Microsoft has opened its Cloud and AI Frontier Week, a five-day virtual event for business and technology leaders across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), with a keynote session focused on the concept of the frontier firm.
According to Microsoft, the term describes an organisation that has moved beyond AI experiments and chatbot deployments to redesign how work gets done, with humans and AI agents working together on real business tasks. “A frontier firm is something more deliberate,” said Lizzie Donnachie, director of AI apps and agents go-to-market in EMEA for Microsoft. “It has fundamentally redesigned how work gets done, where agents take on the real workloads, not novelty tasks. Where the operating model itself has changed, not just the tool set.”
Fiona Carney, Microsoft's chief operating officer for EMEA, set out the company's Frontier Success Framework, which organises transformation around four priorities: enriching employee experience, reinventing customer engagement, reshaping core business processes, and accelerating innovation. “Organisations struggling to see the return on investment from AI aren't held back by technology,” she said. “They're held back by misalignment between business and IT, between experimentation and execution, and between ambition and accountability.”
The session also featured Wayve, an autonomous driving company that builds its systems entirely from real-world data with no hard-coded rules. Kyle Esecson, Wayve's head of commercial strategy and partnerships, said continuous learning from deployment is central to the company’s approach. “The only way to improve is to make mistakes in a safe, reliable way, and then be able to take that data, retrain off of that, and continue to improve,” he said. Wayve recently announced partnerships with Nissan and Uber to launch a robotaxi service in London, with global expansion planned.
Marina Goncharova, who leads cloud and AI go-to-market strategy for EMEA at Microsoft, presented a blueprint for organisations looking to scale AI. She cited research suggesting that 60 per cent of AI projects risk being abandoned due to poor data foundations, and stressed the need for a unified data layer, a flexible AI platform, agentic capabilities and secure infrastructure managed through a single control plane. IDC research, she noted, puts the return on enterprise AI investment at $3.70 for every dollar spent.
The keynote closed with a conversation with Jens Hilmer, global head of business operations and transformation at HDI Global, one of Europe’s largest insurers. Hilmer said that building shared technical and governance foundations early was what allowed the company to move from isolated pilots to AI deployed across underwriting, claims and customer service. “Good governance creates the confidence that allows people to use new technologies at scale,” he said. “I would not describe trust as a brake on AI.”
The event continues across four further days, covering strategy, architecture, data foundations and hands-on building sessions.
Microsoft has opened its Cloud and AI Frontier Week, a five-day virtual event for business and technology leaders across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), with a keynote session focused on the concept of the frontier firm.
According to Microsoft, the term describes an organisation that has moved beyond AI experiments and chatbot deployments to redesign how work gets done, with humans and AI agents working together on real business tasks. “A frontier firm is something more deliberate,” said Lizzie Donnachie, director of AI apps and agents go-to-market in EMEA for Microsoft. “It has fundamentally redesigned how work gets done, where agents take on the real workloads, not novelty tasks. Where the operating model itself has changed, not just the tool set.”
Fiona Carney, Microsoft's chief operating officer for EMEA, set out the company's Frontier Success Framework, which organises transformation around four priorities: enriching employee experience, reinventing customer engagement, reshaping core business processes, and accelerating innovation. “Organisations struggling to see the return on investment from AI aren't held back by technology,” she said. “They're held back by misalignment between business and IT, between experimentation and execution, and between ambition and accountability.”
The session also featured Wayve, an autonomous driving company that builds its systems entirely from real-world data with no hard-coded rules. Kyle Esecson, Wayve's head of commercial strategy and partnerships, said continuous learning from deployment is central to the company’s approach. “The only way to improve is to make mistakes in a safe, reliable way, and then be able to take that data, retrain off of that, and continue to improve,” he said. Wayve recently announced partnerships with Nissan and Uber to launch a robotaxi service in London, with global expansion planned.
Marina Goncharova, who leads cloud and AI go-to-market strategy for EMEA at Microsoft, presented a blueprint for organisations looking to scale AI. She cited research suggesting that 60 per cent of AI projects risk being abandoned due to poor data foundations, and stressed the need for a unified data layer, a flexible AI platform, agentic capabilities and secure infrastructure managed through a single control plane. IDC research, she noted, puts the return on enterprise AI investment at $3.70 for every dollar spent.
The keynote closed with a conversation with Jens Hilmer, global head of business operations and transformation at HDI Global, one of Europe’s largest insurers. Hilmer said that building shared technical and governance foundations early was what allowed the company to move from isolated pilots to AI deployed across underwriting, claims and customer service. “Good governance creates the confidence that allows people to use new technologies at scale,” he said. “I would not describe trust as a brake on AI.”
The event continues across four further days, covering strategy, architecture, data foundations and hands-on building sessions.