Throughout this past fiscal year, customers across every industry and segment moved from AI experimentation to deploying AI for real-world business outcomes. They unlocked innovation and created new opportunities for growth. We saw the emergence of Frontier Firms as they moved beyond efficiency gains to focus on human ambition and embed AI at the core of how they operate. Successful customers are building an intelligence platform so their unique IQ — their knowledge, data, workflows, applications and expertise — can continuously compound, ensuring the value of AI accrues to the customer, not the model. They have a trust platform that is pervasive, with the ability to manage, govern, secure and measure AI across every business process.

Everything we are doing at Microsoft is empowering Frontier Transformation: Copilot enables AI in the flow of human ambition, Microsoft IQ amplifies and protects an organization’s IQ and Agent 365 is the trust platform that enables observability at every layer of the stack.

Businesses are not static, and neither are the AI systems that support them. As organizations evolve, AI systems must continuously learn and improve. Agentic workflows need to be built, observed and tuned against the outcomes organizations seek and the ROI they demand. Microsoft’s open, model-diverse and heterogenous platform powers that improvement loop. We also recently announced Microsoft Frontier Company, bringing our AI engineering approach to customers around the world to help them build these AI systems to accelerate measurable business outcomes.

Throughout the past year, we saw customers put these capabilities to work in powerful ways — embedding AI into core business processes, building agentic systems, strengthening security, accelerating innovation and creating new sources of value. The stories below highlight organizations leading Frontier Transformation, demonstrating how intelligence, trust and human ambition come together across industries.

To advance its journey to become a global AI-powered company, Atos Group deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to 56,000 employees across 54 countries — from consultants to engineers to frontline workers — and was one of the first organizations globally to adopt Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite. Using Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Copilot Studio and Agent 365, Atos is building, operating and governing a growing ecosystem of 19,000 AI agents through a unified operating model that brings together productivity, security, compliance and agent governance. As Atos embeds secure agentic AI across its workforce, the company is creating a repeatable model to continuously improve thousands of agents at scale while applying the same playbook to help customers accelerate adoption across highly regulated industries.

Facing state-sponsored threats and complex global operations, ASM is strengthening cyber resilience with Microsoft Security Copilot, helping protect the intellectual property behind advanced semiconductor manufacturing. By bringing threat investigations into a unified AI-powered experience, ASM enables analysts to investigate incidents faster, apply consistent decision-making across global operations and accelerate the development of cybersecurity talent. The company reduced incident triage time by 68%, cut laptop compromise investigations from 25 minutes to eight and now saves 337 hours each week on investigations while redeploying 20% of its security operations staff to governance, risk and compliance initiatives.

Banco Popular Dominicano, the largest private-sector bank in the Dominican Republic, transformed operational risk management from periodic, sample-based reviews into continuous, AI-powered supervision. Using AURA — an ecosystem of specialized agents built on Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Power Platform — the bank monitors 100% of its operational risk universe in real time, up from roughly 40% coverage, and can automatically analyze changes, validate controls and surface issues as they occur. The shift has delivered seven times greater analytical capacity, reduced manual operating effort by 70%, achieved 98% methodological accuracy and enabled continuous processing of approximately 80,000 documents per week and more than 300 cases per day. Just as importantly, risk teams have moved from reacting to problems after the fact to anticipating and preventing deviations before they occur. These results demonstrate the power of AI democratization. By enabling business teams to build intelligent solutions themselves through low-code tools, Banco Popular transformed operational risk management while fostering a culture of innovation led by domain experts.

To help reduce the manual burden for employees while meeting the pharmaceutical industry’s strict data security requirements, Cactus Life Sciences modernized scientific workflows with Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. The company has deployed more than 30 custom automation agents to streamline document review and structure data extraction and information retrieval across scientific writing and project management teams. Supported by a centralized knowledge repository and the Copilot Champions community, the company reports efficiency improvements of approximately 35% to 50% in structured data extraction. By automating labor-intensive tasks and maintaining human review and quality controls, the company is enabling scientific writers to focus on deeper analysis, synthesis and delivering exceptional science to clients.

Chow Tai Fook is redefining luxury retail with Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Foundry. The company has deployed over 400 customized AI agents supporting more than 24,000 employees, with millions of AI interactions each month and core business-process efficiency gains exceeding 70%. Through its AI Fook super-agent ecosystem, frontline associates can instantly access product expertise, inventory insights and personalized recommendations, helping drive sales conversion improvements of up to 57% while delivering hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences at scale. With hundreds of AI agents operating across the business, Chow Tai Fook is creating a foundation where customer, product and operational intelligence can be applied across every interaction, helping personalize experiences and improve decision-making across its global retail network.

To accelerate AI adoption, EY moved AI from experimentation into enterprise-wide transformation. After deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to 150,000 employees and realizing a 15% productivity gain, the firm is expanding the Microsoft 365 Frontier Suite across its global workforce of more than 400,000 people, embedding agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise. As Client Zero, EY is applying Microsoft technologies across its own operations, including Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Fabric. The results include 95% faster lead times, a more than 37% reduction in finance operating costs and up to a 90% reduction in manual workloads across key business processes.

To reimagine the grocery shopping experience, Grandiose Supermarkets created an AI-powered shopping companion — GrandChef — built on Microsoft Foundry and Azure OpenAI Service. By connecting meal inspiration, recipe discovery and product purchasing into a single experience grounded in live product and inventory data, GrandChef helps shoppers move from intent to purchase faster and with greater confidence. This has led to a 31% increase in conversion, a 20% lift in average basket value and shopping journeys that are 40% faster. Together, these gains are helping Grandiose Supermarkets create more personalized customer experiences while driving measurable business growth. By connecting customer intent, product data and purchasing decisions in a single experience, Grandiose is creating a feedback loop that helps continuously improve recommendations and shopping experiences.

To support audits across its global organization, Grupo Bimbo built two agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio and deployed them through Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams: the result was Audit Assist, an idea generated from a Microsoft-supported internal hackathon and Comatrix. By connecting auditors directly to approved guidance, procedures and templates in SharePoint, the company is helping teams work more efficiently across 39 countries while improving consistency and audit quality. The solution/AI agents reduced planning-phase audit time by 20% and accelerated risk and control matrix creation from days to seconds, enabling auditors to spend less time searching for information and more time on analysis and decision-making. By making approved audit knowledge instantly accessible across its global audit organization, Grupo Bimbo is creating a foundation where expertise can scale with the business — improving consistency, reducing rework and enabling auditors to focus on higher-value analysis and decision-making.

To create a unified foundation for data, automation and AI across its operations in 47 countries, Navien built a connected, intelligent operating model with Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. By connecting fragmented data and processes across procurement, manufacturing, quality and customer service, the company is enabling more consistent, data-driven decision-making across its operations. Navien saved 28,000 hours annually through AI agents and automation, with 32% of employees using self-service analytics to make decisions without IT support. Through its migration to Azure, it also expects more than 1.4 million in total cost-of-ownership savings over five years. By connecting data, insights and workflows across the business, Navien is enabling faster, more consistent decision-making at scale across its global operations.

NHS England is accelerating AI adoption across the healthcare system with the largest implementation of its kind in the healthcare sector. Following a trial involving 30,000 workers across 90 NHS organizations — where users saved an average of 43 minutes of administrative time per day — NHS England is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to over 500,000 clinicians and support staff. Organizations can use Microsoft Copilot Studio to build and deploy AI agents that streamline clinical, operational and administrative workflows. Through Agent 365, NHS England can govern and scale those agents across the healthcare system while enabling individual trusts to build solutions for local needs — creating a secure framework where agentic workflows can be deployed, managed and expanded consistently to improve service delivery, reduce costs and create more time for patient care.

Novo Nordisk is using AI to help researchers make faster, more quantitative decisions in pharmaceutical R&D. Working with Microsoft’s AI Acceleration Studio within the Forward Deployed Engineering team, the company built a governed reasoning agent on Microsoft Azure with its proprietary dataset, including more than 200,000 patient-years of harmonized clinical trial data, while maintaining rigor, oversight and compliance. The system has expanded the team’s capacity to evaluate potential opportunities from 5 to 10 strong ideas per quarter to more than 50, and the company expects it to reduce time to insight for exploratory analyses from weeks to minutes. By grounding AI in its datasets and governed workflows, Novo Nordisk is helping scientists turn decades of institutional expertise into a reusable intelligence layer that can help accelerate discovery across the organization.

As AI becomes part of investment decision-making, SimCorp is helping financial institutions bring AI into investment workflows without compromising governance, auditability or control. By unifying SimCorp One on Microsoft Azure and leveraging Microsoft Foundry, the company is helping portfolio managers, risk analysts and operations teams access insights faster, automate manual processes and spend more time on higher-value decisions. By standardizing how AI is deployed and governed across global investment operations, SimCorp is creating a foundation for trusted AI at scale, helping organizations embed AI into investment workflows while maintaining the controls required in highly regulated markets. One study found SimCorp One customers realized 134% ROI over three years, improved operational efficiency by 45 percent, saved 10 hours per person per week and accelerated time to market by 50 to 60 days.

Stellantis is accelerating AI-led strategy and digital transformation across its global business, co-developing more than 100 AI initiatives across sales, customer care, product development and operations. By applying AI-powered insights across the business, the automaker is streamlining product development and validation, advancing predictive maintenance and bringing new digital features and services to market faster for customers. Stellantis is also deploying an AI-driven global cyberdefense center to help protect vehicles, customers and operations worldwide while modernizing its infrastructure on Microsoft Azure with a targeted 60% reduction in its datacenter footprint by 2029, powering a more scalable and interconnected digital ecosystem for future digital and connected services and resilient operations.

Facing a growing volume of cyberthreats across a complex healthcare environment, St. Luke’s University Health Network is using Microsoft Security Copilot to help protect the systems clinicians and patients depend on every day. Across 15 campuses, 300 outpatient sites and more than 2.5 petabytes of data and patient records, the organization needed a unified view of threats across a complex environment. Security Copilot connects Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview and other security tools, helping analysts correlate threats faster, eliminate silos and respond with greater precision. St. Luke’s is saving nearly 200 hours each month in phishing alert triage and creating incident reports in minutes instead of hours, helping security teams focus more time on protecting patient care.

University of Kentucky unified more than 150 AI initiatives across classrooms, research labs, healthcare settings and administrative offices through its CATS AI governance framework. Standardizing on Microsoft’s AI portfolio — including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Dragon Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Azure — the university achieved campus-wide deployment, providing more than 70,000 students and employees with access to AI capabilities. Clinicians are using Dragon Copilot to reduce documentation burdens and spend more time with patients, and students are using GitHub Copilot to become active builders of digital solutions, such as the Socratic Tutor: an AI-powered learning platform aimed at helping medical students master complex curriculum.

Looking back on FY26, I am inspired not only by the continued pace of AI innovation, but by what our customers are achieving. Across every industry and segment, organizations are turning their unique IQ into strategic advantage with continuously improving agentic workflows. The companies leading this next phase are building, observing and tuning agentic workflows against business outcomes. Intelligence compounds, trust scales and AI can work in the flow of human ambition. As Frontier Firms redefine what is possible with AI, we remain focused on helping our customers amplify and protect their intelligence so they can transform how they operate, compete and grow.

Judson Althoff is the chief executive officer of the commercial business at Microsoft. He is responsible for the product strategy, sales, services, support, marketing, operations and revenue growth of the company’s commercial business, which operates in more than 120 regional and national subsidiaries globally.

The post Looking back on Microsoft’s FY26: From AI experimentation to Frontier Transformation appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

The pace of AI adoption is moving incredibly fast. Customers have moved well beyond experimentation and understand the importance of adopting AI to transform their business. They are now concentrating on delivering measurable business outcomes and demonstrating a return on their AI investments, while ensuring their intelligence is amplified and their IP is protected.

Today we are introducing Microsoft Frontier Company, a new operating business focused on delivering Frontier Transformation through AI for our customers around the world. It will provide a unique combination of skills inclusive of deep industry knowledge, change management and continuous improvement experience, and enterprise-grade AI engineering expertise. This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry. We are making a $2.5B investment in Microsoft Frontier Company, embedding 6,000 industry and engineering experts at customers to co-design, co-innovate, deploy and continuously improve AI systems at scale based on measurable business outcomes.

I recently wrote more about my conviction that Intelligence + Trust are the two most important components of any AI solution and how our customers can use different levers to manage cost.

Companies need to establish an intelligence platform so their unique IQ — their proprietary data, expertise, workflows and decision-making processes — compounds over time from within, using their choice of models to build AI solutions and workflows.

They need a trusted platform that allows them to observe, govern, manage and secure AI solutions across every layer of the technology stack, using FinOps to assess their ROI.

Enterprise AI engineering expertise with deep industry knowledge is required to build a system that acts as a continuous loop of improvement between the two platforms to fine tune agentic business processes, ensuring that a customer’s intelligence compounds over time and delivers real business outcomes.

This is what Microsoft Frontier Company was built to do: focus on end-to-end Frontier Transformation, enabling customers to amplify their IQ with AI while refining their differentiated value in the markets that they serve.

Early results demonstrate meaningful impact: Our engineers and industry experts partnered with LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) to embed AI into LSEG Workspace, helping finance professionals ask complex questions and get quick answers across structured and unstructured financial content. The solution is underpinned by a foundation that is iteratively refined through client feedback and real-time user testing that accelerates each cycle and steadily improves model quality and scope. From LSEG to Land O’Lakes to Unilever to Novo Nordisk, our differentiated approach is already delivering measurable outcomes on our customers’ Frontier Transformation journeys.

To achieve scale, we will work closely with our partner ecosystem to extend this unique value to our customers across all markets and segments globally. We have robust FDE partnerships with our Global SI partners, including Accenture, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, PwC and others.

Central to this approach is a principle that is non-negotiable: a customer’s IQ is protected. Their data, their IP, their competitive advantage — none of it is used to train models in ways that commoditize what differentiates them in their industry. Satya put it clearly recently: there is no societal permission for an AI future that eats the intelligence of the companies it’s deployed inside. We built Microsoft Frontier Company to make sure that does not happen.

We protect that intelligence with a model-diverse, open, heterogeneous AI platform. Customers shouldn’t be locked into a single model any more than they should be locked into a single technology vendor. Microsoft’s platform gives organizations the flexibility to run the right model for each scenario — whether it comes from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, open source or a specialized model tuned for a specific industry — without ceding control to any one of them.

To lead this new organization, I have asked Rodrigo Kede Lima to be the President of Microsoft Frontier Company. Rodrigo brings 30 years of industry experience, and for the past six at Microsoft has led enterprise-wide transformations as a sales leader in the Americas and Asia. He has been at the forefront of helping customers and partners translate technology shifts into business outcomes, and understanding how platform innovation, engineering and partner ecosystem collaboration come together to drive growth.

I am excited about all the things that Microsoft Frontier Company will do for our customers to realize the gains of Frontier Transformation. At the end of the day, it comes down to Intelligence + Trust and empowering our customers to achieve meaningful outcomes and a return on their investments.

Learn more at www.microsoft.com/en-us/frontier-company.

Judson Althoff is the chief executive officer of Microsoft Commercial Business. He is responsible for the product strategy, sales, services, support, marketing, operations and revenue growth of the company’s commercial business, which operates in more than 120 regional and national subsidiaries globally.

The post Microsoft Frontier Company: AI engineering that amplifies and protects your intelligence appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

The two most important elements in any AI solution are Intelligence + Trust. I first made this statement in November at our Ignite conference and my conviction is strengthened by every conversation I have with customers. Through my travels, three consistent topics are being raised when considering the adoption of AI solutions:

1. Will AI amplify the intelligence of my organization and the attributes that make my company unique within its industry to grow my business; or will it use my intelligence for its own benefit, learning from my most important business flows and leveraging my intellectual property?
2. Can I trust that the outcomes are providing durable return on investment and that these solutions are running within the confines of my governance and security standards?
3. How do I get the visibility, control, flexibility and business model innovation needed to manage the costs associated with AI and maximize value?

I consistently advise customers that they need to build their own IQ on a platform of intelligence that is model-diverse, open and heterogeneous at every layer of the stack. Models are commoditizing. No company should be dependent upon any one model or any one model’s harness. Over the weekend, Satya warned of a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see. AI that is intended for growth should amplify the intelligence of an organization so that it compounds from within.

Companies also need an observability platform that provides governance, management, security and Financial Operations (FinOps) to ensure the ROI with AI. This enables AI to be trusted within the environment over which it reasons and puts the business in control of the outcomes.

Intelligence + Trust is embedded across Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Copilot Studio, where model diversity aligns cost and performance to each task. Microsoft IQ optimizes workflows, so context is routed efficiently and reduces unnecessary compute. Agent 365 is the control plane to observe, govern, manage and secure agents. We have built a system to manage AI spend as a core enterprise capability, not an afterthought. It is delivered across clouds and model providers without locking customers into a single approach.

Managing costs at scale

As agent usage scales, organizations need a clear set of levers to manage cost:

Model diversity. Any given inferencing model, model harness or agentic loop on its own does not help build out an organization’s IQ in ways that compound its intelligence. Both Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot are model-diverse by design without locking customers into a single provider. Different models — like GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 4.8 — serve distinct roles with different economics. Matching the right intelligence to each task optimizes performance and cost.

Your IQ. Agents struggle with raw data. Significant compute is spent interpreting structure and context before useful work begins. The Microsoft IQ platform empowers your IQ by turning raw data into usable intelligence, continuously building a semantic understanding of how your organization operates across Microsoft 365 and line-of-business systems. It provides agents with the context they need upfront rather than requiring them to reconstruct it. The result is measurable: faster execution, higher accuracy and lower token usage. This is how intelligence compounds within your organization.

Financial operations. FinOps became critical when companies moved to the cloud and requires even greater attention as AI shifts from fixed pricing to usage-driven models. With Foundry and Agent 365, we are providing tools to help our customers optimize their AI costs today.

Frontier business models

Business models are evolving as we use AI to drive business outcomes. The User Subscription License (USL) has become the foundation, providing a package of capabilities for a predictable per-user-per-month fee. Usage-based licensing has emerged for long-running, multi-tasking agents, where cost aligns directly to the work performed.

Microsoft gives customers a unique combination of business model flexibility and integrated product experiences that is unmatched in the market. Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot use both models — a USL offering with not only value and capabilities, but flexible consumption on top. Today we’re announcing the general availability of Copilot Cowork worldwide, which requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot USL and is then usage-based.

Our model-diverse strategy allows customers to purchase capacity with the flexibility to use the right model for the job based on model strengths, economics and the latest innovations. Microsoft Agent Factory provides a single consumption model spanning Microsoft 365 Copilot (including Cowork), GitHub Copilot and agents built in Fabric, Foundry and Copilot Studio.

Our integrated product experiences put AI in the flow of work for both knowledge workers and software developers and manage capacity fluidly across the two. Historically these personas have been distinct, but increasingly the line between them is blurring. Coding is becoming a mainstream knowledge worker skill and chat and Cowork are becoming modalities important for software development. With Microsoft 365 and GitHub, we offer market-leading tools for both roles and make it easy to seamlessly manage capacity based on availability and need.

Agent 365: The control plane

As organizations adopt agents from Microsoft, another provider or build their own, a control plane is essential. Agent 365 gives IT and security leaders a single place to observe, govern, manage and secure agents across the organization. It builds on the Microsoft stack that enterprises trust: Entra for identity, Defender for threat protection, Purview for data governance and Intune for endpoint management. We are extending Agent 365 to include cost management, so organizations can monitor and manage agent spend alongside security and compliance. As the Frontier Firm operating model takes hold, leaders will manage human and agentic work as a single system, with visibility into both performance and cost.

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The two most essential elements in any AI solution are Intelligence + Trust. At Microsoft, this conviction shapes how we design every layer of our AI platform. Microsoft IQ enables organizations to harness their own unique IQ, bringing context to data and embedding AI directly into the flow of work to deliver faster, more accurate and more trusted outcomes while safeguarding assets and protecting intellectual property. Agent 365 provides that trust layer, ensuring every agent and AI artifact is observed across the environment so organizations can move decisively from experimentation to enterprise impact with confidence. As Jay Parikh put it at Build, AI alone will not change your business. The system running it will.

We have built this system for our customers and partners, where intelligence compounds from within and every agent operates with control, visibility and trust. Together, we can scale human ambition and define how AI delivers measurable business impact across every role, organization and industry.

Judson Althoff is the chief executive officer of the commercial business at Microsoft. He is responsible for the product strategy, sales, services, support, marketing, operations and revenue growth of the company’s commercial business, which operates in more than 120 regional and national subsidiaries globally.

The post Achieving success with AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

As our customers progress toward becoming Frontier Firms, they are using AI not only to optimize how work gets done, but to reinvent their business on the promise of growth. Organizations can now unlock creativity, accelerate innovation and democratize intelligence by bringing Copilots and agents directly into the tools people love and use every day. As adoption continues to scale, business value is no longer measured solely by time saved or productivity gained, but in how effectively organizations translate their unique IQ into decisions that drive measurable impact across core business processes.

The two most important elements in any AI solution are Intelligence + Trust. At Microsoft, we are focused on providing a platform for both through Microsoft IQ and Agent 365, respectively, so customers can harness the power of AI, have it amplify their unique differentiation and do so in a model diverse, open and heterogeneous manner. Microsoft IQ brings context to your data and provides faster, more accurate, more trusted experiences across modalities of chat, artifact creation and augmentation, and agent development; all while safeguarding your assets and protecting your intellectual property. Agent 365 provides observability, governance and security across all the agents you build — whether on Microsoft’s platform or third-party environments — so you can trust the outcomes you achieve with AI and ensure ROI for the same.

With intelligence embedded into daily work, organizations are activating human ambition — engaging customers more effectively, reshaping business processes and accelerating innovation without adding operational complexity — turning gains into competitive advantage. Trust makes this durable, allowing organizations to scale securely with AI. The shift to becoming Frontier can be seen in our recent partnerships, with BMW Group selecting Microsoft for its large-scale deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot across its global workforce and Accenture rolling out Copilot to more than 740,000 employees.

Frontier Transformation — built on a foundation of Intelligence + Trust — is how organizations are enabling AI for growth; moving from aspiration to outcome with confidence, driving measurable business gains and maintaining the rigor required to operate AI responsibly. Across industries, our customers and partners are putting AI to work to reveal new sources of innovation and business value. I am pleased to highlight additional stories from this past quarter.

With millions of customer queries overwhelming its support channels, Air India was facing rising costs, slower response times and growing frustration for customers and employees. Within six months, internal development teams built an agentic AI solution using Azure OpenAI and in Foundry models. AI.g handles 40,000 customer queries daily and since launching has saved the company millions of dollars. The agent has resolved more than 13 million conversations with a 97% success rate, allowing employees to focus on contributing at a higher level — solving complex cases that require nuanced human judgement and problem-solving skills. Air India is the first airline worldwide to deploy generative AI for customer service at scale.

As the second largest school district in Florida, Broward County Public Schools serve approximately 235,000 students across 235 schools and 25,000 employees. Although the district had extensive data, it lacked the real-time insights required to support its students — while simultaneously facing a $90-million budget shortfall. Rather than slowing innovation, the district used financial pressure as a catalyst to modernize systems and rethink how work was done. By deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot, educators and staff reclaimed six to seven hours weekly — time redirected to students for direct interaction, coaching and feedback. The district also equipped students with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Copilot Studio to provide faster access to learning resources and foster more equitable learning — providing support for students with disabilities, English language learners and those needing additional academic assistance. The district’s adoption of Copilot — the largest K-12 deployment globally — is also expected to generate $40 to $50 million in savings over five years.

Cemex is one of the world’s largest building materials companies, operating more than 50 cement plants and over 1,000 ready mix plants across four continents. To accelerate execution at scale, Cemex built LUCA Bot — an AI agent built in Microsoft Foundry with Azure OpenAI — giving approximately 100 senior business leaders visibility into company-wide performance across more than 120 KPIs. The self-service tool processes 400 to 500 queries per month with high accuracy, delivering real-time, conversational insights across global sales, plant operations and financial performance. By compressing decision cycles from days to seconds, the company shifted from reactive to real-time decision-making — allowing leaders to recognize demand signals faster, improve operational efficiency and drive business outcomes across its multi-billion-dollar enterprise.

Cybersecurity startup ContraForce is democratizing enterprise-grade protection for managed service providers by operationalizing Microsoft’s security — Microsoft Sentinel, Defender XDR, Entra ID and Azure OpenAI in Foundry models — into a turnkey, AI-driven platform. Built for environments where traditional tools were too complex and costly for most providers to operate efficiently, the solution automates more than 90% of incident response, reducing cost per incident and enabling 24/7 protection. Providers can onboard more customers, deliver higher-quality security services and scale operations without adding headcount — transforming security delivery into a growth engine. Analysts can manage significantly more volume with incidents resolving in minutes and teams freed to focus on more strategic advisory work.

As global professional services firm KPMG expanded its Digital Gateway platform to support secure, global engagement with clients and professionals, its data environment grew increasingly fragmented and complex — spanning multiple tools and systems that slowed collaboration and increased operational effort. The company established Microsoft Fabric as its strategic data platform; unifying its data engineering, storage, analytics, reporting and global security policies into a single, trusted environment and pacing adoption as it matured in enterprise governance. Client data onboarding times were 87% faster — from sixteen hours to two — and operational IT efforts were reduced by 25%. With a governed, real-time data foundation, KPMG is accelerating insights; enabling faster, more confident decisions and freeing teams to provide consistent, high-quality client value delivery across global engagements.

To democratize AI across its digital workplace, Mercedes-Benz is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot company-wide — one of the largest, most comprehensive industry deployments in European industry. Moving beyond selective use of AI, the company is integrating it systematically into day-to-day work, supporting decision-making and core operational processes while reducing complexity. By placing secure, enterprise-grade AI in the hands of employees across functions, Mercedes-Benz is enabling faster execution, lowering operating costs and driving more consistent performance across its global business. Copilot is also helping teams strengthen decision quality at scale, enabling them to respond more precisely and compete more effectively in dynamic markets.

As one of the world’s busiest rail operators, MTR manages high‑volume, complex transit operations with strict service and reliability expectations. To simplify complex administrative workloads and accelerate decision‑making, MTR deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot alongside Power Platform, embedding role‑based copilots and low‑code workflows across drafting, summarization and analysis. The result reduced manual effort, shortened turnaround times and improved operational consistency across its network. To improve passenger services, the company also launched AI Tracy — a personalized assistant built on Microsoft Azure that provides real-time guidance on ticketing, station facilities and local amenities. With AI embedded into everyday workflows and passenger services, MTR is extending consistent, real-time service across its network and expanding what teams can achieve and execute with AI.

PepsiCo operates one of the world’s largest consumer goods enterprises, with 320,000 employees across more than 200 countries. The company faced a fragmented technology landscape, with disparate collaboration and tools that slowed coordination. This limited PepsiCo’s ability to grow its business, so the company standardized on Microsoft Teams and deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to create a unified, secure foundation to innovate with AI. With Teams and Copilot seamlessly embedded into the tools employees use every day, PepsiCo is improving how work gets done. With 90% to 95% daily Copilot usage, AI is embedded in everyday work — creating a more connected environment that fosters collaboration and reduces friction, saving employees hours each day and freeing up time for them to focus on higher-impact work.

Global real estate developer Tata Realty manages a diverse portfolio spanning residential, commercial, mixed-use and infrastructure in Southeast Asia. As the business grew, fragmented data across finance, operations, engineering, safety and HR made it difficult to generate insights — slowing decision-making, increasing costs and introducing operational risk. By adopting Microsoft Fabric as a unified, governed data platform, the company consolidated engineering, warehousing and reporting into a single environment. This move helped reduce data processing time by 20% and lower annual analytics costs by 20% to 30%. With real-time, cross-functional insights now embedded in core workflows, teams are making faster, more informed decisions and operating with greater speed, consistency and control across the business.

Tru Cooperative Bank (formerly First West Credit Union) serves more than 250,000 members with complex financial products and high service expectations. By deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, the organization reduced administrative effort and accelerated service delivery, reaching 93% employee adoption and 90% weekly usage. With AI embedded in daily workflows, employees can instantly access and bring together member context, policies and procedures — enabling faster decision cycles and more proactive, personalized guidance. By automating routine work, teams are creating space to focus on higher-value client conversations that deepen relationships, advance financial outcomes and drive member growth — with human ambition at the center of every interaction. At the same time, moving from reactive work to real-time, insight-driven engagement is strengthening member trust and scaling consistent, high-quality delivery across the organization.

Frontier Transformation is changing how organizations operate, compete and grow. By embedding intelligence into the flow of work and grounding it in enterprise‑grade trust, businesses are operating with greater precision and expanding what their teams can achieve at global scale. With an open, model-diverse and secure platform, Microsoft enables organizations to unlock human ambition and leverage AI for growth — transforming their unique IQ into decisions and actions that drive measurable business outcomes. We are grateful for the continued trust of our customers and partners. Together, we are shaping how every organization can lead with AI.

Judson Althoff is the chief executive officer of the commercial business at Microsoft. He is responsible for the product strategy, sales, services, support, marketing, operations and revenue growth of the company’s commercial business, which operates in more than 120 regional and national subsidiaries globally.

The post Unlocking human ambition to drive business growth with AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Today Microsoft is announcing:

• Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Expanded model diversity with Claude and next-gen OpenAI models available today
• General availability of Agent 365 on May 1 for $15 per user
• General availability of the new Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite on May 1 for $99 per user¹

Frontier Transformation is a holistic reimagining of business, aligning AI with human ambition to achieve an organization’s highest aspirations. It is the next evolution of AI Transformation — not only do we need to deliver efficiency and productivity, but we need to democratize intelligence and do more for humanity. Companies do not want or need more AI experimentation. They need AI that delivers real business outcomes and growth.

In my daily conversations with customers and partners, they typically question what the most important components of an AI solution are. Is it the model? Is it silicon? At Microsoft, we believe the two most essential elements of Frontier Transformation are Intelligence + Trust. Organizations need to harness their own unique work intelligence as they build agents and solutions and all AI artifacts across their technology stack must be observed, managed and secured to ensure they are delivering value responsibly. 

Intelligence that shows up in real work 

I often say that zero-shot artifact creation is nothing more than a parlor trick. Models can reason over data, produce draft documents, presentations and spreadsheets, but they do not understand work. Real differentiation comes from intelligence — deep work context, embedded in the tools people already use. AI should amplify your intelligence but do so in a manner that protects your differentiation and unique value.

Work IQ amplifies an individual’s IQ by tapping into your organization’s IQ. It is the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to know how you work, with whom you work and the content upon which you collaborate. That is why Copilot is faster, more accurate and more trusted than solutions built on models and connectors alone.

This month, we are unleashing Work IQ with our next generation of agentic experiences in Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Employees will have an enhanced chat experience in Copilot with the ability to create and augment artifacts, and the power to build their own agents within the canvas they work in every day.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is model diverse by design. Rather than betting on a single model, we built a system that makes every model useful at work. Customers get the choice, performance and flexibility in an open, heterogenous environment.  Copilot leverages leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic, operating openly across clouds and data services without locking customers in. Claude is now available in mainline chat in Copilot via the Frontier program, alongside the latest generation of OpenAI models.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 3 is not just a singular release of new capabilities but rather a commitment to continuous innovation. We will bring frontier capabilities with enterprise promises for our customers in an open and model diverse manner. Another great example of this is Copilot Cowork, which is in research preview. Built in close collaboration with Anthropic, we are bringing the technology that powers Claude Cowork into Microsoft 365 Copilot to enable long-running, multi-step work that unfolds over time.  Learn about our Wave 3 news.

These announcements come as our customers across industries are already seeing the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft recently delivered its strongest quarter yet with Copilot, with paid seats growing more than 160% year over year and daily active usage up ten times, as customers increasingly make Copilot a core part of everyday work. Expansion is also accelerating as the number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale — more than 35,000 seats — tripled year over year. Just last week, Mercedes Benz announced a global rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot, following recent investments from NASA, Fiserv, ING, the University of Kentucky, the University of Manchester, the U.S. Department of the Interior and Westpac. This is in addition to the 90 percent of the Fortune 500 who now use Copilot.

Trust: from agent experimentation and sprawl to enterprise control 

The speed of agent development and proliferation tells us customers see value, but without guardrails the pace of adoption turns into blind spots, diminished ROI and real security risk. As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, trust is nonnegotiable. IDC predicts 1.3B agents in circulation by 2028, and 80% of the Fortune 500 are already using Microsoft agents, led by operationally complex industries like manufacturing, financial services and retail.

That is why I am excited to announce the May 1 general availability of Microsoft Agent 365, the control-plane for AI agents. Priced at $15 per user, Agent 365 gives IT and security leaders a single place to observe, govern, manage and secure agents across the organization — using the same infrastructure, applications and protections they rely on to manage people today.

We are seeing tremendous momentum with our preview customers. In just two months, tens of millions of agents have appeared in the Agent 365 Registry. We have tens of thousands of customers that are already adopting Agent 365 to securely govern and scale AI agents across enterprise workflows.

At Microsoft, we are also using Agent 365 as Customer Zero and the early signals are clear. We now have visibility into more than 500,000 agents across the company with the most widely used focused on research, coding, sales intelligence, customer triage and HR self-service. That adoption is translating into real work. Over the past 28 days alone, agents have been generating more than 65,000 responses every day for employees. This is evidence that we are not simply experimenting, we are embedding agents in the flow of everyday work and empowering human ambition.

Introducing the Frontier Suite

To meet this demand, I am thrilled to announce we are bringing Intelligence + Trust together with Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite. Microsoft 365 E7 unifies Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 into a single solution powered by Work IQ and integrated with the apps and security stack customers already rely on. It includes Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced Defender, Intune and Purview security capabilities, delivering comprehensive protection across agents and employees.

Customers have told us E5 alone is no longer enough; they do not want multiple tools stitched together, they want one trusted solution. At $99 per user, E7 is priced below purchasing these capabilities à la carte, giving customers a simpler, more cost-effective way to deploy enterprise AI at scale.

With the general availability of Agent 365 and the latest agentic experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot offered as one Frontier suite, AI moves from experimentation to durable, enterprise-wide value, built on a foundation of Intelligence + Trust. This is how we make Frontier Transformation real. Microsoft is not just imagining the future of AI, we are empowering organizations across industries and around the world to build it.

¹Microsoft 365 E7 is available with and without Teams.

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