By Laura Hyde |
The Microsoft Frontier Company has participated in nearly 500 projects with over 200 customers across 28 countries since its launch in July 2026. The dedicated business unit is backed by a $2.5 billion investment and is led by Rodrigo Kede Lima.
“The technology is ready; what slows AI down is everything around it,” said Lima in a blog post titled ‘From AI ambition to business impact’. “That means identifying where AI can deliver the greatest value, building in trust and governance, redesigning the operating models and helping people work in new ways. Technology and people have to move forward together.”
Customers who have worked alongside the forward deployed engineering teams include 3M, which is automating customer order management, and Publicis Groupe, which is designing and building agentic processes grounded in Microsoft IQ. Other customers include Alaska Airlines, BMW, London Stock Exchange Group, Mastercard, Siemens and Unilever, which is working with Microsoft engineers to bring AI into its factories to boost efficiency and improve product quality. At a factory in South Asia, Unilever built a digital twin on NVIDIA Omniverse and hosted on Azure to simulate a real factory environment with integrated live data to anticipate issues before they occur.
“If we’re asking customers to redesign how they work around AI, we have to do the same,” said Lima. “We are learning, adjusting and moving fast, the same way we ask our customers to.”
Most customers who have completed initial projects with the Microsoft Frontier Company have returned for additional engagements, generating hundreds of follow-on projects. Lima believes this is because each project has started with the value and not the technology; each has redesigned the process, not just the task; and each has involved Microsoft’s engineers working quickly with the customer’s teams. Each project also put security, governance and cost management in place from the beginning to ensure scaling progresses smoothly and without delay.
Lima believes the real measure of success goes beyond what Microsoft delivers. “The real test is what our customers can do after we’ve worked together: run, govern and improve their own AI systems, on their terms, with their intelligence protected,” he said. “Their success is the clearest measure of ours.”
Read more about these projects in a blog post written by Lima on the Microsoft website.