As Australia looked to extend its winning streak to four straight Ashes on home soil, it was clear that left-handed batter Travis Head was leading the way for Australia as the runs piled up. But just how good was his performance? Fans using the Cricket Australia Live app had an instant answer. 

Thanks to the app’s new AI Insights feature, which provides live insights on player milestones, records and key moments using OpenAI’s GPT-5 within Microsoft Foundry, cricket aficionados and newcomers can now access much-needed context to better engage with the game. They can also dig deeper by asking follow-up questions about the insights provided. It’s an exciting development for Cricket Australia, the governing body of the sport in the country. 

“The recent series where England were here in Australia had a couple of key moments where I saw the insights come to life in real-time,” says Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg. “And you can see the engagement through the analytics and the tracking that when something is delivered in the right time frame, in the right format, into the right hands, it has a huge effect.” 

Indeed, AI Insights showed that Head’s 172 runs for the match were his fifth-highest aggregate total in a test. His only higher efforts were 220 runs against Sri Lanka, 213 against West Indies, 181 against India and 180 against England. Head’s big day earned him Player of the Match honors and helped Australia claim a five-wicket victory in the match and a 4-1 Ashes series victory against its archrivals. 

Going beyond the box score 

“Scores and highlights tell you what happened. But the context tells you why you should care about it,” says Balamurugan P M, chief technology and digital officer at Cricket Australia. 

“It comes down to the storytelling. From my perspective, I thought it was essential for fans to learn more about the story rather than just following the scores or watching highlights. So, we wanted to give a different experience.” 

Cricket Australia had a corker in its arsenal as AI Insights came into focus – an extensive archive of official scorecards that dates to 1886, providing a wealth of historical data that could bridge the gap between the past and present. Those scorecards were carefully integrated over a period of three months to ensure the information would pass muster among the serious cricket experts. 

“We had hundreds of years of data, and when it comes to fans, trust is non-negotiable,” Balamurugan says. “When you’re dealing with records and milestones, you can’t make mistakes. There are some hardcore fans who know these stats like the back of their hand. History is core to cricket’s identity. And instant context turns a scoreboard into a story. 

“Getting that volume of data, integrating it and surfacing greater context for live games required huge data alignment and validation. With our systems and with the skilled team that we’ve got, that was made possible.” 

Creating a solution fans can use in real time 

Cricket Australia joined forces with Microsoft, alongside technical partners Insight Enterprises, HCL Tech and Skewer, to create the new iteration of the app. With the important Ashes and T20 international tournaments on the horizon, time was of the essence to launch the app before the bats were raised on those key fixtures. 

The app is anchored by Microsoft Azure, the cloud foundation that Cricket Australia uses to run and scale its digital platforms and the app experience. AI Insights takes advantage of Azure OpenAI Service in Microsoft Foundry, which generates the real-time, match-aware insights that serve as a companion to what fans are seeing on the field. 

“What we’re talking about is a really good example of solving a fan-facing problem with deep technical capability and a shared vision on delivery,” Greenberg says. “Microsoft brought world-class cloud and AI foundations. Without them, we would not have been able to get as far as we have. And our partners have helped accelerate the build, the integration and, importantly, operational readiness.” 

One of the biggest challenges with AI Insights is ensuring that fans watching a match and using the app can get updates and context within the flow of the game, making it an additional resource for fans at the grounds or watching alongside with commentary. 

Azure Cosmos DB supports Cricket Australia’s ecosystem of apps – including Cricket Australia Live with AI Insights and PlayCricket, which hosts scores for up to 7,000 community matches a weekend. The technology provides a fast, scalable data layer that can update quickly during live play, always keeping fans aware of the latest scores. 

“All live sport has one thing in common. There are no pauses,” Greenberg says. “It’s not like reality television. So, the experience has to be fast, reliable and consistent, especially when it’s under peak demand and when you have millions of people enjoying it at the same time.” 

An experience for every type of fan 

While cricket has its ardent supporters, especially in Australia, it can also be difficult for newcomers to pick up. As Cricket Australia looks to cultivate the next generation of fans, Greenberg realizes that the app can prevent sticky wickets for the sport’s novices. 

“I mean, we play a crazy sport that goes over five days and sometimes at the end of the five days, you still don’t get a result,” Greenberg says. “We can’t expect people to be tuned in at every moment, but what we can do is we can hyper-personalize the way they would like to engage with the sport during the contest.” 

The Seddon Cricket Club in Melbourne has been in existence since the 1920s and is now home to several senior, junior and all abilities sides that compete in associations across Australia. It is also home to a loyal supporters group, featuring fans who love the game in all forms. For them, the AI Insights on the Cricket Live App has been a value add as they go deeper into the game. 

“It’s definitely made it more interesting to follow along and learn more about the players,” says Cassie Gray, a Seddon Club supporter and cricket fan. “You could follow a player, you could see what they’re known for, as well as figure out what’s their next step or what do they need to get an amazing moment next. 

“Cricket is a game of history. It’s been around for a really long time, and the players influence other players, and countries influence other countries. With the insights, it gives me an understanding of not just what’s happening today, but what’s led up to that in the game itself.” 

The next step for AI insights is to create greater personalization within its levels of information for different types of fans. A user can select “newcomer,” “history buff” or “stats guru” and receive insights tailored to their persona. 

“We want to understand every fan and cater to how they want to be served by the app,” Balamurugan says. “We have moved from scores to storytelling, but we want to move from storytelling to fans setting up the narrative themselves. Fans should hear the story how they want to hear it. That is one of our lodestars.” 

With the initial success of the AI Insights feature, Greenberg said other sports organizations have reached out to learn more about how it was developed and the impact on the fanbase. Most people working at Cricket Australia have a deep love of the sport, often having played for many years. Greenberg hopes the app’s success and further innovation can continue the sport’s momentum. 

“The thing we’ll never know until much later on is the impact that we’re having on young kids falling in love and choosing cricket as their preferred sport,” he says. “And if we help them love it, what we can create for a fan on their journey between the ages of 8 and 80 is astronomical for a sport like cricket. And so, we’re very mindful of ensuring kids get the opportunity to engage in cricket so we can form lifelong partnerships.” 

Top Image caption: Supporters at the Seddon Cricket Club in Melbourne love the game in all forms, and the Cricket Live App featuring AI Insights has allowed them to gain further insights into the sport, whether they are a novice fan or stats guru. Photo by Graham Denholm for Microsoft.  

Elliott Smith writes about AI and innovation at Microsoft, from how the Premier League is transforming its online presence to why AI may play a major role in saving the Amazon rainforest. Previously, Smith worked as a sports reporter in Washington, D.C., Washington state and Texas, covering high schools to the pros. You can contact him on LinkedIn. 

The post Cricket Australia uses AI Insights to bring fans closer to the action appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

It is a task that is not taken lightly by the Jets’ coaches, front office and scouting department, who will be featured in the team’s draft room as they make their final decisions.

But that gathering is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to player evaluation, and the Jets are careful to explore every avenue available when assessing the thousands of players who are draft-eligible each season. Utilizing the latest technology to help them make more informed decisions is now a critical part of the team’s overall strategy.

“The draft is one of the primary ways in which we’re able to acquire talent, and it’s an extremely important event for us,” says Dan Zbojovsky, senior director, football operations for the Jets. “It’s a year-long process and oftentimes multi-year process for us to evaluate these players coming out of college and then get the opportunity to select them.”

A ‘Titan’ off the field

In the traditional draft scenario, teams receive dispatches from scouts around the country who file reports on players that range from height and weight measurements to 40-yard dash times to vertical leaps. Colleges will conduct Pro Days, in which scouts are invited to see a team’s top performers run drills and catch passes. And independent scouting services provide roundups of prospects major and minor, with their own evaluation systems.

In short, there’s a lot of information on a lot of potential draftees, and that doesn’t even include each NFL team’s own preferences based on organizational philosophy, coaching schemes and roster needs. While some teams prefer to keep things more analog, the Jets have been at the forefront of embracing technology to help them prepare not only for the draft but also the fast-paced nature of an NFL season.

The team’s proprietary Titan app (winkingly named after the team’s original moniker, The Titans of New York) is the team’s “mothership” for football operations – a custom-built web application that contains essential tools for draft preparation, scouting and personnel strategy.

“Titan is really the hub behind everything we do on the football side,” says Paul Marsh, senior director of application development. “It’s a legacy application of 15 years now through many, many different iterations, but it’s always remained Titan. It is where all of our scouting and football data is housed. It is the view into that data and it enables the powers that be to help make their decisions and come up with their plans to help make the team win.”

Titan is built on Microsoft technology, including Microsoft Azure, GitHub Copilot and GitHub Actions. Marsh’s team relies on GitHub Copilot to speed up coding, prototyping and iteration, helping them gain greater efficiency when time is tight leading up to the draft. GitHub Actions are used to automate, build and deploy pipelines, enabling frequent updates and continuous integration across Titan’s modules.

Another key element of Titan is the team’s draft/trade calculator, a points-based tool the Jets use to evaluate draft-day trade scenarios. In real time, New York’s football brain trust can plug in picks, compare values and determine whether a proposed trade would result in a net gain or loss for the team.

“This is a UI that was designed really by our [general manager] and his close advisors to work the way that they want to work,” says Marsh, who has been with the Jets for 24 seasons. “And it simply allows them to kind of dig into the information and game plan on what they’re going to do going forward into the draft.”

The Jets’ process has paid off with several important contributors being acquired via the draft, including wide receiver and 2022 Offensive Rookie of the Year Garrett Wilson, 2025 No. 7 selection Armand Membou, defensive end Will McDonald IV, running backs Breece Hall and Braelon Allen, and tight end Mason Taylor.

Old school, meet new school

For Zbojovsky, who is entering his 19th season with the franchise, the draft successes reflect the balance the team uses when combining the old-school scouting mentality and the technology and analytics of the new school of player evaluation.

“[Titan] is an extremely important internal website for us, and we’ve made a lot of really cool advancements over the years on it,” he says.

“I think everything has its piece of the puzzle. On certain players, some parts might be a bigger piece of that puzzle. We like to, of course, rely on our film work as the foundation of our reports and our scouting evaluations, and then we can utilize all these other cool tools or data points to help inform those evaluations and really help us, whether it be our stacking of our players or comparing players to each other. And really it adds a little bit of an objective piece into what can be a largely subjective evaluation off film.”

Zbojovsky and Marsh work closely with each other to ensure that any late-bloomers, fast-risers or strategic adjustments are reflected quickly in Titan so that everyone is on the same page.

“We always joke that if the GM wanted to come down to our office and say, ‘I need a button here, here and here, and I need it to do these things,’ we’re working on that right out of the gate as soon as he leaves that office,” Marsh says.

“We’re able to turn around very, very quickly because we’re able to push those changes right into our Microsoft stack and get them in front of him before he hits the end of the hall. It’s the trust that we can get things done very quickly because these guys have deadlines that don’t move. We can’t push back the draft. We can’t push back free agency.”

The fastest agent at the Combine

The Jets recently wrapped their time at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, where all 32 teams convene to scout draft prospects as they go through a whirlwind of testing and drills. Numbers and measurements are flying fast and furious, so the Jets, along with the league’s other squads, use the NFL Combine App to help surface the official Combine data to coaches and scouts.

A custom Copilot AI agent is built into the NFL Combine App to allow coaches and scouts to surface fast insights and prospect comparisons with natural language questions that allow teams to get information on, for example, the average, highest and lowest linebacker results for each drill since 2015.

“The Copilot feature not only allows us to ask questions and filter through the information that’s present at the time, but also compare that back to previous years,” Zbojovsky says.

“So you start to really be able to stack how this player not only performed against this cohort here, but also against players that are currently in the NFL. And that helps you start to really understand where that player’s performance metrics on the field might fit within the players that he’s going to be joining in the league.”

Let the countdown begin

In a league where every decision matters and every potential advantage could swing the final score, both Marsh and Zbojovsky are thankful that the Jets continue to see technology as an integral part of scouting and preparation.

“We really are in a great spot for what we need to do. It keeps us nimble,” Marsh says. “Talking to other organizations and other technology companies, they are impressed with how quickly we’re able to iterate and move to get those solutions. We’re not bogged down. We’re given a lot of flexibility and the trust to do what we need to do.”

When the Jets turn in their pick, it will be so much more than writing a name on a card to hand to the commissioner. It will be the final product of research, data, scouting and technology all coming together to welcome the next potential superstar to the NFL.

“A lot of work goes in from a lot of people throughout the organization,” Zbojovsky says.

“We incorporate a lot of different data points and different types of evaluations, whether it be analytics or our scouts. We put a lot of work behind that to make sure we get our board right in advance and then we see how things fall on draft day. We look forward to success in April.”

Top photo courtesy of the Jets.

Learn how the NFL is using AI on and off the field to enhance operations and read how technology could help the Minnesota Vikings build next year’s winning edge. 

Elliott Smith writes about AI and innovation at Microsoft, from how the Premier League is transforming its online presence to why AI may play a major role in saving the Amazon rainforest. Previously, Smith worked as a sports reporter in Washington, D.C., Washington state and Texas, covering high schools to the pros. You can contact him on LinkedIn.

The post The New York Jets are happy to have a ‘Titan’ in their corner at the NFL Draft appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

With the help of Microsoft partner SP Peru, María Almenara took the first step towards its digital transformation process. The bakery migrated to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud, leaving acquisition costs or digital infrastructure maintenance behind. “Thanks to the database, we can analyze customer buying frequency and average purchase amounts, optimizing our processes and reducing pressure on the shop and the manager. These steps directly affect the customer experience,” states Carlos Armando de la Flor, the bakery’s General Manager.

Integrating cloud functionality

When María Almenara decided to become a data-driven business, one goal was to reach a 90% fill rate. This indicator shows the ability to serve customers without running out of stock. Today, the bakery has reached a 99% fill rate, assuring an optimal experience for its customers.

Based on the work done with SP Peru, a system was also created with Azure Machine Learning. Its integration with the Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) and the development of a specific mathematical technique allows for daily and weekly predictions. This is how the bakery obtained sales estimates for each store and product, allowing for planning and adjustments to cover demand for each of the 8 locations, as well as the ability to ship precise orders.

Furthermore, with a goal of complete business transparency and real-time decision making, the bakery used different Human Resources survey systems like SAP, among others. With the help of Microsoft’s Power BI, management created a control panel to view 18 indicators in 3 areas: finances, expenses and budgets; human resources; and customer satisfaction.

The mathematical technique used for these predictions undoubtedly played an important role in this process. This technique was later replicated and tested by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where local partner SP’s technique performed better than that of the team from the prestigious academic institution.

Serving the person, not just the consumer

Thanks to integrating these changes and its technological foresight, the bakery was able to weather a year as challenging as 2020—and managed to reach a milestone for the industry. This also reflects a change in María Almenara’s ethos, which is made of three fundamental pillars: a) a scalable culture and business model with the single goal of making hearts happy; b) data as an essential asset for leading in the digital economy and c) focus on the person, that is, on partners and customers.

With each step of the digital transformation process, María Almenara realized that its partners had to grow with the company. This is reflected in its turnover rate, which is less than 1%. The industry’s turnover rate is usually 25%. Without a doubt, incorporating technology has created business growth and satisfaction for its 223 partners.

Carlos Armando de la Flor concludes: “Here at María Almenara, we see technology as a helpful tool, not just something to solve things. Thanks to the omnichannel retailing platform our business uses, we’ve been able to establish a way to work that allows pregnant women or women with young kids to serve customers from home, prioritizing their health and comfort, and reducing turnover rates.”

COMPANY INFORMATION

• Customer: María Almenara
• Partner: SP Peru
• Products and Services: Microsoft Azure
• Industry: Other
• Organization Size: Medium (50 – 999 employees)
• Country: Peru
• To contact this Partner, click here
• Click here to learn more about this company
• Tags: Customer Stories, María Almenara, Microsoft Azure, Perú

The post María Almenara: The First Data-Driven Peruvian Bakery appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

We’re thrilled to announce the public preview of the Product Change Management agent template—an AI-powered solution that transforms how manufacturers manage the process of change across equipment, products, processes, and more. Built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, the agent automates workflows and connects systems, helping teams cut approval times from weeks to days, reduce errors, and bring innovations to market, faster.

Learn how Copilot Studio can help build and customize agents that work for your operations.  

Reenergizing change management with AI

Engineering change management (ECM) is how manufacturers manage change without causing production chaos. Changes move through a complex, controlled path with requests reviewed, approved, and rolled out to multiple stakeholders and systems. Whether responding to market shifts, regulatory updates, or quality improvements, manufacturers initiate millions of change requests each year.

Today, ECM is slow. While highly collaborative, the process is easily bogged down by siloed information, manual steps, and disconnected processes. When it breaks down, costs from scrap, stoppages, and delayed product launches pile up.

The Product Change Management agent template addresses these pain points by infusing intelligence, automation, and orchestration into this otherwise manual process. The agent provides a managed solution that can be tailored to specific business needs—accelerating deployment while ensuring consistency and governance. Connecting people, data, and systems together with Microsoft AI, it simplifies execution—cutting approval times to days, improving uptime, and ensuring change traceability.

Powering AI change management end-to-end

The Product Change Management agent template is an AI-powered orchestrator, built in Copilot Studio. It autonomously manages engineering change processes through a series of specialized sub-agents, collaborating with your team to ensure every change is executed efficiently and accurately. Using Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams, the agent shifts manual tasks to focused reviews and refinement—delivering faster, safer changes with fewer errors and less review turmoil, while maintaining compliance and alignment. maintaining compliance and alignment.

Some key capabilities set it apart:

• Automated workflow orchestration. Accelerate approvals by coordinating the entire change process, from request to closure, autonomously. Embedded into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, the agent initiates impact analysis, routes approvals, and updates records—keeping stakeholders informed.
• System of record synchronization. Keep engineering and operations systems aligned. The agent ensures updates are consistently reflected across product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, eliminating rework and maintaining alignment from design through delivery.
• Collaborative stakeholder engagement. Simplify communication across engineering, quality, and operations with natural language interfaces and intelligent routing. This ensures that the right people are engaged at the right time, reducing bottlenecks and accelerating approvals.
• Data-driven impact analysis. Evaluate proposed changes across inventory, suppliers, and production. The agent surfaces real-time insights to guide decision-making and flag potential risks early—empowering teams to act.
• Built-in compliance and traceability. Document and audit changes at every step. The agent enforces governance policies, tracks decisions, and supports regulatory compliance without adding complexity.

In short, product change management lays the agentic foundation for manufacturing digital threads—enabling agility, transparency, and reliability for every stakeholder.

Transforming change management at Coca-Cola Beverages Africa

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the eighth largest authorized Coca-Cola bottler in the world by revenue, and the largest on the continent—operating in 14 countries. Serving more than 800,000 customers, CCBA accounts for 40% of all Coca-Cola ready-to-drink beverages sold in Africa through a host of international and local brands.

With thousands of stock keeping units (SKUs), multiple packaging formats, and a relentless focus on sustainability, CCBA runs one of the most complex beverage supply chains in Africa. Agility is critical especially when managing formulation and packaging changes that ripple across multiple production lines, inventory systems, and financial models.

Every year, CCBA makes more than 1,000 changes to its bottle molds alone, often driven by material availability or sustainability initiatives. Historically, these changes relied on manual workflows: engineers drafting requests, planners emailing spreadsheets, and multiple handoffs across departments. This process was slow, error-prone, and risky. A single misalignment could mean production downtime, inaccurate cost data, or compliance gaps. The Product Change Management agent template from Microsoft is transforming this process.

Acting as a digital orchestrator, the agent brings intelligence, speed, and reliability to the CCBA change lifecycle. Here’s how:

• Smart initiation. When a planner or engineer triggers a change, such as switching a supplier or updating a packaging component, the agent immediately identifies all affected products and plants. It auto-drafts the request, applies the standard template, and fills in known details like part numbers and descriptions—eliminating repetitive manual work.
• Automated routing. The agent ensures the request moves to the right reviewers in the correct sequence, removing guesswork and delays. Notifications flow through familiar tools like Teams and Outlook, alerting stakeholders when action is required.
• Instant system updates. Once approvals are complete, the agent updates Microsoft Dynamics 365 in real time, syncing bill-of-material data. It confirms changes immediately, rather than days of manual checks.

The Product Change Management agent is streamlining equipment management across CCBA’s capital assets and products, enabling faster identification of impact areas and responsible individuals, and improving operational efficiency

—Joshua Motsuenyane, Chief Information Officer, CCBA

While this strategic collaboration is still new, CCBA is already seeing results. Actions that once took days of back-and-forth now happen in hours or less. Product change management also represents a major milestone in its Frontier Firm journey—making change management a focus across one of Africa’s most dynamic manufacturing networks.

Creating the future of change management in manufacturing, together with partners

AI-powered change management is now imperative. As changes proliferate across more assets and systems, manufacturers need governed, AI-guided workflows to maintain speed and quality. Discrete manufacturers—building complex products from computers to cars—feel it the most: disconnected systems and manual handoffs slow adoption, raise error rates, and suppress productivity. PTC and Microsoft are changing that.

Together, we’re building an agentic architecture that bridges operations and engineering systems, enabling faster decisions with enterprise visibility. Enabled by technologies such as model context protocol (MCP), native PLM agents in Windchill and ERP agents in Dynamics 365 interoperate to surface problem reports, collate data from multiple systems, and drive automation in PLM workflows such as change impact analysis, where data governance rules are established, ensuring AI agents work in the right context and within the right controls.

Ready to simplify change and accelerate execution?

Product Change Management agent template

Join the public preview

In combining Microsoft for Manufacturing with expertise from partners, we can deliver better, more comprehensive industry solutions. As we expand this ecosystem, manufacturers will gain even broader interoperability, deeper insights, and more resiliency across their value chain.

Shaping the manufacturing Frontier

With the Product Change Management agent template, manufacturers gain a trusted technology partner in navigating every engineering change. Part of a broader vision to enable intelligent digital treads across manufacturing, product change management is about empowering teams to innovate with confidence, backed by data and AI automation.

Industrial AI can accelerate product design and engineering outcomes. Learn how with our latest Signals Report.

The post Accelerate innovation with AI: Introducing the Product Change Management agent template appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

What is a Frontier Firm?

Microsoft defines a Frontier Firm as a human-led but AI-operated organization that integrates AI agents as core team members—enabling rapid scaling, agile operations, and enhanced productivity through hybrid human-agent collaboration and on-demand intelligence.

Microsoft identifies four key pillars of AI transformation:

1. Enrich employee experiences: Empower people with AI tools that remove friction and unlock creativity.
2. Reinvent customer engagement: Deliver transparency, personalization, and trust at scale.
3. Reshape business processes: Automate and optimize operations for speed, safety, and sustainability.
4. Bend the curve on innovation: Move beyond pilots to bold, repeatable frameworks that accelerate transformation.

Microsoft mining and metals customers Ma’aden, Petrosea, and Outokumpu bring these pillars to life and drive efficiency, productivity, cost reduction, safety, and sustainability. I’ll talk more about each one below.

From reactive to proactive: How AI and agents transform mining operations

Frontier Firms are deploying AI and agents across the mining value chain—not just to automate tasks, but to enable supervised autonomous systems that can monitor, reason, and act. AI-powered innovations are already delivering measurable results. For example, BHP and Microsoft have partnered to use advanced AI and machine learning technologies to enhance copper recovery at the world’s largest copper mine. AI-powered systems adapt in real-time to more variability. This optimizes recovery rates, improves throughput, and grade control. It also reduces downtime, waste, water usage, energy consumption, and costs.

With AI and agents, mining companies are not only addressing today’s challenges but are also building resilience and agility for the future—empowering their workforce, optimizing operations, and accelerating progress toward sustainability and growth.

The Frontier Firm in action: Empowering people with Microsoft Copilot and agents

Ma’aden, a leading mining and metals company, aimed to transform into a Frontier Firm by using digital innovation and AI to stay competitive in a resource-intensive industry while supporting sustainability and growth.

The company faced pressure to modernize operations without disrupting workforce roles—balancing efficiency gains with its commitment to empower employees rather than replace them and ensuring adoption of AI tools aligned with cultural and operational needs.

Ma’aden deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot and agentic AI capabilities across workflows—integrating generative AI into collaboration and decision-making. The focus was on augmenting human expertise, enabling employees to automate routine tasks, and free time for strategic thinking.

The transformation improved productivity, saved time, and enriched employee experiences—positioning Ma’aden as a Frontier Firm in mining. Employees reported higher engagement and confidence, as AI functioned as a trusted assistant, not a substitute—driving faster decisions, better collaboration, and sustainable growth.

“We intentionally gave Copilot to early adopters—people who are excited about technology—because they would act as change agents for the rest of their teams.”

—Khalid AlMutairi, Vice President, IT at Ma’aden

Turning obstacles into intelligent opportunities

Petrosea, a leading Indonesian mining and energy services firm, faced intense price wars and operational inefficiencies. To sustain growth and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments, it needed to differentiate beyond cost and embrace innovation.

Legacy batch processes and limited data access hindered real-time decision-making. Remote sites and rising sustainability requirements amplified complexity, requiring a shift to advanced digital capabilities for competitive resilience.

Petrosea launched its 3D strategy: diversification, digitalization, and decarbonization—deploying the Minerva Digital Platform on Microsoft Azure, integrating Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, predictive analytics, and digital twins. It adopted Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Copilot Stack, automation agents, and advanced security.

The company achieved a 15% increase in productivity, a 9% reduction in operational costs, improved safety, and was selected by the World Economic Forum to join its Global Lighthouse Network. Petrosea transformed adversity into innovation, building competitive differentiation as a Frontier Firm through AI-powered workflows.

The integration of IoT sensors, predictive maintenance, and a Remote Operations Center reshaped their business processes—shifting from manual, site-based oversight to centralized, data-driven control that improved efficiency and safety.

“All these innovations led to a 9% reduction in operation costs, decrease in incidents, and enhanced safety measures with real-time corrective actions.”

—Krishna Nawacandra, Digital Project Manager, Petrosea

AI-powered sustainability as strategy

Outokumpu, a global stainless-steel leader, faced mounting pressure to meet ambitious climate targets and comply with Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) reporting while embedding sustainability into its core strategy. Steel accounts for 10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making decarbonization critical.

Manual, fragmented sustainability reporting hindered transparency and efficiency. Outokumpu needed a unified, intelligent data approach to accelerate green value creation and explore AI-powered ESG innovations for competitive advantage.

Outokumpu partnered with Microsoft to deploy the Intelligent Data Platform, Microsoft Fabric, and Sustainability Manager—automating environmental data processes, enabling advanced analytics, and training leaders through the AI data-driven green value creation program.

Outokumpu achieved up to 75% lower carbon footprint versus industry average, launched Circle Green® stainless steel with 93% lower carbon footprint, and helps customers cut 10 million tons of CO₂ annually. Data and AI now fuel new business models, cost savings, and sustainable growth.

By using Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and AI capabilities, Outokumpu is not just improving sustainability reporting—it is bending the curve on innovation by accelerating the development of new low-emission products and unlocking green business models that deliver both environmental and commercial impact.

“We have set a very clear goal for ourselves. We want to achieve something remarkable.”

—Heidi Peltonen, Vice President of Sustainability at Outokumpu

Advancing the Frontier for mining organizations

Across these three customer stories, a common thread emerges: transformation is not accidental—it is intentional. Frontier Firms combine human ambition with AI, Copilot, and agents to create scalable impact. Ma’aden reimagined productivity, while Petrosea transformed adversity into innovation, and Outokumpu turned data into a strategic asset.

What sets these leaders apart is discipline: they do not stop at adoption. They measure outcomes, codify frameworks, and scale with intent. Technology is a purpose multiplier, enabling safer operations, faster innovation, and sustainable growth.

As Frontier Firms continue to redefine what’s possible in mining, the horizon is filled with opportunities for AI-powered solutions—from predictive maintenance and autonomous operations to intelligent exploration, workflow automation, and sustainability platforms—each poised to unlock new levels of efficiency, safety, and innovation across the industry. The Microsoft GenAI for Energy Permitting Solution Accelerator applied to mining represents a promising step for Frontier Firms seeking to transform permitting from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage. Built on the Microsoft Cloud, the accelerator aims to help mining companies accelerate permitting timelines, improve compliance confidence, and enhance transparency with regulators and communities.

With these and other innovative solutions, the future belongs to Frontier Firms. Are you ready?

Discover solutions

Using Copilot in energy and resources

Explore the possibilities of AI transformation

Learn more

• Visit Microsoft for energy and resources and Microsoft for the mining industry.
• Explore Azure Arc.
• Learn more about Microsoft Security for enterprise.
• Discover over 1,000 AI customer use cases in the blog AI-powered success—with more than 1,000 stories of customer transformation and innovation.
• Read the latest International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2025.

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Across industries, organizations are racing to harness the power of AI. The potential in intelligent automation alone motivated a $252.3 billion corporate AI investment in 2024,¹ and those investments have been evolving almost as quickly as this rapidly changing technology itself.

While longer-standing AI technologies like machine learning and chatbots continue to perform well, agentic AI has moved to the front of the pack, offering the kind of autonomous decision-making that companies crave. Early wins with generative AI—drafting emails, summarizing documents, automating routine tasks—have shown what’s possible when a single intelligent agent is put to work.

Microsoft defines agentic AI as the pairing of traditional software strengths—such as workflows, state, and tool use—with the adaptive reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). This allows agents to understand intent, take action, and interact with other systems dynamically, moving beyond the limits of rule-based automation.

As organizations look to scale AI across more of their operations, many are finding that a single agent can’t always manage complex, multi-step tasks. This is where multi-agentic systems become valuable. 

Multi-agentic systems use a series of agents, with a single coordinating agent, to work as a sort of AI team. The coordinating agent works to understand complex queries and delegate workflows to other agents, making multi-step, multi-system queries possible. In collaboration with people who are essential for escalation, understanding significant ambiguity, and creative thinking, multi-agentic systems are becoming integral to digital-first workforces.

Because these AI teams often operate across different tools and systems, organizations need solutions that are secure and enterprise-ready. With Microsoft technologies, agentic systems are built with the security, compliance, and reliability businesses expect. For a deeper dive on multi-agentic AI, read “Designing Multi-Agent Intelligence” on Microsoft Dev Blogs.

Today, Microsoft customers are already seeing the impact of multi-agentic AI. Here are three stories out of the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab in San Francisco that show how multi-agentic AI is transforming security, science, and retail.

Three real-world examples of multi-agentic AI transformation

1. Contraforce: Turning the tide in cybersecurity

In cybersecurity, every second matters. For managed service providers (MSPs), responding to threats quickly can mean the difference between business as usual and a major incident. Contraforce, a Microsoft partner, set out to change the game with a multi-agentic security delivery platform built on Microsoft Foundry.

The multi-agentic solution automates 90% of incident investigations and response tasks, working as an always-on security operations team to analyze security data, identify suspicious activities, and autonomously managing incidents. These autonomous AI agents don’t just automate tasks—they help create a new cyber defense workforce.

The results are striking:

• Incident response times plummeted from 30 minutes to just 30 seconds.
• The cost per incident dropped from $15 to less than $1.
• MSPs can now scale their services without scaling their teams.

Contraforce’s story is a testament to how agentic AI can transform security operations from reactive to proactive, delivering speed, scale, and cost-efficiency.

3. Stemtology: Accelerating discovery in health sciences

Medical innovations can move slowly, and sometimes for good reason. But in regenerative medicine, lengthy research cycles and complex data analysis can be optimized with AI intervention.

Regenerative medicine innovator Stemtology worked with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab to accelerate biomedical discovery using a multi-agentic platform.

By combining Azure Cognitive Search, GPT-based agents, and domain-specific knowledge graphs, Stemtology’s system allows agents to:

• Parse scientific literature
• Generate therapeutic hypotheses
• Design and evaluate experiments

The impact? Research timelines have been cut by up to 50% at Stemtology. Minimum viable products are delivered in weeks instead of months. And the path from idea to patient-ready therapy is shorter than ever. This has freed up researchers to focus on highly complex evaluation and design strategies for treatments, rather than spending hours on gathering and synthesizing research.

Stemtology’s journey shows how agentic AI can support critical human discovery and bring life-saving treatments closer to reality.

3. SolidCommerce: Personalizing customer engagement at scale

For retailers, delivering personalized experiences while managing vast product catalogs and backend operations is a constant challenge. SolidCommerce specializes in providing AI solutions that address these challenges in the retail industry.

Hoping to address time-consuming support processes, inconsistent customer communications, and operational inefficiencies handling customer support, they approached the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab in San Francisco to create an AI agent that could automate accurate and brand-aligned responses to meet customer needs.

Their solution brings together multiple agents for customer triage, FAQ handling, account management, product recommendations, and compliance checks. Built on Microsoft’s Agentic AI framework and integrated with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Foundry Agent Service, the system is easy to deploy and scale.

The payoff:

• Richer, multimodal customer experiences
• Scalable automation across channels
• Real-time personalization with memory and context

SolidCommerce’s story demonstrates how multi-agentic AI can turn retail complexity into seamless, intelligent engagement, ensuring customer satisfaction to keep pace with technological change.

Learn more about the agentic advantage

Microsoft customers are realizing benefits every day across industries. As we’ve seen in the customer examples above, multi-agentic AI delivers speed and scale in operations, accelerates innovation in research and development, and enables personalized engagement at scale.

Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labs

Accelerate your AI projects with personalized help from our Microsoft Technology Experts

Learn more

Multi-agentic AI isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic shift. And companies that harness these systems to transform legacy processes can benefit not only from automation, but from truly intelligent optimization.

Learn how other customers are transforming with AI and explore creating your own generative AI proof of concept at Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labs.

¹ The 2025 AI Index Report, Stanford HAI.

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“Gartner^® predicts that 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027.”¹ While AI technology is transformative, adoption alone does not guarantee desired results. It’s important to have a plan that meets your organization’s unique needs, goals, and capabilities.

Studies show how finding the right strategic lever for AI is becoming table stakes for retail organizations. By 2030, personal AI shopper agents could influence over half of global consumer spending, having a massive effect on marketing strategies.² Retailers who fail to adapt, risk being left behind.

How do we resolve this paradox? The answer lies in specificity. Success depends on understanding where AI agents can drive impact in retail and consumer goods organizations, mapping innovative opportunities to the most pressing challenges, and measuring results with rigor. Starting with clear use cases tied to real business outcomes. This is how small proof points evolve into large cross-organizational impact.

The new demands of retail and consumer goods marketers

On the customer-facing side of retail and consumer goods, the pressure to deliver is intense. Chief marketing officers (CMOs), loyalty leaders, and customer experience executives are asked to orchestrate hyper-personalized campaigns while also delivering seamless support throughout the customer journey. Communications, pricing, promotions, placement (brand engagement), post-purchase care—each of these touchpoints require speed, consistency, and delight. Yet in many organizations, insights are fragmented, campaign cycles are slow, and service costs are rising.

This is where agentic AI can create a flywheel. Consider marketing campaigns. With AI analyzing consumer data for insights, generating creative content variations, and orchestrating campaigns, marketing executives can move from static plans to dynamic, always-on engagement. These same systems can feed reports to marketers managing campaign effectiveness, closing the loop between insights and agility.

With the agility offered by AI, other customer-facing roles are also enabled. Customer service leaders are empowered with insights on customers who have interacted with the brand, and frontline workers are empowered with faster time to knowledge and service.

Retailers such as Albert Heijn, featured in our new e-book, show how forward-thinking retailers are already deploying AI on the store floor, to help employees serve customers faster and more effectively.

Operations as a growth driver

If marketing and customer service comprise the front face of retail, operations and merchandising are its backbone. A delayed shipment, a stockout, a mistimed promotion aren’t operational issues; they’re revenue leaks.

AI agents reframe operations, from support to strategy. For chief operating officers (COOs) and supply chain and logistics leaders, AI agents can forecast demand, sense disruptions, and adjust supply chains before problems escalate. This goes beyond efficiency into protection of revenue, risk management, and brand trust. For merchandising executives, AI agent capabilities enable localized assortments, dynamic pricing, and promotion planning that adjusts in near real-time. What once took weeks of manual coordination can now be automated to maximize sell-through and reduce carrying costs.

The cumulative effects are profound. Agentic AI brings agility to the functions that keep retail running, turning them into engines of competitive differentiation. This example from Pets at Home illustrates how retailers are applying tools to match demand with precision, protect margins, and optimize execution across stores and channels.

Combining your insights to out-innovate at scale

Beyond day-to-day execution, the consumer goods industry faces another pressing challenge: the speed of innovation. Product lifecycles are shrinking. Consumer preferences shift quickly. Data is fragmented and siloed. For research and development (R&D) leaders, this creates inefficiencies that delay launches and increase costs.

AI agents have the potential to rewire this process. By unifying consumer insights, market trends, and operational data, they can accelerate product development cycles and empower collaboration. Manufacturing leaders gain predictive visibility into bottlenecks. Product officers can simulate demand and orchestrate workflows across teams. The net effect is faster time-to-market, lower risk of failed launches, and greater alignment between what consumers want and what companies can deliver.

Estée Lauder used AI to unify datasets and accelerate innovation. It underscores how agentic AI can serve as a catalyst for growth beyond the core of retail operations.

Learn how retail and consumer goods leaders use AI agents

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Where will you pilot agentic AI?

AI agents aren’t a one-size-fits-all answer, but embracing AI agents today will help future-proof your organization and empower functions across your retail and consumer goods businesses. Its greatest impact emerges when part of a broader strategy, deployed against specific challenges, and with clear measures of success. Whether enabling agentic shopping experiences or efficient operations, retail and consumer goods companies that take advantage of marketing, customer service, merchandising, operations, and R&D opportunities to embrace AI can reimagine these functions as growth drivers for the business.

¹Gartner^® Press Release, Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027, June 25, 2025. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark and IT Symposium/Xpo is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

²Cognizant, Consumers Who Embrace AI Could Drive $4.4 Trillion in Spending Over Five Years, 2025. 

The post How retail and consumer goods leaders empower their workforces with AI agents appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Every patient image tells a story, and radiologists play a critical role in unlocking insights from the pixels to inform downstream care. By delivering timely, accurate, and complete reports, radiology teams help bridge the gap between diagnosis and action, accelerating time to treatment and supporting better outcomes. Microsoft is deepening its commitment to healthcare by working closely with radiologists to deliver a unified AI experience for their reporting workflow. As radiologists face increasing demands for speed, accuracy, and efficiency in reporting, this is a pivotal moment for helping them unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency through generative, multimodal, and agentic AI.

At the 2025 Radiological Society of North America Conference and Annual Meeting (RSNA 2025), Microsoft is extending the value of its flagship AI clinical assistant, Microsoft Dragon Copilot, specifically for radiologists. Now in preview, Dragon Copilot integrates directly into familiar workflows to help radiology teams focus on their interpretations.*

Serving as a companion for PowerScribe One, Microsoft’s leading reporting solution and trusted by thousands of radiologists, it delivers a unified workflow that streamlines reporting, surfaces information, and automates tasks.

Delivering generative, multimodal, and agentic AI without disrupting existing workflows

Every day, radiologists face a relentless tide of images, data, and documentation—each with varying degrees of complexity and urgency. And every moment a radiologist spends wrestling with fragmented technology is a missed opportunity to make a difference when it matters most.

This challenge extends into the AI landscape where fragmentation occurs when tools address narrow problems but create extra steps and poor integration into broader clinical workflows. Yet, hope is on the horizon. With many radiologists relying on the proven capabilities of PowerScribe One, like speech recognition to accurately dictate their report content and generative AI for generating draft impressions, organizations are looking for ways to integrate AI without altering the entire reporting experience.

For radiologists, Dragon Copilot works with PowerScribe One to deliver generative, multimodal, and agentic AI in a secure, scalable, and extensible way. It brings cloud-native features and AI directly into the radiologist’s workflow. By integrating with PowerScribe One, Dragon Copilot can further streamline report creation without interrupting the radiologist’s interpretation.

As we embrace the next frontier of AI, we know that having cloud-based solutions that work seamlessly with our existing products and systems is paramount. Having Dragon Copilot as a companion for PowerScribe One gives me confidence that I can test and benefit from the latest AI advancements with minimal disruptions and distractions.

—Sean Cleary, MD, Vice Chair of Informatics for Imaging Sciences University of Rochester Medical Center

AI capabilities tailored for radiologists

Prior report summarization: Radiologists often rely on prior reports to provide essential context for interpreting current studies. Prior report summarization in Dragon Copilot distills relevant prior reports and associated metadata into concise bullets, helping improve speed and accuracy in diagnostics. It assists the radiologists in interpretation of the current exam by clearly highlighting findings from prior reports requiring follow-up or ongoing attention.

Chat with credible sources: During an interpretation, radiologists may have questions or need to do additional research on a specific topic. A chat experience in Dragon Copilot routes questions to the appropriate agent or plugin to deliver relevant, reliable responses backed by credible sources with patient context—helping radiologists work more efficiently and intelligently without having to toggle between windows and other applications.

Report optimization for billing and beyond: Dragon Copilot can use third-party AI insights from partners to check the report content to help radiologists improve accuracy and quality, helping to prevent downstream issues like claim denials. By surfacing important details and helpful reminders directly inside the reporting workflow, radiology teams can optimize their reports for billing and beyond.

AI draft report content: With Dragon Copilot, organizations can accelerate the path to intelligent, draft-first reporting by integrating self-developed and third-party multimodal AI models. Radiologists can receive AI-generated draft report content from image analysis, which they can then review, test, and validate.

Accelerating innovation with new models and a rich partner ecosystem

Many organizations are experimenting with testing, fine-tuning, and building AI models tailored to their specific needs. With the rise of multimodal AI models that can analyze medical imaging, genomics, clinical records, and more, customers and partners are leading the next wave of innovation and exploring new use cases.

Collaborating on this work allows us to assess models like CXRReportGen that support grounded report generation based on image analysis from chest X-rays. With these new capabilities comes the challenge of how to surface model output into clinical workflows in ways that can add value. This has given us the opportunity to collaborate on AI interoperability with Microsoft in concert with other partners like Epic and Sectra to test how multimodal AI can work across systems to optimize clinical workflows and improve patient care.

—Dr. Richard Bruce, Professor and Vice Chair of Informatics, Department of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health

Microsoft Foundry offers a growing catalog of more than 50 first- and third-party healthcare AI models across modalities like radiology, pathology, dermatology, and protein analysis. Key models include MedImageInsight for image embedding, MedImageParse for segmentation, and CXRReportGen for drafting imaging reports.

Building on this foundation, Microsoft now provides premium versions of two proprietary AI models—CXRReportGen Premium and MedImageInsight Premium—trained on high-value datasets for superior accuracy and task-specific performance. These models allow developers and ISVs to create advanced imaging solutions without starting from scratch, supporting use cases such as image quality checks, image-to-image search, exam parameter classification, and metadata analysis.

Most importantly, our partners are also pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and offering radiology-specific AI apps and agents that can surface directly in Dragon Copilot.

• Lunit, a global leader in AI-powered cancer screening and diagnostics, brings advanced AI-powered image analysis for mammography exams to Dragon Copilot, allowing radiologists to receive real-time insights directly within their reporting workflow. Lunit’s comprehensive breast screening data assists radiologists in classifying and correlating abnormalities. By integrating Lunit’s algorithms, Dragon Copilot helps surface critical findings and optimize report accuracy without disrupting clinical interpretation—supporting diagnostic efficiency and better patient care.
• Zotec extends the value of Dragon Copilot by integrating revenue cycle management and billing intelligence directly into the radiologist’s workflow, helping ensure reports are complete, compliant, and satisfy quality measures before final sign-off. This seamless connection reduces the risk of missed billing information and the need for addenda, saving time and improving reimbursement accuracy. By making Zotec’s expertise available, Dragon Copilot empowers radiology teams to focus on clinical care while automating complex administrative tasks.

Lunit and Zotec are part of a broader ecosystem of partners bringing new AI innovations to Dragon Copilot customers. The collaborative innovation between Microsoft and its partners keeps solutions adaptable, secure, and tailored to the evolving needs of healthcare professionals.

Expanding what cloud, data, and AI can do for radiology

The power of our ecosystem extends beyond Dragon Copilot. At RSNA 2025, we’re extending that innovation across the broader Microsoft Azure ecosystem, showcasing partners who are transforming imaging workflows and data management in the cloud.

• Merge by Merative, from first click to final read, accelerates imaging workflows in the cloud.
• CitiusTech helps organizations consolidate their medical imaging on Azure with their digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) migration suite.
• Qumulo allows for intelligent retention and lifecycle management of imaging data in one unified file system on Azure.
• Milvue delivers both automated X-ray measurements and pathology detection for chest and appendicular skeleton imaging, supporting both pediatric and adult patients.

PowerScribe One

Harness AI to achieve new levels of reporting accuracy and quality.

Learn more

Learn more about AI adoption in radiology

• See Dragon Copilot and our radiology solutions, including partner innovations, live at RSNA booth #1311.
• Not attending RSNA 2025? Contact your account executive to schedule a demo.
• For advice on how you can accelerate AI adoption in your organization, explore the 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief.

*Dragon Copilot for radiology is currently in preview for PowerScribe One customers. 

The post Driving a unified AI experience at RSNA 2025: Microsoft Dragon Copilot expands to radiologists, transforming the reporting workflow appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

Leaders in the AI era are reimagining what AI can amplify: creativity, expertise, and the human ingenuity and leadership that drives progress. A recent IDC study commissioned by Microsoft shows that Frontier Firms are customizing AI for their unique workflows and seeing three times greater returns on their AI investments. Why? Because this approach keeps people at the center. They’re using AI to tackle big challenges, empower higher-value work, and help industries adapt quickly in a world where efficiency and resilience are non-negotiable.

Becoming Frontier isn’t reserved for tech disruptors or startups. Legacy brands across industries are bending the curve on AI innovation, pairing decades of expertise with AI-first differentiation to reinvent processes and accelerate growth. In a world where more than 99% of companies fail to reach 100 years in business,¹ centennial companies—brands that have been around for 100 years or more—are proving that reinvention is the key to longevity. Today, they’re using Microsoft AI to eliminate the mundane and unlock creativity to accelerate their journey to becoming Frontier.

Companies including The Kraft Heinz Company, Levi Strauss & Co., Wells Fargo, and Land O’Lakes have been serving customers for more than a century and remain leading household names because they never stood still. They’re positioning themselves at the forefront of AI innovation.

When you think about how quickly humans have grasped the concepts of AI, it’s influencing how they do everyday life right now. Compared to past technologies introduced into business or corporate settings, the learning curve and the adoption rate are not something that you have to worry about as much because people are actually craving it and they’re looking for it.

—Ken Meyer, Chief Information Officer for Enterprise Functions at Wells Fargo

These centennial brands show that reinvention isn’t a one-time event—it’s a mindset. By pairing their own expertise with a trusted partner like Microsoft, they’re transforming operations, accelerating innovation, and setting new benchmarks for what’s possible. Let’s look at how The Kraft Heinz Company, Levi Strauss & Co., Wells Fargo, and Land O’Lakes are leading the way.

Influencing the future with the wisdom of the past

In the consumer goods industry where companies are balancing shifting consumer preferences, supply chain complexity, and speed-to-market, AI-powered insights are especially crucial. The Kraft Heinz Company, one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies, is demonstrating how it is reaching for historical data as it prepares the organization to thrive in the future with the recent introduction of The Cookbook.

Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI and trained on a proprietary central database, The Cookbook is a proprietary AI agent that puts decades of institutional wisdom around HEINZ Tomato Ketchup production processes at employees’ fingertips. With The Cookbook, users can ask questions on everything from the thickness and color of a batch of ketchup to insights about the efficiency of production processes, and more. Preserving and digitizing institutional knowledge and subject matter expertise in this way supports improvements in production consistency, quality, and efficiency—leaning into a legacy of innovation to maintain the quality that’s made HEINZ the world’s best-selling ketchup.

As part of our long-term strategy, we’re harnessing disruptive digital solutions to fuel growth across the organization. In doing so, we’re transforming the way we work, streamlining processes, enhancing decision making, and more—all of which enable us to continue delivering the great-tasting products consumers know and love as well as continue to innovate and address evolving preferences.

—Oliver Ganschar, Head of Digital Product Management and Innovation at The Kraft Heinz Company

The Cookbook joins a robust lineup of generative and agentic AI-powered projects already in use at The Kraft Heinz Company to optimize marketing, production, supply chain functions, and more. They have streamlined operations for Claussen pickles, cut manufacturing waste, and dramatically reduced timelines for brand asset creation across The Kraft Heinz Company’s portfolio. The digital-first solutions empower employees to focus on high-value tasks, make decisions rooted in data, and enhance engagement.

“When it comes to AI, we’re exploring integrated solutions that can drive scalability and connectivity across our organization end to end, rather than siloed deployment or disconnected applications,” said Ganschar. “We aim to create a connected ecosystem that enables our teams to work more efficiently and effectively, and this includes evaluating applications of generative and agentic AI in ways that we believe can unlock further value for our teams and the business.”

The Kraft Heinz Company and Microsoft have also collaborated on a Supply Chain Control Tower to preempt interruptions and develop digital twins of the company’s manufacturing facilities to virtually test and troubleshoot new processes. Together, these efforts hone The Kraft Heinz Company’s competitive edge, strengthening its ability to get products to market faster, better serve customers, and drive innovation.

Our collaboration with Microsoft has been an important part of our digital transformation, helping us drive innovation and efficiencies through machine learning and advanced analytics so we can get products into the market faster, better serve our customers and, ultimately, deliver on consumer demand.

—Oliver Ganschar, Head of Digital Product Management and Innovation at The Kraft Heinz Company

As The Kraft Heinz Company looks to continue leading the curve on AI innovation, it plans to scale The Cookbook beyond HEINZ Tomato Ketchup.

“We aim to use key learnings and insights from The Cookbook pilot phases to scale to other brands, products, and Kraft Heinz businesses, and we are currently in the process of exploring additional use cases for the technology,” said Ganschar.

Prioritizing data in decision-making at scale

Enthusiasm around AI is not just confined to the C-Suite—it is growing throughout entire organizations. Ken Meyer, Chief Information Officer for Enterprise Functions at Wells Fargo, says employees at every level are clamoring for AI products, with more than 30,000 using Microsoft 365 Copilot since it was rolled out in June 2025. The active usage rate for enabled employees is 92%, demonstrating the value the tool offers to the employees.

It’s really a proof point saying that not only did people want to use these products, but they were waiting for it and excited about it, and what’s really exciting is understanding the usage across the different ways in which they’ve engaged: creating content, doing summarization, and researching. That’s real time saved for our Microsoft 365 licensed users.

—Ken Meyer, Chief Information Officer for Enterprise Functions at Wells Fargo

This kind of data is the foundation of decision-making at the 173-year-old financial institution, particularly when it comes to choosing solutions to put in the hands of employees. Analytics drove Wells Fargo’s 2021 migration to Microsoft Azure as its primary public cloud provider and guided subsequent rollouts of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft SharePoint to enhance productivity and strengthen security. Now AI is increasing efficiency at Wells Fargo, with generative and agent capabilities in GitHub, Microsoft Copilot, and other Microsoft AI solutions equipping employees to more effectively support clients, each other, and the organization.

Organizations across the financial services industry are seeing the opportunities AI can create to unlock greater innovation and business value at an accelerated pace. It plays a critical role in streamlining operations and compliance management—making processes more efficient and secure.

Microsoft understands what it takes to be an enterprise business and do things at scale. When you think about being in a highly regulated industry, being a bank our size, and the commitments that we have to the number of clients that we serve, it’s important and it gives us a lot of confidence.

—Ken Meyer, Chief Information Officer for Enterprise Functions at Wells Fargo

Weaving innovation and intuition into all operations

In retail, as in finance, leaders must keep pace with their customers’ rapid adoption of emerging technologies. From evolving consumer expectations to the rise of omnichannel experiences, agility is key. Levi Strauss & Co., navigating new audiences and sales models, has partnered with Microsoft to stay resilient and innovative, using digital tools to streamline operations, personalize engagement, and scale sustainably in a fast-moving retail landscape.

Retail has always been a story of change. Microsoft is a big part of how we scale for the next 100 years.

—Jason Gowans, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Levi Strauss & Co.

On the heels of a massive cloud migration to Azure, the 172-year-old company is prepared to lead in a new era of agentic AI. The first five years of a seven-year digital transformation at Levi Strauss & Co. saw streamlined workflows, improved analytics and data quality, and more robust security—enabling the company to scale AI-powered innovation across the organization. 

Now, Levi Strauss & Co. and Microsoft are collaborating on AI-powered solutions that enhance employee decision-making, efficiency, and creativity with seamless access to insights. The newest example of this is the development of a new “superagent,” which has the intelligence to intuitively understand which applications and subagents to activate based on a user’s prompt. 

The foundation of the superagent streamlines the process to develop and integrate future agents—creating substantial savings. With AI woven into every experience for employees and fans, by extension, Levi Strauss & Co. is supercharging its trajectory toward becoming a fan-obsessed, direct-to-consumer business. 

We believe in performance, but our core value is also integrity. Whatever we choose to do with AI, it’s going to be grounded in making sure that it’s the right decision for our people, for the company, and for the community. 

—Sheena Kunhiraman, Vice President of People Systems and Analytics at Levi Strauss & Co.

Modernizing a trusted resource to elevate human expertise

Land O’Lakes, one of America’s premier agribusiness and food companies, is a member-owned cooperative with industry-leading operations that span the spectrum from agricultural production to consumer foods. Behind the scenes, the company has executed a sweeping digital transformation: migrating more than two-thirds of its IT environment to Azure, driving widespread adoption of Microsoft Copilot, and fine-tuning its enterprise copilot.

We are not a tech company, but a tech-forward company. Having a true technology partner that helps our digital transformation was the foundation of our partnership with Microsoft. We wanted a bigger bat to swing. Microsoft gives us that.

—Teddy Bekele, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Land O’Lakes

This modern infrastructure is the foundation for AI innovation and serves as the backbone for a new digital assistant called “Oz.” The assistant combines the power of Microsoft AI with Land O’Lakes’ deep agricultural expertise to help farmers make data-informed decisions to maximize yield potential and mitigate risk throughout the growing season.

Land O’Lakes is owned by highly knowledgeable agricultural retailers who act as trusted advisors to farmers. Historically, these retail agronomists have used the Land O’Lakes Crop Protection Guide, an 800-page agronomic resource built on 20 years of data and millions of agriculture-specific data points, to assist farmers. Oz allows retail agronomists to quickly surface critical agricultural information specific to a farm’s unique features and needs in a mobile-friendly format.

The idea has always been to make that agronomist the hero at the farm gate. Instead of flipping through a book, now agronomists can have this deep technical discussion with the AI. So, we go from a good recommendation to a highly customizable recommendation for that farmer.

—Teddy Bekele, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Land O’Lakes

Oz is just the latest example of how Land O’Lakes’ AI transformation has enabled them to bring cutting-edge, AI-powered solutions to the farmers they serve.

Bringing AI into the next Frontier

By thoughtfully integrating AI into many levels and functions of their businesses, centennial companies are demonstrating the ingenuity and resilience that has allowed them to dynamically navigate past moments of disruption for more than 100 years. We’re proud to partner with these Frontier Firms and support their continued transformation.

Explore examples of AI in action from this year’s Microsoft Ignite 2025 conference to envision how Microsoft’s industry-specific solutions can augment your organization’s expertise and experiences with AI.

Use our resources to innovate with AI and start your journey to becoming a Frontier Firm.

¹ Building Indiana Business, The Centennial Secret: How Do Companies Last 100 Years?, October 23, 2020.

The post From legacy to Frontier: How 100-year brands are leading AI innovation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

To better understand this transformation, Microsoft commissioned a global study with the International Data Corporation (IDC) of more than 4,000 business leaders responsible for AI decisions. The findings reveal 68% of these companies are using AI today but the real difference lies in how they’re using it. Frontier firms, the ones leading in AI Transformation, report they are achieving returns that are three times higher than slow adopters.

What sets Frontier firms apart

Their success goes beyond efficiency and productivity at scale, driving growth, expansion and industry leadership in a new AI-powered economy. Based on the IDC study, Microsoft has identified five key lessons learned in becoming a Frontier firm and how organizations can transform their business with AI.

#1 EXPANDING AI IMPACT ACROSS EVERY BUSINESS FUNCTION

On average Frontier firms are using AI across seven business functions. Over 70% are using AI in customer service, marketing, IT, product development and cybersecurity. These functions benefit from AI’s ability to automate workflows, generate content and detect anomalies in real time. This broad adoption is translating into measurable business impact: Frontier firms report better outcomes at a rate that is 4X greater than slow adopters across brand differentiation (87%), cost efficiency (86%), top-line growth (88%) and customer experience (85%).

BlackRock is transforming its investment lifecycle with Microsoft AI integrated into its Aladdin platform. Embedded across 20 apps and used by tens of thousands of users, AI tools help client relationship managers save hours per client by generating personalized briefs and opportunity analyses, while portfolio managers access real-time analytics and research summaries through Aladdin Copilot. The result is faster insights, improved data quality and enhanced risk management; helping BlackRock and its clients gain an advantage while enhancing client service, compliance and portfolio management.

#2: UNLOCKING INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC VALUE

While many organizations start their AI journey with personal productivity gains like automating tasks and improving efficiency, Frontier firms are moving further, deploying AI for strategic, industry-specific applications. According to the study, 67% are monetizing industry-specific AI use cases to boost revenue.

Industries at the forefront of this transformation include financial services, healthcare and manufacturing. Each is finding powerful, practical ways to apply AI to its most complex challenges. In financial services, organizations are strengthening fraud detection, accelerating transaction reconciliation and elevating customer support. In healthcare, it is helping clinicians generate accurate documentation, assist in diagnostics and deliver more personalized care. In manufacturing, AI is driving predictive maintenance, optimizing production schedules and automating quality inspections.

Mercedes-Benz is scaling AI across its global production network to advance automotive innovation, stabilize supply chain volatility, simplify production complexity and meet sustainability demands. Its MO360 data platform connects more than 30 car plants worldwide to the Microsoft Cloud for real-time data access, global optimization and analytics. The Digital Factory Chatbot Ecosystem uses a multi-agent system to empower employees with collaborative insights. Paint Shop AI leverages machine learning simulations to diagnose efficiency declines and reduce energy consumption of the buildings and machines — including 20% energy savings in the Rastatt paint shop — and NVIDIA Omniverse on Azure powers digital twins for agile planning and continuous improvement.

#3: BUILDING CUSTOM AI SOLUTIONS FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Today, 58% of Frontier firms are using custom AI solutions. Custom AI solutions allow businesses to embed proprietary knowledge, tone and compliance into every interaction. They can be fine-tuned on proprietary data or industry-specific knowledge, enabling higher accuracy in predictions or content generation and better alignment with business goals and compliance needs.

Within the next 24 months, 77% of Frontier firms plan to use custom AI solutions. This reflects a growing trend that AI leaders are layering in deeper strategic integrations of AI across their business.

As customers seek to use AI more to shop and search for products, luxury lifestyle company Ralph Lauren developed a personal, frictionless, inspirational and accessible solution to blend fashion with cutting-edge AI. Working with Microsoft, Ralph Lauren developed Ask Ralph: an AI-powered conversational tool providing styling tips and outfit recommendations from across the Polo Ralph Lauren brand. Powered by Azure OpenAI, the AI tool uses a natural language search engine to adapt dynamically to specific language inputs and interpret user intent to improve accuracy. It supports complex queries with exploratory or nuanced information needs with contextual understanding; and can discern tone, satisfaction and intent to refine recommendations. The tool also picks up on cues like location-based insights or event-driven needs. With Ask Ralph, customers can now reimagine how they shop online by putting the brand’s unique and iconic take on style right into their own hands.

#4: AGENTIC AI: THE NEW DIFFERENTIATOR FOR BUSINESS LEADERS

Agentic AI — systems that can reason, plan and act with human guidance — is fast becoming the next defining capability of Frontier organizations. In the next two years, IDC estimates the number of companies using agentic AI will triple.

Leaders today face a familiar challenge — teams are operating at full capacity, yet the demand for innovation and impact continues to grow. That’s where AI agents come in. In finance, they can surface real-time insights, provide policy guidance, review deal documents and assist in sourcing suppliers. In sales, agents are becoming always-on teammates — building pipelines, unifying insights across CRM systems, meetings, emails and the web and helping sellers qualify leads and draft personalized outreach. In customer service, AI agents can manage cases, maintain knowledge accuracy and interpret customer intent.

Dow is using agents to automate the shipping invoice analysis process and streamline its global supply chain to unlock new efficiencies and value. Receiving more than 100,000 shipping invoices via PDF each year, Dow built an autonomous agent in Copilot Studio to scan for billing inaccuracies and surface them in a dashboard for employee review. Using Freight Agent — a second agent built in Copilot Studio — employees can investigate further by “dialoguing with the data” in natural language. The agents are helping employees solve the challenge of hidden losses autonomously within minutes rather than weeks or months. Dow expects to save millions of dollars on shipping costs through increased accuracy in logistic rates and billing within the first year.

#5: AI BUDGETS ARE GROWING AND SO IS THE TEAM BEHIND THEM

71% of respondents plan to increase their AI budgets, with funding coming from IT and non-IT sources. These investments are no longer confined to the IT department or the Chief Digital Officer’s office.

To truly unlock AI’s transformational potential, it requires everyone collaborating across functions to drive innovation, adoption and impact: 34% of respondents are adding net new investment, 24% are repurposing existing IT budgets and 13% are reallocating funds from non-IT areas such as operations, HR or marketing. This diversified funding strategy signals that AI is no longer viewed as a niche technology — it’s becoming a core enabler of enterprise-wide transformation.

“IDC is projecting that the global economic impact of AI is projected to reach $22.3 trillion by 2030 (3.7% of global GDP in 2030), estimating the return on AI investments requires both strong measurement capabilities and a robust business case — one that models both cost implications and the potential for responsible value creation,” said David Schubmehl, Vice President AI and Automation for IDC.

The AI imperative: Act now to lead the future

The opportunity to demand more from AI is now. Among organizations surveyed, 22% are Frontier firms, realizing measurable impact and moving with speed, while 39% risk falling behind. Many are navigating challenges around security, privacy, governance and cost, as well as ethical considerations, integration complexity and scaling from pilot to production.

The message is clear: those who embrace AI benefit from momentum in efficiency, customer experience and innovation. To stay competitive, leaders should act now and embrace AI not as an experiment but as a strategic imperative for growth.

Closing the gap: Start your transformation today

Success starts with investment, governance and organizational readiness. Having a robust infrastructure that is secure, reliable and scalable to support AI initiatives is critical. The emergence of Frontier firms shows that customized AI deployment and responsible oversight can drive ROI and innovation.

Explore how Microsoft’s AI solutions can transform your organization. Leverage our resources to innovate with AI and start your journey to becoming a Frontier firm.

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