Azure Updates: Cost Management; o1 model; Continuous modernization

Microsoft principal product manager Sameer Doultani provided a recap of the year’s developments in Microsoft Cost Management. In a bid to improve cost visibility, Microsoft added the ability to quickly analyze costs, create alerts, and build reports. The Exports experience continues to change with new ways to support custom reporting and analytics, such as exporting usage datasets in FOCUS 1.0 format for Fabric. Copilot is now integrated with cost analysis. Microsoft has focused on cost allocation with billings tags with inheritance, AKS cost views, OpenAI provisioned reservations, and savings plan roles. 

Azure OpenAI Service Product Lead Steve Sweetman announced the o1 model in OpenAI Service, which is soon to be introduced. The multimodal model supports advanced reasoning capabilities across both text and vision inputs. So far, a select group of customers are using the new model. Rohirrim, a rapidly growing AI startup built its Rohan generative AI platform  for Fortune 1000, using the o1 model to sift through unstructured data. For developers, the o1 model provides vision inputs, developer messages, reasoning effort parameters, and an expanded context window.