Klir Unveils Revolutionary ChatGPT Integration powered by Microsoft Azure's OpenAI Service for its Unified Water Management Platform

The first-of-its-kind AI integration simplifies compliance and operational processes for water professionals while maximizing economic and environmental sustainability

TORONTO, June 12, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Klir, the integrated water platform that helps the world's water utilities make water safer, today announced the launch of its new generative AI capabilities now available through the latest iteration of its platform, Klir Comply. Using Microsoft Azure's OpenAI service to provide access to powerful language models – including ChatGPT4 – Klir is the first-ever water management software powered by ChatGPT.

Water professionals can now receive holistic insights into their utility's data through an AI-powered chatbot while benefiting from the scalability, reliability, performance, and security of Microsoft Azure.

By blending the conversational benefits of ChatGPT with each utility's water quality management and compliance data (E.g., "Is our water compliant today?" or "Draft me a summary of last week's water quality"), the AI function simplifies tedious but critical tasks while ensuring internal data stays secure and private at all times.

A nod to Klir's Irish-founded roots, the chatbot is fittingly represented by "Boots," an Irish Water Spaniel "trained to sniff out key data." Notably, the chatbot allows users to query millions of data points within the utility's private internal data with precise control over the knowledge base. Features include integrating administrative tasks with sampling results data, providing predictive water quality analysis, generating quantitative insights into sampling results, and identifying correlations between data.

"Klir's AI function sits as a layer on top of what is already the most comprehensive software for water quality and compliance management on the market," said David Lynch, CEO of Klir. "To be able to ask complex compliance water management questions and immediately receive accurate answers is seismic and will help organizations around the world to slow the global water crisis."

With most water professionals working with outdated or siloed technologies, Klir's new generative AI capabilities reflect the growing need for water managers to quickly adapt to an industry landscape shaped by climate change and population growth. Despite the recent influx of climate mitigation budgets, the water sector has struggled to combat this escalating challenge due to restrictions by public sector procurements and the overwhelming availability of bespoke technology vendors that do not easily integrate.

"Klir's purpose-built platform is filling an industry gap and solving the growing problem of data quality and integrity that has made it so difficult for water professionals to pull impactful performance insights," said Dr. Tom Stafford, Chief Product Officer of Klir. "This next major release of our integrated platform provides support across all water functions, from biodiversity and compliance to customer and asset data, and now this new AI tool further empowers users to capture both the scientific data and human knowledge required to keep water safe and secure."

Stafford joined Lynch on-stage to announce the launch of Klir's new AI capabilities during Klir's invite-only event Boiling Point: Where AI & the Future of Water Management Software Meet held in Toronto alongside ACE, the premier annual conference for the world's biggest water utility and municipal operators. Former EPA Administrator Carol Browner moderated a Klir-hosted panel discussion on AI and water management with water utility executives from leading regional jurisdictions, technologists, and top climate change journalists.

Along with introducing the ChatGPT function, Klir unveiled a new "maturity model" that assesses and prioritizes the key operational risks a utility faces and its potential to become a resilient utility in the future. Senior leaders can now engage in a comprehensive 90-point evaluation, guided by a Klir water expert, to generate a risk report on their existing operational model. The outcome of this exam will also provide a comparative benchmark, ranking the utility against similar attributes of other water utilities.

As the only operating system for water that brings together all of the utility's compliance and operational processes in one unified platform, Klir is backed by the biggest firms in technology, including Insight Partners, a $95b enterprise software fund based in New York.

To learn more about Klir Comply and Klir's AI capabilities, please visit www.klir.com. Klir and Microsoft Azure users can also reach out to their respective representatives for more information.

About KlirKlir is the single operating system for water. With one platform to connect every team, Klir allows water utilities to manage critical processes across the entire water system—from permits, to sampling, and inspections, and everything in between. Administrative processes that were once painful and error prone, become effortless thanks to automation, data analytics, and task management. The result is a simplified process that reduces risk, operating expenses, and administrative overhead.

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SOURCE Klir

Azure Government cloud gets access to OpenAI’s generative AI models

Microsoft Corp. revealed today that users of its Azure Government cloud infrastructure platform can now access the latest artificial intelligence models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI LP.

The company said in a blog post that Azure Government users will be able to experiment with two of OpenAI’s large language models, namely GPT-3 and GPT-4, through the Azure OpenAI service. Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI and uses its models to power its Bing search engine chatbot.

Azure Government is a specialized version of the Azure cloud that adheres to a number of very specific security and data-compliance rules in order to cater to government agencies. Its customers include the U.S. Defense Department, the U.S. Energy Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Microsoft didn’t say which Azure Government customers will actually start using the Azure OpenAI service, but Bloomberg revealed that the Defense Technical Information Center, which is a part of the Defense Department focused on gathering and sharing military research, will experiment with OpenAI’s models via the new offering.

OpenAI’s models have been available to regular Azure customers for some time. The Azure OpenAI service has seen rapid growth in recent months. In May, Microsoft said it had more than 4,500 users, up from just 2,500 in the previous quarter. Some of those users include Volvo AB, Inter IKEA Systems B.V., Mercedes-Benz Group AG and Shell Plc.

Large language models such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 are trained on enormous swaths of internet data and have captured the imagination since the public launch of ChatGPT late last year, thanks to their ability to respond to prompts in a humanlike manner. This year, numerous technology companies have come out with their own, specialized chatbot offerings that can provide assistance for tasks such as writing content, programming, marketing and querying blockchains. The emergence of generative AI technologies has been controversial, though, leading to some very public debates on whether or not AI research should be regulated or limited.

Until now, government agencies have been restricted in their ability to use generative AI. However, with OpenAI’s services now available in Azure Government, federal, state and local government agencies can begin experimenting with the technology to answer research questions, produce computer code and summarize field reports, said Bill Chappell, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for strategic missions and technologies. He explained that government agencies will be able to access GPT-3 and GPT-4 via a chatlike interface, similar to commercial users.

Chappell noted that the OpenAI models are hosted in Azure’s commercial cloud space, which is entirely separate from the Azure Government cloud. As a result, any query sent to OpenAI’s models by Azure Government users will be encrypted and sent via a private connection, avoiding the public internet. The company also stressed that no data from Azure Government will be used to train the OpenAI models.

No doubt the restrictions on the use of government data are related to compliance and data privacy concerns, but they will prevent government users from exploring the full potential of generative AI, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc.

“Microsoft offering its OpenAI service to Azure Government users is a good start, but it is hampered somewhat by the service being hosted in its commercial cloud space,” Mueller said. “It means AI models can’t be trained using government data, which hamstrings their AI efforts. So the question remains: Who will be the first cloud vendor to provide the U.S. government with full generative AI capabilities?”

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Join our digital event to learn what’s new in Microsoft Entra

In today’s interconnected world, there’s virtually no limit to what technology can help us achieve. Millions of connections happen every moment between people, machines, apps, and devices. Digital connectivity fuels new possibilities for us in business, helps us make positive changes in the way we live and work, and enables us to communicate without boundaries with almost anyone on the planet.

Expanding the ways we use digital technology, however, also causes attack surfaces to sprawl—making our identities, networks, and data more vulnerable. Seeing the mounting security challenges organizations are facing inspired us to think differently and to ask: What could people achieve if we had trust in every digital experience and interaction?

Last year, we introduced you to Microsoft Entra, a comprehensive family of identity and access solutions. Soon, we will be expanding Microsoft Entra to include even more products and capabilities to strengthen your defenses.

We hope you will join us on June 20, 2023, as we introduce the next stage of our vision at Reimagine secure access with Microsoft Entra. Register for this digital event to hear from Microsoft Security leaders about the latest innovations and current best practices in identity and access. You’ll hear announcements about new products and capabilities, see demonstrations, and get insights about the future of identity and access.

Attend the digital event to hear about the latest identity and access innovations.

It can be almost impossible for organizations to anticipate all the access scenarios and attack vectors they need to protect against. That’s why it’s critical that organizations address the risks that come with growing their footprint in a limitless digital landscape.

In uniting all our identity and access capabilities as Microsoft Entra, our vision has been to create a trust fabric that can serve organizations across their entire digital ecosystem—and continue to expand our products to protect against all the scenarios organizations are facing. Envisioning strong identity protection as a cohesive, interlocking trust fabric that encompasses every digital interaction is a critical shift that organizations need to make in order to remain protected, now and in the future.

Our mission with Microsoft Security is to empower every organization to innovate fearlessly, enabling them to secure any point of access, wherever it may be. We want to make unauthorized access impossible for bad actors, and life easier for security professionals. But we are equally committed to making our solutions flexible and agile, so access is seamless for every user.

At the Microsoft Entra digital event, Joy Chik, President, Identity and Network Access at Microsoft, will talk about how to reinforce the trust fabric around all your digital interactions—while keeping your users’ experience simple—with new products from Microsoft Entra. She’ll be joined by experts from her team to share product demos and take a deep dive into some of the newest Microsoft Entra capabilities.

To start the event, join Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management at Microsoft, as she discusses the Microsoft approach to comprehensive security. She’ll talk about how identity is now—more than ever—an organization’s first line of defense, and how we’re evolving identity to prepare us for future challenges.

Joy Chik will also give a keynote announcing groundbreaking innovations in the Microsoft Entra family, explaining how they take us a step forward in our mission to make it easy to secure access to any app or resource for every employee, customer, partner, and digital entity.

There will also be a series of deep dives where you’ll hear insights into identity and access trends, plus best practices on how to be more secure, efficient, and resilient in the face of identity-based threats and risks. You’ll learn how to think about secure access in a holistic way with Sinead O’Donovan, Vice President, Program Management; take a deep dive into identity innovations with Alex Weinert, Vice President, Identity Security; Sarah Scott, Principal Product Manager; Kristina Smith, Principal Product Manager; Sri Ponnada, Product Manager II; Avni Rambhia Principal Product Manager; and Ankur Patel, Partner Product Manager; and find out what’s happening next with Microsoft Azure Active Directory with me, Irina Nechaeva, General Manager, Identity and Network Access.

To end this event, you will explore the real-world applications of establishing an identity trust fabric through a panel discussion between me and experts Alex Simons, Corporate Vice President of Product Management, Identity and Network Access, Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Microsoft, and David Holmes, Senior Analyst at Forrester. You’ll hear about industry shifts and trends, plus what they’ve learned from customers and how those experiences are helping us shape Microsoft Entra.

We hope you’ll attend Reimagine secure access with Microsoft Entra to explore how to secure access for any identity to any resource in our connected world—and to be among the first to hear news about the latest identity and access innovations.

Through engaging conversations and demonstrations, you’ll learn how to optimize your tech stack, simplify your users’ experience, and prepare for whatever the digital future might bring. You’ll also have the benefit of seeing new Microsoft Entra products in action, and getting your questions answered by experts during the live Q&A session.

Learn more about Microsoft Entra.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.