall within the Philippines 4 days earlier than the occasion, outperforming official forecasts that anticipated it to bypass the area.
On this newest analysis, Aurora additionally beat the US Nationwide Hurricane Heart in forecasting 5-day tropical cyclone tracks, a primary for a machine-learning mannequin. In a serious achievement, it additionally outperformed seven main forecasting facilities on all cyclone monitor forecasts for the 2022-2023 season globally, the researchers discovered, Microsoft mentioned.
Past storms, Aurora demonstrated highly effective air high quality forecasting capabilities. It efficiently anticipated a extreme sandstorm in Iraq in June 2022, which grounded flights and despatched 1000’s to hospitals. Regardless of restricted air air pollution knowledge, Aurora’s switch studying capacity — absorbing patterns from its foundational coaching — enabled correct fine-tuning with comparatively small datasets.
Ocean Insights and Environmental Versatility
Aurora additionally excelled in predicting ocean wave patterns. In checks, it outperformed present fashions in 86 p.c of comparisons over a yr, even when skilled on only a few years of knowledge. In a single case, it precisely projected the wave impacts of Hurricane Nanmadol, Japan’s most intense storm of 2022.
Microsoft’s researchers credit score Aurora’s success to its versatile structure and deep-learning strategy, which avoids hardcoding bodily guidelines. As a substitute, the mannequin learns patterns and interactions instantly from the information, permitting it to adapt to duties starting from precipitation monitoring to crop logistics and energy grid safety.
Open Entry and Sensible Deployment
To encourage world collaboration and innovation, Microsoft has made Aurora’s supply code and mannequin weights freely obtainable. The mannequin can also be featured on Azure AI Foundry Labs and is built-in into MSN Climate, the place it enhances hourly forecasts with extra correct knowledge on precipitation and cloud cowl.
Aurora’s modular design permits researchers and organizations to fine-tune the mannequin to their particular wants in a matter of weeks — a drastic distinction to conventional forecasting techniques, which may take years to develop. Additionally it is accessible by the European Centre for Medium-Vary Climate Forecasts (ECMWF), one of many world’s broadly used meteorological providers, Microsoft mentioned.
Trying Forward
Microsoft mentioned Aurora’s early outcomes have stirred curiosity throughout academia and trade, together with forecasting organizations, power firms and even commodity merchants. There may be specific curiosity in seeing how it may be tailored to higher predict rain, improve crop logistics and defend power grids.
Whereas Microsoft emphasizes that Aurora just isn’t meant to interchange current climate techniques, it sees the mannequin as a strong complement — particularly in underserved areas missing superior forecasting instruments.
Megan Stanley, a senior researcher at Microsoft, believes Aurora—and what comes subsequent—will complement present forecasting techniques, not change them. “There may be quite a lot of fascinating analysis to be performed round how properly it’s studying the physics, and whether it is studying the physics accurately then it means that is one thing that ought to be sturdy sufficient to make predictions in several climatic settings. It is the primary of its form,” provides Stanley. “Nevertheless it doesn’t imply it will likely be the final.”
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