Ask any executive about their biggest technology goals, and improving customer service while creating measurable value for the business will be high on the list. It’s a perennial challenge, and AI brings new possibilities to meet it. Agentic AI is unlocking a new model of work, where intelligent systems collaborate with people to drive faster decisions, more personalised experiences and better outcomes at scale. It is transforming the way businesses operate – and how they approach their technology investments.
“Instead of simply asking what AI can do, our customers are asking how they can apply the technology to their most important challenges and prove the business value of it,” says Shelley Bransten, corporate vice president, frontier industry advisory at Microsoft Frontier Company. “Across every industry, AI is moving from a standalone tool into the flow of work and the core processes that run the business. People are working with copilots and agents that help them find knowledge, make decisions and take action all the way from the shop floor to the top floor. At the same time, IT leaders are moving from isolated pilots to integrated platforms that connect data, applications, workflows, security and governance. Companies are unlocking innovation and creating new opportunities for growth at a pace and scale unlike anything I’ve seen before.”
Bransten points to US-based non-profit St Luke’s University Health Network. It is using Microsoft Security Copilot to help protect both the systems clinicians and patients depend on across 15 campuses, 300 outpatient sites and more than 2.5 petabytes of data and patient records. As a result, it is saving nearly 200 hours each month in phishing alert triage and creating incident reports in minutes instead of hours. St Luke’s embodies Microsoft’s frontier vision, which sees AI becoming a core operating capability that drives growth, innovation and measurable business outcomes repeatedly, at scale.
“Frontier transformation is about helping organisations move beyond AI experimentation to business reinvention,” explains Bransten. “It’s about becoming AI-first in everything you do and demanding that AI does more than just drive efficiency gains. A frontier firm combines human ambition, AI and agents to create continuously improving workflows that generate value across four transformational scenarios: enriching employee experiences, reinventing customer engagement, reshaping business processes and bending the curve on innovation.”
That vision is built on two intertwined principles: intelligence and trust.
“Intelligence is an organisation’s unique IQ, its data, expertise, workflows, applications and decision-making,” says Bransten. “Frontier organisations create platforms where that intelligence compounds over time. Trust means the ability to govern, secure, observe and measure AI across the stack while protecting data, intellectual property and competitive advantage.”
These are core principles that cannot be captured by isolated projects. AI adoption is an urgent competitive priority – but the organisation with a comprehensive AI strategy will come out ahead.
“With frontier transformation, AI systems are continuously built, observed and tuned against business outcomes, creating a flywheel where value compounds over time rather than ending with a pilot,” says Bransten. “The risk of lagging is not simply adopting AI later than competitors. It is allowing competitors to redesign how they operate, learn faster, serve customers more intelligently and translate their unique intelligence into competitive advantage while others remain trapped in isolated experiments. At the same time, organisations must avoid scaling AI without the right foundations in data, governance, security and change management. Success comes from moving with urgency and discipline, starting with business outcomes and designing for trust and continuous improvement from day one.”
Turning AI ambition into measurable business outcomes involves a combination of technology, data, security, industry expertise, AI engineering and change management. That is why Microsoft is investing in capabilities that support the full frontier transformation journey.
“From a technology point of view, Microsoft Azure provides the open, model-diverse foundation to build, run and scale AI,” says Bransten. “Microsoft Foundry, Fabric, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365 and Teams help organisations bring AI into the flow of work, connect agents to trusted business data and redesign customer and business processes around measurable outcomes.
“But technology is only part of the answer. We recently announced a $2.5 billion investment in Microsoft Frontier Company, bringing together 6,000 industry and engineering experts to work side-by-side with customers. The model is outcome-driven: start with what success looks like, co-design solutions, deploy them into real workflows and continuously improve them against measurable business key performance indicators (KPIs).”
Alongside this trusted platform, Bransten emphasises the need for deep industry expertise, AI engineering, change management and continuous improvement. “And let’s not forget that people are at the heart of all this,” she says.
“Our ambition is to help organisations move beyond pilots and productivity gains towards true frontier transformation, while ensuring that what makes them unique – their intelligence – remains protected and continues to compound over time.”
A ‘customer zero’ approach is central to that understanding. It sees Microsoft and its partners using internal AI deployments to prove business value, before passing tried and tested approaches to their clients.
“We’re working across numerous teams at Microsoft to build a library of reusable evidence and lessons learned that we can share with our customers so they can move from experimentation to operational impact with more speed and confidence. In Microsoft Finance for example, AI agents are helping collections teams move faster and make better decisions. They’ve helped to cut case-handling time by 22 per cent and reduce customer inquiry-handling times by as much as 60 per cent,” says Bransten, who also highlights EY as a case in point.
“After deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to 150,000 employees and reporting a 15 per cent productivity gain, EY is expanding the Microsoft 365 Frontier Suite across a workforce of more than 400,000 people,” says Bransten. “Across key processes, it reports 95 per cent faster lead times, more than 37 per cent lower finance operating costs and up to a 90 per cent reduction in manual workloads. That experience gives EY practical transformation insight it can bring to customers. The ecosystem becomes most powerful when partners run the technology themselves, codify what works and apply those lessons with industry depth.”
There is also ample evidence of AI deployments having measurable impacts on customers’ businesses across industries and geographies. For instance, global luxury jewellery retailer Chow Tai Fook has deployed more than 400 customised AI agents supporting over 24,000 employees.
“The company’s AI Fook ecosystem gives frontline associates immediate access to product knowledge, inventory insights and personalised recommendations,” says Bransten. “As a result, it reports core process efficiency gains above 70 per cent and sales conversion improvements of up to 57 per cent.”
In financial services, Banco Popular Dominicano transformed operational risk from periodic, sample-based reviews into continuous AI-powered supervision.
“Banco Popular Dominicano’s agent ecosystem now monitors 100 per cent of the operational risk universe in real time, up from roughly 40 per cent, while delivering seven times greater analytical capacity and reducing manual effort by 70 per cent,” says Bransten. “This improves both control and the speed with which the bank can respond.”
Meanwhile, automotive manufacturer BMW worked with Microsoft Azure and Foundry Agent Service to modernise its Mobile Data Recorder system. Multi-agent AI makes the five to ten terabytes of test-vehicle data generated each week instantly accessible and actionable for all the company’s engineers. Now, BMW can deliver insights 12 times faster than before and has empowered its engineers to analyse telemetry directly. With AI-driven workflows embedded into daily research and development, teams can analyse thousands of test scenarios at the same time – resulting in faster design cycles and reduced late-stage fixes.
“What all these stories have in common is that AI is grounded in trusted organisational context, connected to a real workflow and measured against a business or human outcome,” says Bransten.
BMW accelerated its design cycles by using Microsoft Azure and Foundry Agent Service to make test-vehicle data instantly accessible and actionable for engineers (Photo: BMW Group PressClub)
As AI continues to enable new ways of getting work done, more organisations are moving towards the frontier vision. And while nobody can predict what will happen next, Bransten sees glimpses of what is coming.
“I expect the conversation to move decisively from copilots as individual productivity tools to human-agent teams and agentic workflows that operate across entire business processes,” Bransten says. “We will also see fewer disconnected proofs of concept and more deliberate portfolios of transformation programmes tied to enterprise KPIs. Agents will increasingly connect across customer service, finance, supply chain, engineering and other functions. The organisations that lead will build strong intelligence and trust platforms underneath them, with clear observability, governance, security and cost management.”
We may be seeing the emergence of an AI-first world, but it’s one in which the human dimension will become even more important. This is about how enterprises harness AI to create value for their employees and for the people they serve. Those that move with intent now will define what customer delight looks like in an AI-first world.
“The winners will not be the organisations with the most agents,” says Bransten. “They will be those that combine technology with industry expertise, responsible leadership and the confidence to redesign how work gets done. In an AI-first world, customer delight is not a layer added at the end. It becomes an outcome woven into the fabric of the operating model.”
Partner perspectives
We asked selected Microsoft partners how they are helping organisations to leverage Microsoft AI capabilities, so workers can focus on creating exceptional value.
Turning intent into action
Microsoft’s cloud and AI portfolio gives channel partners a strong technology ecosystem to build around real end-customer needs. Arrow Electronics combines Microsoft expertise with commercial support, technical enablement and platforms including ArrowSphere Cloud, giving our channel partners greater visibility, automation and control across end-customer cloud estates as they build and manage solutions. We also help them develop the use cases, skills and confidence to work across Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, security and data, and create scalable services that support long-term growth. The opportunity is to turn intent into action, create measurable business value and deepen end-customer relationships.
Oliver Harvey-Jones
Director of Cloud UK & Ireland, Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions
An intelligent foundation for Microsoft Teams Rooms
AI is reshaping how work gets done, and meetings are a critical source of knowledge for organisations. To unlock the full value of AI, meeting spaces must deliver richer context than audio and video alone. AI needs to understand who is speaking, how people interact and what content is being created in the room. ClickShare Hub provides the intelligent foundation for Microsoft Teams Rooms, bringing together cameras, microphones, displays and wireless content sharing into one seamless experience. This enables AI-powered capabilities that help teams to spend less time on administration and more time creating value, delivering meeting spaces ready for the next generation of collaborative work.
Yannic Laleeuwe
Marketing Director Meeting Experience, Barco ClickShare
Preparing for new ways of working
Organisations are moving quickly to embrace Microsoft Copilot and
AI-powered ways of working, but the value they realise will depend in part on the Microsoft 365 environment supporting them. When business information is fragmented across tenants, identities and legacy environments, it can be harder for employees and the AI tools supporting them to find and use the right information. For many organisations, preparing for what comes next means consolidating Microsoft 365 tenants, bringing collaboration data together, aligning identities and reducing infrastructure complexity. Migration is no longer simply about moving data from one environment to another. When it’s done well, it can help create a more connected digital workplace that improves how employees work today while providing a stronger foundation for AI-powered productivity.
Aaron Wadsworth
Senior Director, Product and Strategic Partner Management, BitTitan
A proven framework for governance, security and adoption
Coretek helps organisations move beyond AI experimentation and into measurable business outcomes by combining Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio with a proven framework for governance, security and adoption. Through our AI Envisioning and AI Frontier Factory offerings, we help clients identify high-value use cases, modernise workflows and deploy AI solutions that automate repetitive tasks, accelerate decision-making and improve productivity. By deploying and operationalising AI in our own business first, we’re able to guide clients with practical experience, proven architectures and real-world lessons learned. The result is a secure, scalable path to AI adoption that frees employees to focus on innovation, customer engagement and higher-value business activities rather than manual, time-consuming work.
Brian Barnes
Chief Technology Officer, Coretek
Spaces that support connection and innovation
AI workflows as they relate to meetings, especially in the workplace, will need the right hardware. It’s essential to have outstanding cameras, microphones and speakers to get the full value of those AI investments. But beyond just meetings, we’re working with Microsoft to also ensure the hardware is available and useful to the space even without attendees on a call – so people can just drop in and use a space any time. We’re also offering solutions that help with wayfinding, room scheduling and more. At the end of the day, we have technology platforms that enable continued innovation.
Brad Hintze
Executive Vice President, Global Customer Success and Marketing, Crestron
Grounded and trustworthy answers for employees
Microsoft 365 Copilot gives people a faster way to work, but much of an enterprise’s most valuable data still lives outside SharePoint and OneDrive. CTERA brings Copilot to petabytes of enterprise NAS data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, without copying that data to the cloud. Copilot can securely access and reason over data where it already lives, while preserving existing ACLs, permissions and classification. Employees get grounded, trustworthy answers from across the enterprise without compromising data governance and spend less time searching for information and more time on work that matters to customers.
Aron Brand
Chief Technology Officer, CTERA
Enterprise-grade data in Azure cloud and AI
Everpure collaborates with Microsoft to integrate enterprise-grade storage and data services natively into Azure’s cloud and AI ecosystems, streamlining hybrid cloud migration and management. Everpure Cloud dynamically scales storage capacity and IOPS on demand, ensuring environments remain perfectly right-sized to actual workload needs. Industry-leading data reduction rates, compression and thin provisioning deliver significant savings on overall storage costs. Organisations can redirect those saved IT dollars straight into funding next-generation AI innovation, such as enterprise model customisation and agentic application deployment. Additionally, automated storage management through familiar Azure tools frees workforce energy from routine maintenance, enabling teams to build custom AI integrations and drive business value.
Dan Kogan
Vice President, Cloud, Everpure
Time to collaborate, respond and create value
At Intermedia, we believe the real opportunity with AI is to give people time back to focus on the work that creates the most value for customers and the business. As organisations embrace Microsoft’s AI capabilities, we’re helping extend that transformation by bringing AI-powered enterprise calling, customer engagement and archiving directly into Microsoft Teams. By embedding these capabilities into the environment employees already use every day, organisations can reduce application switching, simplify workflows and make communications more efficient. The result is less time spent navigating technology and more time collaborating, responding to customers and applying the insight and creativity that only people can bring.
Urvashi Sheth
Chief Customer Officer, Intermedia Intelligent Communications
AI-powered identity verification to secure critical workflows
As AI agents and Microsoft Copilot take on real work, organisations need confidence in who, or what, is on the other side of the interaction. Credentials can be stolen, shared or synthetically generated, and deepfakes now defeat traditional verification. Without trusted identity, automated workflows inherit that risk at machine speed. IDEMIA Public Security combines AI-powered document authentication, biometric face matching, liveness detection and identity proofing to establish that a verified person is present at onboarding, access and other sensitive transactions. Integrated with Microsoft technologies, these capabilities help secure critical workflows across the enterprise. With trusted identity anchored at the start, organisations can automate with confidence, reduce fraud and free employees to focus on higher-value work.
Virginie Flam
Senior Vice President, Smart Biometrics, IDEMIA Public Security
Critical context and actionable intelligence
Iron Mountain InSight DXP on Microsoft Azure is transforming how organisations activate their physical and digital assets. By natively integrating Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI, we enable customers to enrich unstructured content with critical context and actionable intelligence. This partnership allows businesses to modernise fragmented data into an AI-ready foundation, ensuring enterprise-grade security and automated compliance. Our agentic AI workflows simplify information governance, freeing employees from manual data management to focus on strategic initiatives. Together with Microsoft, we are empowering global teams to turn complex data into a strategic competitive advantage and elevate the power of their work.
Matt Jennings
Senior Vice President, Digital Business Sales and Partnerships, Iron Mountain
Faster, better and safer
For too long, financial services firms have made high-stakes decisions on point-in-time snapshots of risk. As AI becomes the primary interface for decision-making, we have a chance to give customers something better: a continuous, real-time integrated view of risk that moves at the speed of the market. But that only works if the intelligence behind it can be trusted – and explained to regulators, boards and shareholders. That’s what our partnership with Microsoft is: two brands built on trust, bringing together a governed enterprise platform and a governed set of data and intelligence, so our customers can not only work faster – but better and safer.
Rob Fauber
CEO, Moody’s Corporation
Handing back time for value-adding tasks
At OpenText, we help customers see Microsoft Copilot not as a bolt-on tool, but as a tool to redesign how work gets done. Through Copilot in 30 – a 25-seat, 30-day Microsoft 365 Copilot Business trial – we get customers hands-on fast, so they experience the time savings themselves rather than taking our word for it. From there, we help customers map AI into the workflows that actually eat their employees’ time, such as creating drafts, meeting follow-ups, data digging and routine approvals. Copilot efficiently hands that time back, so they can focus on selling, service and strategy. OpenText is also ‘customer zero’, using Copilot internally ourselves before we demo it, so every recommendation comes from lived experience, not a slide.
Majd Madina
Senior Partner Development Manager EMEA, OpenText
Connecting systems to streamline processes
Most enterprises now run AI in two places. Microsoft Copilot sits where employees work and ServiceNow sits where the work actually gets done. Our job is to connect them. We integrate Now Assist and ServiceNow AI agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI and Fabric, so a request made in Teams executes as governed work in ServiceNow. Nothing gets re-entered. Nothing gets lost between systems. Customers transact through Azure Marketplace and draw down existing Microsoft commitments, which takes months out of procurement. The result is fewer handoffs, faster resolution and people spending time on customers instead of chasing status.
Chad Scheller
Area Vice President for Global Microsoft Business, ServiceNow
Human judgement at the centre of every decision
AI is changing how our customers – from energy traders and sustainability analysts to market strategists – work, learn and make decisions. At S&P Global Energy, we’re helping them access trusted data and insights directly within the tools they use every day, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Researcher and Cowork. The opportunity is not simply to work faster; it is to help clients connect complex information, find answers and focus on higher-value analysis for their businesses. When Microsoft AI capabilities are combined with S&P Global’s data and expertise, our customers can move with greater speed and confidence while keeping human judgement at the centre of every decision.
Joerg Gerth
Vice President, Channel Management, S&P Global Energy
Clear voices, reliable coverage
Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to develop collaboration technology that empowers Microsoft AI tools. We want to help organisations build meeting spaces that give Microsoft Teams, Copilot and Facilitator the best possible input: clear voices, reliable coverage, the highest video quality for more engagement and future-ready technology that works consistently across the modern workspace. When meeting room systems recognise participants and record both the conversation and non-verbal cues properly, AI can do more than summarise the meeting. Clean inputs help human teams understand decisions, move work forward faster with AI agents handling background tasks and spend less time managing meetings so they can focus on customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
Josh Blalock
Director, Collaboration Ecosystem and Engagement, Shure
Turning AI into a practical part of how work gets done
Synergy Technical is helping organisations apply Microsoft AI capabilities to workflows by bringing Microsoft Copilot, AI agents, automation and data together within a secure and governed environment. We help organisations understand how to turn AI into a practical part of how work gets done by focusing on workflows where employees lose the most time to repetitive tasks, disconnected information and manual processes. The goal is to create measurable capacity across the business by using AI to surface information, automate routine steps and support faster decision-making. Employees can therefore spend more time solving customer problems and focusing on the work that creates greater business value.
Dan Finn
Vice President, Sales, Synergy Technical
Providing AI with operational context
The most successful organisations aren’t asking how to deploy AI; they’re asking how they can improve the way work gets done. That’s where we start the conversations. We help clients identify where employees spend too much time on repetitive activities, where information is difficult to access, and where processes create unnecessary delays or frustrations. Once we understand those challenges, we look at how Microsoft technologies can help simplify work, improve access to knowledge and support better decision making. Organisations achieve the greatest success when they use AI to rethink work rather than simply speed up existing processes. Our role is to help guide that transition responsibly and practically by ensuring that technology supports people rather than replacing them.
Hersch Patel
Chief Client Officer, Velosio
Unlocking human skills
Microsoft has given organisations extraordinary AI capability. What most lack is the human layer – the skills, confidence and manager support that decide whether any of it gets used. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index puts it plainly: the question is not whether people have the right skills, but whether the organisation is built to unlock them. That is the layer we work on. The Zensai platform, with agentic AI built natively inside Microsoft 365, coaches employees on the skills their goals now demand and managers on the conversations that develop their teams – inside the tenant IT already governs. This is why we call ourselves the human success company.
Unleashing the potential of AI
Most AI programmes are constrained not by the technology but by the processes they inherit. Microsoft’s stack is capable; the workflows it lands on usually are not. At ZS, we begin with a rapid diagnosis of how work is actually performed, including the judgement that lives outside any documented procedure. We then build the data and context layer, on Microsoft Azure and Fabric, that gives agents governed access to policy, pricing and precedent; without it, no agent can make a decision that survives an audit. Only then do we redesign the workflow itself, around the persona accountable for the outcome rather than the department that inherited the task. Copilot then becomes the surface where the work happens, and people spend their time on judgement and on customers rather than on moving information between systems.
Neelabh Saxena
Principal, ZS
Read more like this, including news, interviews, case studies and insight from industry experts, in the Autumn 2026 issue of Technology Record. To get content like this on a regular basis, subscribe to the print edition or free digital edition of the quarterly Technology Record magazine.