At Microsoft Digital, our mission is to transform the digital employee experience across devices, applications, and hybrid infrastructure.

But what fuels that transformation?

Data.

Enterprise data, backed by a strong strategy and culture, powers the technologies that drive Microsoft forward.

Let’s explore some of the ways data is the fuel that powers IT at Microsoft.

Modernizing our corporate functions

In the era of AI, data plays a crucial role in our effort to modernize corporate functions like Human Resources, Finance, and Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA). For instance, employees can use our Employee Self Service Agent to retrieve information and insights in real time using natural language queries. In the past, these actions were either conducted manually or required an IT support ticket, both of which resulted in a negative user experience. Now, employees can use the agent to complete their tasks more efficiently and with the confidence that the data they’re working with is secure.

Another impact of the powerful combination of data and AI is being realized by HR generalists. The Microsoft HR Business Intelligence team manages an immense number of Power BI dashboards. Instead of manually sifting through vast amounts of information, our Microsoft Digital team has developed new capabilities that allow HR generalists to use natural language queries to find the Power BI dashboards they need in real time. These tools use generative AI to optimize the time employees spend searching for information, so they can focus on their strategic deliverables.

“AI is not just about algorithms—it’s about the data that powers them,” says Faisal Nasir, a principal architect in Microsoft Digital. “A well-structured enterprise data strategy ensures that AI can drive automation, insights, and business transformation at scale.”

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve defined a data standard for our AI workloads that we refer to as AI-ready data—data that’s available, complete, accurate, and high quality. AI-ready data allows tools like Microsoft Fabric for data management and Microsoft Purview for governance make the most of AI tools and machine learning for the company’s corporate functions.

By using data mesh, a decentralized data architecture approach, data scientists and engineers build data products across organizational siloes or workspaces using the One Lake feature of Fabric, illuminating cross-domain insights. By using Purview’s Shortcut feature, engineering teams can easily request and receive approval for access to the information they need to manage their organization more effectively and efficiently.

In the race to adopt machine learning and AI, organizations often focus on model sophistication while ignoring the foundation: the data. Without clean, labeled, contextualized, and well-governed data, even the most advanced algorithms will falter.

AI-ready data isn’t just nice to have—it’s the make-or-break factor in every successful AI initiative. Models trained on poor-quality data will amplify bias, hallucinate patterns, and make dangerously flawed predictions.

Meanwhile, organizations that invest in high-quality, AI-ready data gain not just better models, but a long-term competitive edge. They build systems that learn faster, adapt better, and scale smarter. In short, AI-ready data isn’t the back end. It is the strategy.

“AI is only as smart as the data it’s fed—and if that data isn’t AI-ready, you’re not building intelligence, you’re building illusions,” says Patrice Pelland, a partner engineering manager in Microsoft Digital.

{Learn how we’re transforming our data governance at Microsoft with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric.}

Optimizing our employee experience

Microsoft Digital’s user-centric, coherent design philosophy puts the user—an employee or a guest—at the heart of every decision and aligns all our facility’s services, physical and digital, to the needs of people. We employ a data-driven approach to the employee experience, using AI to aid in decision making, improving how Microsoft employees interact with technology, physical spaces, and other Microsoft resources.

A few examples of how we’re using data and AI to improve the employee experience include:

Commute optimization: AI is being used to predict the best routes and Connector buses for employees, improving their commute experience. Microsoft Digital observes frequency and travel patterns to predict and recommend optimal routes to the desired destination, thereby decreasing the amount of time spent in transit.

Dining solutions: Microsoft Digital is actively working to enhance the dining experience through the integration of AI capabilities. We’re enabling insights based on data related to dining popularity—essentially, where and what do employees like to eat? By using AI and machine learning, we aim to offer a richer Copilot experience to users.

For instance, we’re developing features that analyze cafe station popularity over time, and calculate the average fulfillment times for orders at each station. With this data, employees can use Copilot to make informed decisions about where to dine based on real-time insights into station capacity, foot traffic, and average efficiency.

Occupancy predictions: Predicting employee occupancy in on-campus facilities helps to optimize utility usage. By using AI and machine learning to understand footfall patterns, the team can adjust heating and cooling systems to save energy and improve efficiency.

{Learn how we’re making transportation seamless and efficient at Microsoft with the power of data and AI.}

Managing our network infrastructure

Managing Microsoft’s network infrastructure effectively is crucial for maintaining productivity and collaboration. A data-driven approach can provide the necessary insights and tools to ensure a seamless connectivity experience, efficient diagnostics, performance and cost optimization, and proactive security management.

Pillars of data transformation

The Infrastructure and Engineering Services team (IES) in Microsoft Digital has a close partnership with our data engineering team to transform network infrastructure IT. A consolidated data lakehouse delivers data on inventory, configurations, health, device hardware and software compliance, vulnerability analytics, and more. The data platform supports an ecosystem of data citizens (network engineers, site operators, and security engineers) to self-serve on monitoring, dashboards, and diagnostics. The same data lakehouse enables applications to build rich network visualizations, implement AIOps to automatically manage incidents, and deliver network dedicated AI agents.

The IES data team also plays a crucial role as Customer Zero for the Microsoft data analytics and governance products, like Fabric, Purview, and Copilot. Their contributions to testing and to providing feedback are invaluable for the development and improvement of these products, including:

• Using language models to automate the creation of descriptions of data schemas, reducing the time required to publish data products into the Purview catalog.
• Developing Copilot agents that transform natural language prompts into Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries, further increasing the accessibility of the data for IT technicians and business owners. KQL is a powerful tool used to query structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

“Global connectivity—connecting all employees globally and ensuring they can access necessary resources from wherever they are—is our foremost priority on the Infrastructure Engineering Services team,” says Oana Nica, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital.

Data-driven security

Security in the era of AI is more challenging than ever given the increasing scope and frequency of cybersecurity attacks and the sophistication of threat actors. The investigation by the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) regarding the Storm-0558 cyberattack, from summer 2023, emphasized the severity of the threats facing our company and our customers. Managing the security of a digital landscape with the breadth and complexity of Microsoft is our top priority.

The Secure Future Initiative (SFI), a company-wide effort aimed at addressing security issues across Microsoft involves multiple organizations and requires a coordinated effort to manage and track progress. Data management plays a critical role in the success of SFI. A data-driven approach to security management can provide the necessary insights and tools to ensure compliance and prompt attention to security concerns.

One of SFI’s key components is providing data views for leadership. These data views help leaders understand the status of their organizations, identify areas that need attention, and make informed decisions.

Microsoft Digital has built tools using Azure DevOps to ensure that leaders have the necessary insights to manage security effectively. Additionally, creating a reporting structure to track progress and compliance is essential for managing security initiatives. A transparent, common-sense structure combined with high-quality data helps ensure that initiatives are completed on time and that any exceptions are managed effectively.

Improving culture with data

In Microsoft Digital, we’re fostering an environment that prioritizes data quality and effective governance. Central to that effort is our system of continuous improvement (CI), an operating model that enhances our products, services, and processes with the goal of achieving improved efficiency, quality, and overall performance over time. In the realm of data and AI, CI is integral to fortifying data integrity, accelerating model development, and enabling data-driven decision-making at scale. By embedding dynamic feedback loops into our workflows, we can adapt rapidly to evolving business needs, mitigate risks, and maximize the value of our AI investments.

Building a robust culture that emphasizes transparency, accessibility, and continuous improvement is imperative for our organization to maximize the value of AI. Our Microsoft Digital Data Council creates curricula and sponsors learning activities to equip our employees with the skills required to thrive in a data and AI-centric world. The curriculum includes high-level courses on data concepts, applications and extensibility of AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, in addition to data products like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric.

“At Microsoft Digital, we recognize that a strong data culture is essential to engineering excellence and AI-driven innovation,” Nasir says. “Through architecture community discussions, we focus on robust design, governed data products, and scalable, AI-ready solutions. By embedding a design-first mindset and continuous improvement into our data strategy, we regularly assess, refine, and evolve our practices.”

With a better understanding of the impact a strong data culture can have on productivity and continuous improvement, Microsoft Digital employees not only drive the AI transformation, but also gain insights into their organization’s cultural dynamics and make informed decisions to foster a positive and inclusive environment.

{Learn how a Center of Excellence is powering the technical veracity of our AI deployment at Microsoft.}

Here are our tips for using data to transform your IT operations:

• AI success starts with high-quality data: Ensuring data is governed, accessible, and AI-ready is critical to driving automation, insights, and innovation.
• Data products enhance efficiency and decision-making: Tools like the Employee Self-Service Agent empower employees by providing instant access to secure, relevant data.
• A modern data architecture drives enterprise connectivity: Implementing a data mesh approach enables seamless cross-functional collaboration, breaking down organizational silos.
• Security and compliance require a data-driven approach: Initiatives like SFI (Secure Future Initiative) use structured data insights to proactively mitigate security threats.
• Optimizing employee experience through data insights: AI-powered solutions improve commutes, workplace efficiency, and resource allocation through predictive analytics.

Discover how Microsoft 365 Copilot can transform your digital experience.

• See our approach to conditioning unstructured data for AI at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re powering our data governance with Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.
• Check out how the Microsoft Digital Data Council guides our data strategy.
• Learn how we’re empowering our employees with the Microsoft Power Platform.
• Explore our guide that covers how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Top five ways data is the fuel that powers IT at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT organizations—at Microsoft and companies around the world—will never be the same thanks to AI.

For all the benefits that AI and machine learning offer, one element we and companies like ours need to get right is data. After all, data is what’s powering the AI revolution.

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, getting our data to an AI-ready state is a fundamental imperative. As such, we’re focused on four key areas of data management: quality, governance, compliance, and infrastructure.

Understanding AI-ready data

AI-ready data is data that’s available, complete, accurate, and high quality. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization.

Our days of assembling, cleaning, and massaging data each time we launch a data-driven project are gone. Using guidance from our Microsoft Digital Data Council, a multi-disciplinary team that’s responsible for defining data quality standards for Microsoft Digital, and our Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence (CoE), we enhance our data discoverability and documentation before we launch any new AI-powered product or experience.  

“Our customers understand that data is the fuel that powers IT,” says Patrice Pelland, partner engineering manager for Microsoft Digital. “By ensuring our employees have access to data that is complete and accurate and prioritizing good governance, Microsoft is embracing the generational change brought on by AI.”

AI is already having transformative impact globally. In Microsoft Digital, we’re driving internal adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot in every division of the company to increase productivity, enhance creativity, and improve efficiency. The benefits are already being realized, but the fact remains that Copilot and other AI tools are only as good as the data that supports them. The last thing we want our employees to experience is inaccurate or incomplete answers from AI-generated content. Powering tools like Copilot with AI-ready data allows our employees to work confidently, knowing that they can trust the information they’re working with.

{Learn more about how we’re responding to the AI Revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.}

Enhancing data management with AI

Before we truly realized the benefits of tools like Copilot, we needed to incorporate AI-ready data into the same data management and governance tools that many of you use: Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview. For decades, the challenge of data analysts and engineers was maintaining a consistently reliable “source of truth” despite inconsistent data quality, insufficient governance, and years of collecting data in siloes. Fabric and Purview help to resolve these issues.

Fabric is our unified data and AI platform that combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) solution. Part of our AI-ready data strategy includes embracing data-mesh architecture. By using Fabric’s data lake, OneLake, to connect to data from anywhere and work from the same copy across platforms, our data scientists and engineers are executing that strategy. Fabric’s ability to unify data sources provides data professionals with the AI-ready data they need, all in one SaaS experience.

“There is no good AI without a solid, curated data stack,” says Delphine Clement, a principal product manager for the Microsoft Purview product team. “Democratizing data unlocks the power of enterprise data by cataloging, curating, and certifying it, then making it available to employees.”

Purview is our primary tool for data governance and ensures the security and compliance of Microsoft’s data assets. Purview has been reimagined to provide an integrated SaaS solution to the practice of data governance for enterprise-wide users. Delivering AI-ready data is a priority for maximizing the effectiveness of Purview and tools like it.

In addition to providing a unified data catalog that helps us classify and identify defects in our enterprise data, Purview enables Microsoft Digital to safely manage our data estate by applying data sensitivity labels to all the digital assets that comprise our Microsoft 365 content estate. Copilot uses sensitivity labels, file permissions, and rights management services to ensure that private or sensitive data isn’t reasoned over and overexposed. Purview also helps us maintain an effective chain of custody for our digital assets with strong data loss protection (DLP) capabilities to help us catch the 1% case when sensitive data leaks from our environment. An effective data governance strategy powered by Microsoft Purview is essential to enabling Microsoft Digital to support Responsible AI at Microsoft.

Our everyday corporate functions like Microsoft HR and Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) depend on Purview to provide accurate data to complete projects, whether they’re smaller in scope or large-scale initiatives. For example, the accuracy of legal data required to complete a brief for a court filing is essential. With Purview, our CELA teams know the information they’re working with is high quality, accurate, and complete.

{Explore how we’re transforming our data governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric.}

Accelerating time to value with powerful AI models

AI-ready data can fast-track value realization by leveraging powerful AI models. On Microsoft platforms, AI data model options for information retrieval and custom engine agents offer varying levels of flexibility and control.

Agents focused on knowledge or information retrieval are built using tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio and operate on our pre-configured AI models and orchestrators, which are the software layers that manage and coordinate the execution of tasks and services across multiple systems. This approach simplifies development by eliminating the need for organizations to manage their own AI infrastructure, as these agents utilize the Copilot engine to handle prompts and leverage foundational models. Additionally, retrieval agents have native access to indexed Microsoft Graph data, such as SharePoint and OneDrive files, enhancing their integration capabilities.

{Find out how we’re unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.}

In contrast, custom agents provide organizations with the ability to. integrate their own AI models, including models from Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry These agents—built using tools like the Teams Toolkit, Azure AI, and Microsoft Copilot Studio—can be tailored to specific domains or workflows. This approach allows for the use of custom foundational models and orchestrators, enabling specialized experiences that align closely with their unique requirements. However, this increased flexibility necessitates a greater level of security and compliance oversight, as organizations are responsible for managing and maintaining their custom AI infrastructure. 

{Learn how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.}

AI-ready data + Copilot

Microsoft Dynamics for Sales (MSX) and Microsoft Sales are our principal platforms for managing customer and sales data. MSX is the pipeline through which we manage the sales of Microsoft products. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is already being used to improve the data quality and hygiene of MSX. Instead of sellers needing to manually update sales each month or clean up duplicate data, Copilot for Sales can do the work automatically, freeing employees to focus their time more strategically.

“There is a great opportunity for AI-ready data to help with data hygiene in tools like MSX and Microsoft Sales,” says Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager for Employee Experience Success. “It can quickly organize account data to reflect the correct hierarchies and account parenting.”

Microsoft Sales is the database of all purchases from Microsoft. The amount of information is massive, and data quality is critical. Thanks to AI-ready data, in the future Copilot will assist with organizing the data associated with thousands of accounts, updating hierarchies and maintaining account contact information.

{See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.}

Accelerating corporate functions growth

All corporate functions are being asked to do more with less because they can no longer afford to grow operational costs linearly with top-line revenue or employee count. AI tools, powered by AI-ready data, will play a fundamental role in transforming corporate functions’ workflows while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making.

Human Resources agents will be empowered to summarize support cases, find answers to user inquiries, and craft email responses faster and more effectively using AI tools backed by AI ready data. Legal professionals in CELA will exploit AI-ready data within CELA’s workflows to provide swift access to legal findings by consolidating trusted knowledge assets across diverse data sources. Global Workplace Services (GWS), our facilities management team, will use AI-ready data to forecast occupancy and make real-estate portfolio recommendations based on complete and accurate information.

{Learn how AI is revolutionizing the way we support corporate functions at Microsoft.}

Democratizing access to enterprise data, powered by AI, is a strategic imperative for Microsoft. We’re focused on delivering a strong data culture that prioritizes data quality, infrastructure, and governance. Emphasizing AI-ready data to power our data and AI solutions ensures that Microsoft meets the needs of the company, customers, and employees.

Here are some tips for getting started with getting your data AI-ready:

• Identify and assign enterprise data owners to implement and oversee the processes that guarantee data quality.
• Verify and document existing data sources to understand where datasets need to be connected across domains.
• Ensure strategic governance by using tools like Microsoft Purview to focus on the origin, sensitivity, and lifecycle of your enterprise data.
• Enterprise data is one of your most valuable assets. Form a data council to help promote a data culture to ensure your data is AI-ready.

Ready to experience Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here.

• Learn more about Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric.
• Discover how we’re transforming the employee experience at Microsoft with AI.
• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Transforming our data culture with AI-ready data appeared first on Inside Track Blog.