Welcome. I’m incredibly excited today
to announce a partnership between Bee’ah, Microsoft and Johnson Controls.
Bee’ah is announcing a new headquarters, totally AI based.
Kahled, could you tell us a little more about that?
As an organization, Bee’ah, which is based in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates,
has led with a vision of pioneering sustainable quality of life in the Middle East.
And we believe future-ready economies
have to have two critical pillars, which is sustainability and digitalization.
Our new headquarters, which is one of the most iconic buildings being built in the Middle East,
has been designed by one of the most famous architects of our time, Zaha Hadid.
And it will be demonstrating these two critical pillars.
When you’re looking at sustainability,
this building will be one of the most sustainable buildings in the Middle East,
will be powered 100% by renewable energy,
as well as be LEED-platinum certified, which is the highest certification for green buildings.
Microsoft is bringing a bunch of capabilities to the building.
So, Scott could you tell us more about that?
The great thing about this new building is it’s focused around digitization and sustainability.
And, AI and the cloud is really a critical aspect of enabling both of those.
And at Microsoft, we’ve been delivering as part of our Azure Cloud platform
a core set of what we call IoT capabilities
that enable you to integrate any physical device
into a cloud environment and create what we call a "digital twin"
of what that environment looks like,
that can be reasoned over, that you can use AI models against to get smarter around,
and that you can then use to automate,
to improve whether it’s power efficiency, whether it’s just
improving the day-to-day life of each of the employees working inside of it.
The great thing has been our partnership with Johnson Controls,
who’ve then taken a lot of the core platform capabilities that we deliver inside Azure
and really delivered a complete end-to-end solution on top
that takes it to the next level and is really ideally suited
for what Bee’ah is looking to deliver
and is really the magic behind it all.
Can you talk a little bit more Kahled about the AI and AI features within the building?
So whether it is HR or procurement or finance or marketing,
we’ll be having different use cases of AI in the building
to provide a more productive workspace.
We are developing jointly with Johnson Control and Microsoft
the different use cases for a digital persona
and how visitors and staff will experience that and encounter
the different features of the building.
At the end, the result is to provide a more productive workspace
and to achieve a better quality of life for our staff and for our visitors.
Scott you’ve talked a lot about the capabilities that Azure is bringing to the table.
You’re one of the number one cloud providers.
Tell us more about the digital twin that Microsoft is bringing.
I mean, I think one of the things that we’re seeing is a broad trend across really every industry
is, how do you take the physical world and create
a digital representation of it
that’s up-to-date,
that’s accurate, that has
a tremendous amount of telemetry so you can know really what’s going on.
And then how do you reason over that digital twin to make decisions and really integrate
a host of AI as well as automation capabilities around it.
And the great thing about this particular project is we’re really taking this iconic building
that’s state-of-the-art, that’s some of the most advanced
and doing it across everything in the physical layout.
Once you have this digital twin it means that you can know
what is the temperature like
and what’s Bill’s preference of this temperature in this room versus Scott’s
and you can optimize accordingly.
You can start to integrate your vendors.
You probably have folks that are
helping manage facilities or doing security or doing cleaning.
You can now start to reason over all those and integrate all of their systems as well.
And, at the end of the day, really just have a far more advanced,
capabilities as well as really deliver on the sustainability goal
that as a society, we all share and prioritize.
What’s next for Bee’ah?
Well, Bee’ah has always been a technology-driven organization, and
we have the aim to be one of the most digitally enabled organizations
in our region by the end of this year.
And this, the AI features that we are
going to have in our building, will actually be rolled out
across our different offices and locations across the UAE.
And also, with our technology arm, Evotech,
we’ll be looking at leading digital transformation,
looking to focus on the public sector as well as the private sector across the region.
And we are very excited to work with the Johnson Controls and Microsoft on this project
and with other projects moving forward.