76 VIEWPOINT Microsoft is at the forefront of the AI revolution, transforming industries with intelligent agents and predictive AI BRIAN BARNES: CORETEK Leading the shift to AI-augmented work Generative AI is no longer experimental – it’s embedded in workflows, customer experiences and decision-making processes. Rather than being a niche capability, it’s now a foundational layer of enterprise transformation. Microsoft’s own internal transformation, as documented in its 2025 AI Decision Brief, illustrates this shift. Over 4,000 Microsoft Copilot champions are driving adoption across the enterprise, supported by gamified learning programmes like Camp Copilot. AI is now a strategic necessity. Service providers are embedding AI into core offerings and using predictive analytics to shift from reactive to proactive operations. Enterprises are moving beyond proofs of concept to full-scale deployments, with AI driving measurable gains in efficiency, personalisation and risk mitigation. In the financial sector, agentic AI is already transforming operations. Banks and insurers are using these systems for hyper-personalised services, advanced risk modelling and intelligent automation. For example, Coretek assisted our customer in developing a prototype for a virtual chief financial officer solution designed to process financial account details and generate actionable insights in a natural language format. This integration improved customer engagement and accelerated decision-making, leading to increased reliability, scalability, enhanced security and cost reduction. Meanwhile, in the defence industrial base, our team worked on an AI solution to provide financial governance within Microsoft Azure, implement data security governance for AI and assist in deploying the first production AI workload that included HR Policy retrievalaugmented generation. This resulted in our customers gaining their first AI production case and security approval for further AI deployments. The next frontier is agentic AI, where systems not only respond to prompts but act autonomously, learn from outcomes and orchestrate complex workflows. These agents are evolving through four levels: reactive, proactive, adaptive and fully agentic systems. Microsoft’s experimental platform, Magentic-One, exemplifies this shift. It integrates with enterprise systems to automate workflows, provide real-time assistance and continuously improve through self-learning. Internally, Microsoft is preparing for this future by deploying agent builders in SharePoint and exploring agents that can act on behalf of employees. As AI agents become more of the primary interface for information retrieval, traditional search engine optimisation is rapidly losing relevance. Users are no longer typing keywords “Predictive AI stands out as the most likely candidate to achieve widespread, mainstream adoption in the near future”
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