Microsoft is making more than 70 announcements about its products and solutions this week at its Ignite event.
Several of its major solution updates – the ones that empower “frontier firms” – were highlighted during the opening keynote.
First, Microsoft’s chief commercial officer Judson Althoff explained four common reasons why AI projects fail: alignment between business and IT professionals is inconsistent, data quality issues, regulatory and governance requirements require AI to be observable at all times, and companies are focusing on experimentation rather than scaling projects.
“The frontier firm needs to holistically reimagine their business,” said Althoff. “AI transformation needs to do more for humanity by obsolescing the mundane and unlocking greater creativity.”
Althoff then outlined three common traits to successful frontier firms, explaining that they put AI in the flow of work, facilitate ubiquitous innovation where everyone can create with AI, and have the ability to govern and manage the AI they deploy.
“We need to put the ‘I’ back into ‘AI’”, said Althoff, emphasising that intelligence is key to empowering enterprises.
Microsoft’s Judson Althoff at Ignite
Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn, introduced the intelligence layer Work IQ that “enables Copilot and agents to know you, your job and your company”.
“WorkIQ is the AI that you can trust your most valuable information with,” he said. “It finds patterns and insights within data, rather than pulling fragments of data that ignores context and relationships.”
Roslansky also unveiled two major updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot: dedicated Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents within Copilot Chat, and new capabilities that allow Copilot to interpret and reason across a user’s entire inbox.
Microsoft’s Ryan Roslansky at Ignite
Microsoft partner Epic, for example, is bringing AI-powered intelligence, similar to the ubiquitous nature of Copilot, to healthcare organisations.
Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development at Epic, explained how technology powered by Microsoft is creating end-of- shift notes, discharge summaries and patient overviews so healthcare providers can allocate more time to helping people. Plus, Dr. Jackie Gerhart, chief medical officer at Epic, demonstrated how the software helps practitioners before, during and after patient examinations, while also providing the patient reminders about medical treatment advice.
Microsoft president Asha Sharma then debuted App Builder, which allows anyone to create an app and uses Work IQ for contextual information.
“This is the beginning of something new – software made for people, to software being made by people,” she said. “When innovation becomes ubiquitous, everyone has the chance to drive things forward.”
Sharma was joined by Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger to discuss the companies’ new partnership, which brings Anthropic’s Claude family of models to Microsoft Foundry.
“There’s been a lot of shared DNA and trust across both companies, and I’m really excited to see what will happen when you combine the power of our trusted models with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft 365,” said Krieger.
Sharma added: “Now Azure is the only hyperscaler to offer both OpenAI and Anthropic models to fully empower our customers to build the best AI applications on the planet.”
Microsoft’s Asha Sharma and Anthropic's Mike Krieger
With all this choice, picking the right model for the right jobs becomes more difficult, which is why Microsoft has introduced Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ. The solutions intelligently connect structured and unstructured data that agents use and recommend the best model.
Work IQ, Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ form IQ, a new unified intelligence layer from Microsoft across its data, application and productivity stack.
In addition, Microsoft Agent 365 – the control plane for AI agents – helps organisations observe, manage and secure their agents. It provides visibility into every agent in an enterprise, access controls to data, an easy way to see and understand agent ecosystem, and a safe and secure way for agents to interact with data and communications, all while protecting agents against security threats.
“Agent 365 helps you safely scale agents across a whole company, no matter how or why they were built,” said Charles Lamana, president of business apps and agents at Microsoft.
Lamana was joined by representatives from three of Microsoft’s launch partners during the keynote including Manus AI, Workday and ServiceNow.
Paul Fipps, president of global customer operations at ServiceNow, explained how companies can balance risk with the value of AI: “What I’m hearing from every executive now is how to move on but stay in control. Agents are moving out faster than anyone anticipated… AstraZeneca is using ServiceNow’s AI control tower to have visibility of its agentic workflows. You can see unchecked work and security issues all in one place.”
Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna with representatives from Manus AI, Workday and ServiceNow
Microsoft also shared several major Azure updates.
“Data is the fuel that powers AI but we need a database capable of supporting petabytes of data,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and AI at Microsoft.
Azure HorizonDB, a new cloud database service in preview, handles demanding data storage requirements with up to 15 replicas running on auto-scaling shared storage. Meanwhile, Azure DocumentDB, now generally available, is designed for hybrid and multi-cloud flexibility by supporting advanced search and is compatible with MongoDB tools.
SQL database and Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric are also available this week. These databases are natively integrated into Fabric so users can run workloads within one environment. Plus, Azure Copilot is a new agentic interface that manages specialised agents across the cloud management lifecycle.
Althoff concluded the keynote at Ignite by reminding attendees how many industries Microsoft-powered technology is helping to overcome challenges, referencing its work with Land O’Lakes, Siemens to provide AI on the factory floor, Nestle and others.
“AI in the flow of human ambition, ubiquitous innovation and observability at every layer of the stack is about your IQ, the human ambition that lives inside your company,” said Althoff. “At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more and that is what we’re going to do by empowering all of you to become frontier firms.”