Behind every successful AI transformation is a sharp strategy and at Microsoft, that strategy is being driven by a powerhouse trio who are helping organisations move beyond hype to real-world impact, combining deep industry insight, cutting-edge technology and strong partner momentum.
Kathleen Mitford, corporate vice president of global industry marketing, leads with the industry lens by helping ensure Microsoft’s AI solutions are grounded in the unique needs of sectors like healthcare, retail, financial services and manufacturing. Satish Thomas, corporate vice president of Microsoft business and industry solutions, brings the technology to life by showcasing how Microsoft’s latest innovations, industry-adapted models and next-generation AI agents are moving customers from concept to implementation. And Shelley Bransten, corporate vice president of global industry solutions, focuses on outcomes by sharing how customer and partner collaboration is driving measurable results. Together, they’re shaping the future of AI across industries and in this interview, they share how.
As Microsoft enters a new fiscal year, can you share how AI is already making an impact, and how it will continue to accelerate transformation at scale across sectors?
Kathleen Mitford: Over the past year, I’ve had conversations with business and government leaders around the world, and there’s a clear shift happening. The question is no longer whether to use AI. The question now is how to get the most out of it. We’ve reached a point where AI is no longer a distant concept. It’s here, it’s real and it’s already transforming how people work across industries, roles and geographies.
At Microsoft, we’re working alongside customers and partners to support AI transformation and while productivity is often the starting point, what’s most exciting is how organisations are using AI to go much deeper. AI is empowering employees with tools that enable them to focus on more creative and strategic work; transforming how they engage with customers through more personalised and responsive experiences; streamlining operations to automate workflows and provide real-time insights; and accelerating innovation to bring new ideas to market faster.
The real impact of AI is increasingly being measured in three strategic ways. First, organisations are seeing a return on employee. AI is helping people focus on higher-value work by automating repetitive tasks, reducing burnout and improving engagement. Second, there’s a clear return on investment. Companies are realising cost savings, accelerating time to market and unlocking new revenue streams, especially when AI is applied to high-impact, industry-specific scenarios. And third, there’s a return on future opportunity. AI is enabling organisations to innovate with confidence, whether that means launching new services, entering new markets, or rethinking how they deliver value to customers.
As we enter Microsoft’s new fiscal year, our focus is on helping customers lead with AI, starting with tools and technologies that are grounded in the realities of their industry. AI can’t be one-size-fits-all. It needs to reflect the language, processes, regulations and challenges that are specific to each sector. That’s why we take an industry-first approach, combining the full breadth of the Microsoft Cloud with industry-specific AI capabilities and the deep industry expertise of our global partner ecosystem.
Our ambition is to help every organisation evolve into what we call a ‘frontier firm’. These are companies that use AI not just to optimise but to transform. They bring together human expertise and intelligent systems to move faster, operate more efficiently and innovate more boldly. They’re structured for agility and scale, with AI embedded across their value chain. Whether in healthcare, manufacturing, retail or finance, becoming a frontier firm means being ready to lead in this new era of AI.
We will continue to power innovation across industries by advancing a new wave of AI capabilities that are built specifically for the needs of each sector. A clear example is the emergence of industry AI agents and industry-specific copilots. These agents are designed to automate tasks and support individuals, teams or entire organisations. What makes them unique is their ability to address sector-specific needs. Whether it’s gathering real-time insights in financial services, improving personalised shopping experiences in retail, or accelerating factory issue resolution in manufacturing, these agents are built to address the unique use cases of each industry. They’re fully customisable, allowing customers to align them with their own data, workflows and business logic.
Alongside these agents, we’re also expanding our impact with solutions like Microsoft Dragon Copilot, the first unified voice AI assistant for healthcare. It uses ambient intelligence to streamline documentation and surface insights during patient visits, helping reduce administrative burden and improve care quality. Together, these innovations are helping organisations move faster, operate more intelligently and deliver better outcomes in ways that are deeply aligned with their mission.
The trio work together to empower organisations across all industries with Microsoft cloud and AI technologies
Looking more closely at the technology driving this innovation, what is Microsoft’s approach from an engineering perspective?
Satish Thomas: As generative AI technology matures, we are entering the next phase: the autonomous enterprise, where organisations and people leverage technology, particularly AI and automation, to operate and adapt in an age of rapid transformation and innovation. Where there once was ‘an app for that’, there will now be ‘an agent for that’.
This transformation isn’t just about automation, it’s about people. By putting intelligent agents in the hands of every employee, organisations are empowering individuals to focus on higher-value work, make decisions faster and drive innovation. Sales teams can deepen customer relationships without being bogged down by administrative tasks. Finance professionals can move from manual reconciliation to strategic forecasting. Marketers can go from idea to execution and product managers can orchestrate complex workflows with clarity and speed.
When we think about AI-first companies, human ambition is a key part of it, augmented by a copilot. There will be a copilot for every user and an intelligent agent for every business process and of course, for each of those copilot experiences there might be multiple agents that enable them to scale that effort. So think of copilots as the UI for AI.
And one of the things that you’ll hear in the context of the work we are doing is how we enable agent scenarios across business processes and industries that move from having humans with assistants to being human led, agent operated. This is where we are really thinking about how to reimagine our industry and business applications to enable our customers to become AI-first companies.
Alongside the current generation of Microsoft cloud tools, could you give us a brief look at what’s next for AI?
ST: First of all, our biggest differentiator as a company is the Microsoft Cloud. We’ve got planet scale infrastructure with Azure, industry leading low-code and low-code/no-code solutions with Power Platform, collaboration with Teams, business applications with Dynamics 365, and data and AI with Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Fabric – all underscored by a foundation of security, privacy and governance. When you think about the comprehensiveness of the Microsoft Cloud, we have a complete and very competitive technology stack for our customers and partners to build upon.
We also have an innovative agent platform with Copilot Studio, which provides a standardised protocol for agents to seamlessly interact with our business and industry applications, helping to ensure consistency, reliability and scalability. What you can expect from us is that we will have out-of-the-box agents for business processes across the enterprise and small to medium-sized businesses, industry-specific agents that help drive functions such as personalised shopping in retail, or factory operations in manufacturing. And at the limit, we are a partner company and will work closely with our partner ecosystem to enable them to take advantage of our platform and tools to extend and build agents to deliver the last mile of functionality for our customers.
One of the latest innovations we’ve announced to accelerate the development of agents is the adoption and compliance with Model Context Protocol (MCP) across our business applications and development platforms. At our Build conference in May 2025, we announced MCP servers for Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management business applications, in addition to MCP support for our developer platforms such as GitHub and Copilot Studio.
MCP standardises how applications provide context to large language models, enabling seamless integration with different data sources and tools. This open standard connects AI assistants and agents to various systems where data resides, such as content repositories, business tools and development environments. An MCP compliant agent uses rich contextual information to act efficiently, unlike a non-MCP compliant agent which lacks necessary context.
In the age of the autonomous enterprise, we need to move fast and MCP servers will help break down the silos between applications and data. Customers and partners will no longer have to piece together a maze of bespoke connectors or manually discover every API, hard-code prompts with these actions to pass the right context, map ever-shifting schemas or thread role-based security into each call. Weeks of work is almost seamlessly accelerated by this standardised approach to deliver immediate impact for our customers and partners. This is something we are very excited about.
Bransten and Microsoft’s Bill Borden rang the opening Nasdaq bell to celebrate Microsoft’s 50th anniversary in April 2025
Let’s talk about customer momentum. What are the tangible benefits that you and your colleagues have witnessed when talking with Microsoft customers about the early adoption of AI tools? How far is its impact reaching across the daily operation of an organisation?
KM: AI is transforming business at a pace we’ve never seen before, unlocking possibilities that would have felt out of reach not long ago. We can personalise learning for every student, anticipate climate threats to support food security and help doctors detect illness earlier to improve patient outcomes. These examples are already in motion and delivering results.
What’s especially powerful is how organisations are starting to move beyond pilots. AI is becoming part of how they operate, serve customers and make decisions. This is where real transformation begins, when AI is tied to strategy and focused on solving specific industry challenges.
The frontier firms are setting the pace. These companies acted early and are now applying AI across every area of the business. According to the 2025 Work Trend Index, they’re seeing faster innovation cycles, stronger employee engagement and greater resilience. Many are developing their own AI solutions, upskilling teams and expanding adoption across numerous departments.
And this shift is visible across every sector. In healthcare, for example, nearly 80 per cent of workers say they don’t have enough time or energy to do their jobs effectively. At the same time, 79 per cent of healthcare leaders plan to use digital labour to expand capacity in the year ahead. These numbers highlight a broader trend. AI is helping bridge the gap between growing demands and limited human capacity.
Shelley Bransten: It’s incredible to see what our customers are doing with AI technology. And we’ve really seen a big shift from ‘proof of concept’ to ‘proof of value’ when we look at how they’re deploying AI and the impact it’s having. One of my favourite examples is Venchi, the Italian chocolate and gelato maker. As Venchi expanded into more than 70 countries, it partnered with Microsoft to modernise its supply chain with AI and enhance in-store experiences using agents. The results have been substantial with over 1,500 hours saved annually through automated fulfilment, optimised inventory levels, and having grown its loyalty programme by 800,000 customers, all while maintaining a customer satisfaction score of 4.9 out of 5.
Another favourite is our work with Pets at Home, the UK’s largest pet care company. Pets at Home created an AI agent to support its retail fraud detection team in investigating suspicious transactions. With this low-code agent extending and seamlessly integrating into existing systems, the company’s fraud department can act more quickly. What used to take 30 minutes is now handled by the AI agent within seconds, plus the company is identifying fraud 10 times faster and is processing 20 times more cases a day.
The fraud department at Pets at Home uses a Microsoft-powered AI agent to identify fraud 10 times faster and process 20 times more cases a day
Meanwhile, in manufacturing, Rolls-Royce is using AI to boost machine usage by 30 per cent and prevent around 400 unplanned maintenance events every year. That translates into major savings and greater productivity across its operations. In financial services, Aditya Birla Capital is using AI for faster time to market, a 20 per cent boost in contact centre productivity and more than 40 per cent in cost reductions.
KM: What ties all of these customer stories together is a clear focus on solving industry-specific challenges. Whether it’s optimising production, streamlining customer service or improving real-time decision-making, these organisations are using AI to deliver meaningful results. And they’re doing it with the help of our global partner ecosystem. By combining Microsoft’s platforms with partners’ deep industry expertise, we are helping customers go from early adoption to complete transformation, with results that are tangible and lasting.
As technology continues to open new markets and ways of delivering services, how do you see the lasting value of having a strong, global community of technology partners working alongside Microsoft?
SB: One of the reasons I joined Microsoft seven years ago was because of the incredible Microsoft partner ecosystem. They’re the envy of the technology world and in many ways our secret sauce. I’ve been blown away by the pace and scale of change the past two years and that only seems to be accelerating. So as we think about how AI is reshaping and reimagining industries, our partners bring the agility, specialisation and local expertise that allow Microsoft to meet customers where they are, navigate this change and solve their most pressing challenges to ultimately take their businesses into the future.
What makes the Microsoft partner ecosystem enduring is its diversity and depth. With over 500,000 partner organisations worldwide, we’re able to co-innovate across every sector, from startups building on Azure to global systems integrators delivering complex solutions. These partners extend Microsoft’s capabilities, infuse their own IP and co-sell with us to create tailored, high-impact solutions. As a platform company, we rely on our partners to deliver industry specific solutions and capabilities to our customers, all built on the Microsoft Cloud.
When we talk about the power of partnership to drive industry innovation, two great examples come to mind: Blue Yonder and Sitecore.
With Blue Yonder, we’ve been partnering together to help customers across manufacturing, retail and logistics transform their supply chains and move toward intelligent, autonomous operations. Together, we’re delivering real-time visibility, predictive disruption management, smarter demand forecasting and optimised fulfilment. This means that when a storm disrupts a shipping route, a retailer can reroute inventory before shelves go empty. It means a manufacturer can anticipate demand shifts and adjust production before waste builds up. It’s about building supply chains that don’t just react – they think, adapt and respond in real time to keep businesses moving and customers satisfied. For example, the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Sales and Services Company’s IT organisation, known as Coke One North America Services (CONA), is transforming operations for Coca-Cola’s largest bottlers across North America. By integrating demand, supply and production planning with Blue Yonder and migrating to Azure, CONA is unifying planning processes and pioneering AI-driven forecasting. This enables bottlers to anticipate market shifts, optimise production schedules and ensure timely product delivery.
CONA Services, responsible for Coca-Cola's products across North America, improved production schedules by migrating to Blue Yonder on Azure
The Sitecore AI Innovation Lab is a joint initiative with Microsoft that empowers marketers to rapidly explore and validate AI-driven solutions for content and experience. The Lab offers a guided, collaborative environment where marketing teams work directly with experts from Sitecore and Microsoft. Together, they prototype solutions tailored to real-world challenges, such as automating content tagging, generating personalised copy at scale or streamlining campaign workflows. These innovations feed directly into Sitecore’s digital experience platform, ensuring that what’s built in the Lab delivers measurable business results: faster execution, more relevant customer experiences, and a clear path to AI adoption.
These are just two examples of how we’re working with partners to turn bold ideas into real-world transformation for customers.
Where do you see this unfolding story taking Microsoft customers? What is the ongoing potential for innovation in the years ahead?
KM: We are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI. What we’re seeing now is the beginning of a much broader transformation, one where AI becomes deeply embedded in how organisations operate, innovate and grow. The next phase is about building intelligent systems that are integrated across business functions and aligned to strategic goals.
For those who haven’t started yet, the gap is widening, but there’s still time. With the right use cases, a strong data foundation and trusted partners, organisations can ramp up quickly and begin seeing results in a matter of weeks. The key is to take that first step. Once momentum builds, progress tends to accelerate.
Looking ahead, AI will play a more integrated role in helping industries solve complex, cross-functional challenges. In manufacturing, we may see more adaptive production systems that respond to real-time data. In healthcare, more proactive models of care that reduce administrative burden and improve outcomes. In financial services, more personalised and secure experiences at scale. And in retail, more agile supply chains and seamless customer journeys.
This direction aligns with what we describe as the model-forward era, a shift where every layer of the technology stack is being reimagined to support AI-first innovation. It also connects to our vision for the open agentic web, where intelligent agents, grounded in secure access to data and business logic, can act on behalf of users and organisations across digital environments. But technology alone isn’t enough. Realising this vision requires more than tools. It demands a strong data foundation, a culture that embraces change, and a clear connection between AI and business strategy. It also requires people. While AI is accelerating what’s possible, it’s human creativity, empathy and judgment that give innovation its purpose and direction. The most successful organisations will be those that empower their workforce to lead alongside AI, where people are not replaced, but elevated.
We’re seeing the rise of a new kind of organisation, AI-operated and human-led. People are beginning to manage AI teammates, delegating tasks and collaborating with digital agents to expand capacity and amplify impact. These ‘agent bosses’ are using AI tools and leading teams that include AI agents, and they’re redefining what productivity and leadership look like in this new era.
Frontier firms are already operating this way. They’re building their own copilots, aligning AI with the specific needs of their industries and with their business goals, and creating new ways of working. And we’re committed to supporting every organisation that’s ready to take that step, with the technology, expertise and partner ecosystem to help them lead.
Discover more insights like this in the Summer 2025 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox.