Unlocking document understanding with Mistral Document AI in Microsoft Foundry

By Dustin Ward

Enterprises today face a familiar yet formidable challenge: mountains of documents -contracts, invoices, reports, forms – remain locked in unstructured formats. Traditional OCR (optical character recognition) captures text, but often struggles with context, layout complexity, or multilingual content. The result? Slow workflows, error-prone manual reviews, and missed insights. Enter mistral-document-ai-2512 in Microsoft Foundry. This new…

Instant access incremental snapshots: Restore without waiting

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re excited to introduce instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk, delivering an industry-leading snapshot experience where creation, disk restore, and production-ready performance all happen instantly. Instant access snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra Disk are usable immediately upon creation, allowing you to restore new disks without waiting…

AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI partnership, AWS Elemental Inference, Strands Labs, and more (March 2, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

This past week, I’ve been deep in the trenches helping customers transform their businesses through AI-DLC (AI-Driven Lifecycle) workshops. Throughout 2026, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating these sessions for numerous customers, guiding them through a structured framework that helps organizations identify, prioritize, and implement AI use cases that deliver measurable business value. AI-DLC is…

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud adds governance, productivity, and support for large AI models securely running even when completely disconnected

By Dustin Ward

As digital sovereignty becomes a strategic requirement, organizations are rethinking how they deploy critical infrastructure and AI capabilities under tighter regulatory expectations and higher risk conditions. Microsoft’s approach to sovereignty is grounded in enabling enterprises, public sectors, and regulated industries to participate in the digital economy securely, independently, and on their own terms. The Microsoft…

AWS Security Hub Extended offers full-stack enterprise security with curated partner solutions

By Dustin Ward

At re:Invent 2025, we introduced a completely re-imagined AWS Security Hub that unifies AWS security services, including Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector into a single experience. This unified experience automatically and continuously analyzes security findings in combination to help you prioritize and respond to your critical security risks. Today, we’re announcing AWS Security Hub Extended,…

Transform live video for mobile audiences with AWS Elemental Inference

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re announcing AWS Elemental Inference, a fully managed AI service that automatically transforms and maximizes live and on-demand video broadcasts to engage audiences at scale. At launch, you’ll be able to use AWS Elemental Inference to adapt video content into vertical formats optimized for mobile and social platforms in real time. With AWS Elemental…