By Kasturi Datta |
Professional services firm EY and Microsoft have launched a new five-year, US$1 billion initiative to help organisations around the world deploy AI at scale across their core business operations. The initiative is part of the long-standing EY-Microsoft Alliance.
Integrated teams of Microsoft engineers and EY consultants will co-develop secure, industry-specific AI solutions for finance, human resources, supply chain and tax operations for the consumer goods and retail, energy, financial services, government, healthcare and industrials sectors.
The aim is to help clients become ‘Frontier Firms’ by accelerating AI adoption, continually optimising operations and upskilling their employees.
“Together with Microsoft, EY is supporting clients to unlock value through rapid deployment of AI at scale,” said Janet Truncale, CEO and global chair of EY. “With access to a single, integrated team, clients will have at their disposal both Microsoft’s market-leading engineering depth, alongside EY teams’ deep industry knowledge and change management capabilities. By combining people and innovation in this next phase of the Alliance, clients will be empowered to realise the transformative power of agentic AI within the enterprise.”
EY will serve as ‘Client Zero’ for the initiative, using its own teams to test the optimal ways of using Microsoft technologies. It was one of the first organisations to adopt Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Suite and initially deployed Copilot to 150,000 employees, resulting in a 15 per cent increase in productivity. The firm is now scaling Copilot to more than 400,000 of its employees.
In addition, EY has integrated AI agents into the Microsoft Power Platform to modernise its finance operations, which has cut operational costs by 37 per cent and resulted in 95 per cent faster lead times. It has also decreased the manual workload involved in extracting data from its global tax platform by 90 per cent by adopting the Azure AI Document tool.
Further to this, the firm is embedding a multi-agent framework – integrated with Microsoft’s Azure, Foundry and Fabric platforms – to organise the workflows of 130,000 assurance employees across 160,000 audit projects.
“Our initiative combines Microsoft’s trusted AI platform and engineering teams with EY’s industry capabilities and experience as ‘Client Zero’ – applying these technologies across their own organisation – to help customers move beyond pilots to enterprise execution, enhancing decision-making and delivering measurable impact,” said Judson Althoff, CEO of commercial business at Microsoft.