Microsoft is genuinely differentiated by the breadth of the stack. We can bring a customer everything from Azure at the foundation, to Copilot, which I describe as the socket that carries the power of AI across every line of business, to Dynamics, to the security fabric that makes all of it safe to run. Very few companies can span that end to end, and in the AI era that integration matters enormously. Access to AI will not be the advantage for long, because in time everyone will have access. The advantage is trust, and it shows up as a persistent thought partner rather than a transactional one. Too often in our industry the vendor appears at renewal and disappears in between. Our job is to be present, proactive and useful all year round. That is how you earn the right to grow. Microsoft holds a strong position, but there is no room for complacency. We are deliberately raising both our technical and competitive intensity. We intend to compete with the urgency, focus and customer obsession this moment demands. What have you learned about Microsoft’s partner community in the past year, and how do you see the partner model evolving? The biggest thing I have learned, or really re-learned, is that the ecosystem is the multiplier. No single company, not even one of Microsoft’s size, delivers transformation on its own. Our partners bring industry expertise, implementation experience, specialised capabilities and a level of customer intimacy that extends our reach far beyond what we could achieve on our own. Having spent most of my career at SAP, which is one of Microsoft’s most important partners, I’ve seen first-hand how interconnected these ecosystems really are. I’ve learnt that the strongest partnerships are built on trust and mutual success. Technology shifts, market conditions change and strategies evolve, but relationships endure when there is a genuine commitment to creating value together. I often tell our teams to make the tent as big as possible. The more inclusive the ecosystem, the stronger it becomes. We’re now entering one of the most interesting periods in the history of partner-led innovation. Agentic AI is changing the dynamic in real time. Partners are no longer simply helping customers deploy technology; they are building their own intellectual property, creating industry-specific agents and co-innovating with us on the platform itself. That moves the relationship from implementation to innovation. That’s where the greatest opportunity lies. The winners will be the companies that bring together the right ecosystem of capabilities to solve customer problems faster and create business outcomes that none of us could deliver alone. What best-practice models do you recommend for business leaders struggling to navigate their AI journey? First, demystify it. Many leaders freeze because they assume they need to be technical to lead on AI. They do not. At its heart, AI is about rethinking and reimagining how work gets done, and that is a leadership exercise, not an engineering one. Some of the best AI leaders I meet could not write a line of code. Second, start with the business outcome, not the technology. Choose a high-value problem and be ruthless about the metric: how does the needle move? I push my own teams hard on this. It is not especially interesting to say that 12,000 people now use a tool; what is interesting is the outcome those people produced. Anchor every initiative to a number the business genuinely cares about. Third – and this separates the leaders from the laggards – redesign the work rather than 41 “ I’ve learnt that the strongest partnerships are built on trust and mutual success” EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
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