Today, the company has grown into a global organization with more than 200,000 employees. They all rely on Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—to provide the tools, technologies, and solutions that empower them to accomplish more every day.

The need for digital transformation

The history of information technology is one of constant evolution, and the pace of change has never felt greater than it does right now. The AI capabilities and other groundbreaking innovations unveiled in the last few years show the potential to radically transform our world and change the way we think about and operate all IT services.

When the world pivoted to remote online work and collaboration because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was just one example of how digital transformation doesn’t always happen in a straight line or on a predictable schedule. Our company’s history of shaping and adapting its IT organization to the latest challenges faced by employees and partners is no different; marked by big bets and strategic shifts that reflect our ever-changing world.

Mapping our IT journey

Today, Microsoft Digital is the team that powers, protects, and transforms the digital employee experience across all devices, applications, and hybrid infrastructure at the company. Using our deep knowledge and experience in enterprise IT, we’re pivoting to help lead the company’s AI transformation while also sharing our journey with customers so they can take advantage of this generational opportunity to reshape their businesses and IT operations.

To understand where we’re going, it helps to take a look at where we’ve been. This article explores the details of the major eras of our IT history and then shifts to examine the trendlines and technological innovations that are shaping Microsoft now.

On-Premises IT (founding to 2009)

It’s useful to break the history of our IT operations into different eras. For the first three decades or so from its founding in 1975, Microsoft operated with on-premises IT systems. This era was characterized by the setup, operation, and maintenance of onsite physical technology—servers, datacenters, and other hardware infrastructure.

During this time, IT roles were narrowly defined. IT team members functioned primarily as “order-takers,” with limited influence over strategic decisions.

Because funding was inconsistent, our IT organization had limited growth opportunities and relied on vendors for development work. Gaps were filled in with “shadow IT,” where internal teams would sometimes procure their own hardware or software without formal IT approval or standards.

We established security as an early priority for the company. Cofounder Bill Gates launched the Trustworthy Computing initiative more than two decades ago, an effort emphasizing the importance of security, privacy, and reliability across Microsoft products and services both internally and externally.

Our On-Premises IT era established the foundation that would become crucial to the company’s future digital transformation.

All in on the cloud: The Cloud and Culture era (2010-2018)

Cloud computing marked the next significant shift in the history of IT at Microsoft. It began in 2010 under the leadership of CEO Steve Ballmer, signaling a major break with the previous era of physical IT infrastructure and an important step toward today’s distributed-computing world.

The launch of the cloud computing platform then known as Windows Azure heralded this new era, as we transitioned away from an IT philosophy focused on the Windows desktop client toward a more platform-agnostic view. Cloud computing offered extensive advantages for customers and for our own IT environment, in terms of cost, performance, security, and scalability.

We started our journey by moving productivity workloads (Exchange and SharePoint) to the cloud. Then, we shifted new development to Azure and optimized modern applications to run in the cloud. We also moved existing applications targeted for migration to virtual machines. Today, more than 98% of our IT workloads run on Azure.

Cultural transformation

Another important shift during this era was the profound cultural transformation at Microsoft sparked by new CEO Satya Nadella, who rose to the top job at the company in 2014. Nadella had previously run the Microsoft cloud computing and enterprise group, so he was already steeped in the idea of transformational change at the company.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture. It all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Before Nadella’s ascension, Microsoft had long been known for its extremely competitive, “know-it-all” culture. Employees succeeded by showcasing their own individual achievements and how their accomplishments exceeded their peers.

Nadella changed this ethos by championing a growth mindset, encouraging employees to be “learn-it-alls” rather than “know-it-alls.” The shift included placing new importance on how employees contributed to the success of others, a value that was incorporated into individual performance reviews. Nadella made this transformation his personal mission and directed leadership to propagate the new philosophy at all levels across the organization.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture,” Nadella says. “It all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

The combination of the shift to cloud computing infrastructure and overhauling the company culture helped set the stage for the major technological innovations to come.

A new vision: The Modern Engineering era (2018-2023)

For years, IT at Microsoft had been order takers, doing what the business requested with limited ability to impact strategic priorities. That changed as we shifted to become a modern engineering organization. With support from our executive leadership, IT was elevated to become a peer engineering function at Microsoft.

Rather than simply taking orders, the team was empowered to lead with a strong vision for the future. In fact, leading with vision is the primary hallmark of our Modern Engineering era. As we moved into this era, we needed a clearly articulated view of our goals as an IT organization aligned to the needs of our business partners, as well as the resources needed to achieve them.

Role transformation

Transitioning to become a modern engineering organization required Microsoft Digital to adapt our legacy approach to IT.

Operating an engineering organization in a cloud environment meant new roles, new skills, and a new mindset. With no need to manage physical hardware, our modern IT professionals were freed to work more closely with business partners, requiring greater strategic acumen. The team was now focused on DevOps, Agile program management, and user-centric design principles.

User-centric, coherent design

Our design philosophy puts the user—an employee or guest—at the heart of every decision we make at Microsoft Digital.

The goal of this approach is to make tasks that might have previously caused friction to become simpler. Instead of dealing with disconnected systems, user-centric design introduces consistent and logical flow between services. This makes it easier for people to access services, learn how to use them, and then put them to good use.

Microsoft also embraces coherent design across all our products. A familiar look and feel, along with consistent usage patterns, accelerates employee usage and adoption. 

Embracing work-from-anywhere capability

During the pandemic, when our workforce was still fully remote, our organization was already starting to think about what the new hybrid workplace would look like when people started returning to the office. We identified three key dimensions of the employee experience:

• Physical spaces: We partner with Global Workplace Services to plan and deploy meeting spaces with amazing digital capabilities that support an inclusive approach to hybrid productivity.
• Digital capabilities: We keep employees productive and their digital environment safe and secure, no matter where they’re located or how they connect.
• Culture: A strong partnership with HR ensures that digital experiences support our company culture.

Managing shadow IT with a culture of trust

Shadow IT is the unknown and unmanaged set of applications, services, and infrastructure that are developed and managed outside standard IT policies. Shadow IT typically crops up when engineering teams are unable to support the needs of non-engineering partners, a situation that could arise from a lack of available capacity or the need for specialized domain solutions. 

While earlier eras of our IT history focused on trying to prevent shadow IT, we are now concentrating on managing it. We use Azure best practices to optimize shadow IT and Microsoft 365 governance policies to ensure that our corporate security, privacy, and accessibility standards are met. We empower our employees to create whatever they need within our tenant, including PowerApps, SharePoint sites, Teams channels, or agents, mitigating the need for “shadow” solutions while also providing visibility into how our employees are using our own technology.

Learn how optimizing our Microsoft Azure usage is helping us manage our Shadow IT.

The Era of AI (2023 to present)

The latest chapter in the history of our organization’s digital transformation is defined by the integration of AI and agents into IT operations. AI is revolutionizing how Microsoft does IT at enterprise scale, driving efficiency and innovation across the board. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience to the network, infrastructure, and devices that enable employee productivity, our AI-focused investments provide a solid foundation for the innovations that we are constantly implementing. As we look at the future of Microsoft Digital, we’re focused on four key priorities: security, service fundamentals, acting as Customer Zero, and AI-powered innovation. We’re working to excel in all four domains with the help of our industry-leading AI capabilities.  

“Our mission is to power and protect Microsoft, and that starts with an unwavering commitment to the Secure Future Initiative.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Securing our future

Security is our highest priority. The Microsoft Secure Future Initiative aligns every team with a shared approach, common priorities, and consistent milestones to harden our security posture across all products and services.  

“Prioritizing security above all else is critical to our company’s future,” Nadella says. “Every task we take on—from a line of code to a customer or partner process—is an opportunity to help bolster our own security and that of our entire ecosystem. If you’re faced with a tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security.”

The Secure Future Initiative is built on three core principles: Secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations. As the company’s IT organization, we work relentlessly to fulfill the key pillars of the Secure Future initiative across all our systems, including:

• Safeguarding identities and secrets
• Protecting tenants and isolating production systems
• Securing networks and engineering systems
• Enhancing threat detection
• Expediting response and remediation

“Our mission is to power and protect Microsoft, and that starts with an unwavering commitment to the Secure Future Initiative,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital.

Secure Future Initiative | Microsoft

Foundations: Service fundamentals

The second pillar is to maintain the highest standards of service fundamentals. These are the essential capabilities and practices that enable us to deliver reliable, secure, and compliant services companywide. Adhering to the highest standards of service fundamentals ensures that our organization continues to play a critical role in running the company’s business and enabling innovation, agility, and resilience in a fast-changing and competitive environment.

Customer Zero

The third pillar is acting as Customer Zero for Microsoft’s most important products and services, like Copilot Studio, Microsoft Teams, and Agent 365. In Microsoft Digital, we take pride in being the first customer for a wide variety of Microsoft products and services, relentlessly focusing on our own employee experience to create products that enable every person on the planet to achieve more.

Being Customer Zero means forging a deep partnership between our IT organization and product engineering groups to envision the right experiences, co-develop innovative solutions, and then listen to and act on insights gathered from our employees. We work together to stay grounded in the way our employees use our products every day, so your employees can benefit from our insights prior to external product launches.

Read about how we’re improving our employee experience through our Customer Zero focus.

AI-powered innovation

The final pillar of this era is innovating with AI to transform the digital experience at Microsoft. By doing all the fundamental work detailed above—security, foundations, and Customer Zero—extremely well, we gain the confidence and earn the trust necessary to embed AI across our full portfolio of services. We do this over three key dimensions: core IT services, employee experiences, and corporate functions.

Core IT services: Transforming and securing our network and infrastructure

We’re focused on using AI to infuse data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure and network operations. This allows us to optimize operations and increase security while simultaneously improving outcomes.

Examples include:

• Network observability and governance: Ensuring data accuracy, eliminating non-compliant hardware and software, and real-time updates
• Securing endpoints: Device management, asset management, and patching
• Zero Trust networking: Isolating device classes and limiting attacker’s movements across the network
• Network access: Azure VPN, identity management, and Secure Access Workstation (SAW) infrastructure security

Learn how we’re transforming our enterprise IT operations at Microsoft.

Core IT services: Tenant management

We manage one of the most complex tenants anywhere. Governance today is a somewhat fragmented experience, with no clear mechanism for IT to safely enable self-service asset creation for sites, Teams, groups, Power Apps, and so on. These unmanaged assets increase the risk of over-sharing sensitive data and compromise the health and security of our IT environment.

In the world of AI, security through obscurity is no longer a viable option. This means data hygiene, permission management, and data protection are essential to providing trustworthy AI tools that don’t overexpose sensitive content, while still providing quality responses.

Read about one way we’re improving security by protecting elevated-privilege accounts at Microsoft.

Core IT services: Support

We’re using generative AI to transform the way our employees interact with our support services. IT issues will be either auto-remediated or resolved remotely and instantly through conversational, personalized, and contextualized solutions, often without a human agent’s intervention.

We’ll accomplish this with a focus on the following:

• User experience: Our employees are using the AI-powered Employee Self-Service Agent to access personalized, accurate, and cost-effective issue resolution. Future goals include implementing a seamless transition to a human agent while the user stays within the agentic Copilot experience.
• Human agent experience: Operational efficiency and automation are being integrated into the Service Operations Workspace. The service includes chat and incident summarization that recommends best next actions and drafts contextual answers to queries.

Find out how we’re transforming IT support at Microsoft with AI and the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Defragmenting the employee experience

The second dimension where we’re implementing our AI vision to make a difference is our employee experience. Our vision is to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where users can access employee data, tools, and insights from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees, delivering personalized experiences that empower us to work smarter, faster, and happier—unleashing the innovation and collaboration necessary for our success.”

Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

One of the key ways we’re doing this is with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which functions as a “UI for AI” across our employee tools and services. An example is our Employee Self-Service Agent, an AI-driven tool based on Copilot that helps employees more efficiently find context-specific answers to their questions using natural language queries.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees, delivering personalized experiences that empower us to work smarter, faster, and happier—unleashing the innovation and collaboration necessary for our success,” says Vijaya Alaparthi, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital.

To achieve our vision, we’re building a workplace where AI defragments the employee experience by:

• Providing contextual support in the flow of work
• Reducing the number of sites and apps an employee must remember
• Using Microsoft 365 Copilot as the “UI for AI,” making it simple for employees to find information, take action, and even fully automate certain repeatable tasks

Corporate functions growth

Our third major priority in Microsoft Digital is to improve how we support the company’s corporate functions organizations, including legal and real estate and facilities.

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate. From optimizing building occupancy, to streamlining commute services, to automating contract and document management, we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

This is a particular challenge, as these teams are being asked to do more with less today; Microsoft can no longer afford to grow operational costs at the same rate as in the past.

AI is playing a fundamental role in transforming the business workflows of our corporate functions partners while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making. It’s revolutionizing the way they operate by automating repetitive and time-consuming operational tasks.

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “From optimizing building occupancy, to streamlining commute services, to automating contract and document management, we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful.”

Some of the corporate functions taking advantage of AI capabilities and related increased efficiencies include:

• Real estate and facilities: In supporting the technology needs for more than 500 company buildings worldwide, we are poised to use AI and related innovations to implement cost savings in the areas of workspace systems, facilities management, and space management.

Find out how we’re transforming facility operations at Microsoft with AI maps.

• Travel and expense: Our plan is to work for near-elimination of the traditional expense reporting process through AI-based and touchless experiences, driving simplification and productivity gains.

Check out how OneExpense transformed our employee expense reporting.

• Legal: Our vision for integrating AI into Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) includes more discoverable legal findings, better corporate document management with the Docufy platform, enhanced engagement with Microsoft Philanthropies, and accelerated support for business-critical functions such as immigration, contracting, and insider trading compliance.

Read how AI is revolutionizing the way we support corporate functions at Microsoft.

Agentic AI: Becoming a Frontier Firm

This era of AI in IT has quickly morphed into a world in which agents are having major impacts across the enterprise. Microsoft Digital plays a central role in helping the company embrace this change and transform into a Frontier Firm: an organization that has deeply embedded AI and agents into its operations, products, and culture

As a Frontier Firm, we go beyond simply adopting AI as a discrete tool or additional technology. We’re actively integrating intelligent systems, rich data platforms, and human knowledge into a unified operating model, where automation, decision making, and innovation combine to spark acceleration at scale. Agentic AI is a core enterprise capability for us, powering everything from employee productivity to customer experiences and strategic decisions.

As Microsoft progresses into this agentic AI future—where autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents understand context, take actions, and collaborate alongside humans—Microsoft Digital has played a lead role in deploying these capabilities internally. We’ve led the early adoption of tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI services, and custom-built agents that help us automate repetitive tasks, surface insights, and orchestrate workflows across systems while enforcing strict governance policies. Examples include AI-powered agents that assist in IT service management, network monitoring, and enterprise knowledge retrieval, which allow employees to focus on higher-value work and maximize their individual impact.

As AI agents continue to grow in power and functionality and become more deeply integrated into the daily workflows of knowledge professionals, Microsoft IT will maintain our leadership role and operate at the bleeding edge of this technological revolution. 

A catalyst for change and growth

Microsoft’s digital transformation is a story of evolutionary change, resilience, and adaptation across multiple eras of information technology. From our origins as a traditional IT organization to becoming a modern engineering organization focused on driving AI-powered innovation, we in Microsoft Digital remain a catalyst for change within the company and our industry.

With our insights born from customer and employee obsession, we’re committed to streamlining IT operations while prioritizing security, revolutionizing user services, and facilitating corporate functions growth and development. All with the overarching goal of making Microsoft employees everywhere more productive while showing our customers and partners what’s possible as we move forward together into the future of IT.

The post Digitally transforming Microsoft: Our IT journey appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“The pace of AI innovation has far outstripped how people learn. The old model of static catalogs, fragmented experiences, and a mindset of ‘consume content and move on’ doesn’t work in this new world, where roles are evolving in real time and every employee is expected to be AI proficient.”

Kavitha Radhakrishnan, general manager, Global Skilling

At Microsoft, this shift exposed a critical gap for us. While access to learning content has expanded dramatically, clarity about how to build and maintain skills has not kept pace. Our IT professionals often know they need to build AI capabilities but struggle with where to start, how to prioritize, and how to align their growth with business outcomes.

This is where our Global Skilling team identified an opportunity.

“We started with a simple observation: The pace of AI innovation has far outstripped how people learn,” says Kavitha Radhakrishnan, a general manager in Global Skilling product development. “The old model of static catalogs, fragmented experiences, and a mindset of ‘consume content and move on’ doesn’t work in this new world, where roles are evolving in real time and every employee is expected to be AI proficient.”

This situation led to the development of a cutting-edge solution: The AI Skills Navigator.

Try it at your company

Start your journey with our AI Skills Navigator

From content overload to guided capability building

At its core, AI Skills Navigator represents a shift in how learning is designed. Instead of asking learners to navigate sprawling catalogs of courses, the platform is built to guide them through a purposeful journey tied to their role, their goals, and the demands of their organization.

“Traditional learning catalogs answer the question, ‘What can I learn?’” Radhakrishnan says. “AI Skills Navigator answers the question, ‘What do I need to learn next—and why does it matter?’”

For IT professionals, that difference is significant:

• Learning paths are aligned to real-world scenarios and roles
• Content is curated and structured rather than fragmented
• Progression moves from foundational understanding to applied capability
• Skills are validated through credentials that signal actual proficiency

This approach helps IT teams move beyond passive learning and toward what Microsoft describes as “active capability building at scale.”

How AI Skills Navigator works for IT professionals

AI Skills Navigator is designed to meet IT professionals where they are, whether they are building foundational understanding, creating agents, or deploying and managing AI-powered solutions in production.

The experience is anchored in four key principles:

1. Curated skilling playlists aligned to real roles. Learners engage with curated playlists mapped to their role and responsibilities. These playlists guide progression from foundational proficiency to deep expertise and leadership with AI.
2. Applied skills, not just content consumption. The platform emphasizes hands-on, lab-based experiences where learners build and demonstrate real capabilities. Applied Skills credentials validate what learners can do, not just what they have completed.
3. Multimodal learning in the flow of work. Content is delivered in formats that fit how professionals learn day to day, including interactive modules, video, and audio-first experiences like podcasts. This makes it easier to build skills without stepping out of the workflow.
4. Skills validation with organizational visibility. Progress and credentials give individuals a way to demonstrate expertise. At the same time, organizations gain visibility into skill development and readiness at scale.

Behind the scenes, the experience is designed to deliver personalization at scale.

“The most important architectural decision we made was treating personalization as a ‘data and signals problem’ before it became a model problem,” says Iliyas Chawdhary, a principal group software engineering manager in the Global Skilling product group. “We built AI Skills Navigator on a modular foundation: a unified content catalog, separate skills and roles taxonomy, an identity and profile layer, and a recommendation surface connected through well-defined contracts. That separation enables us to make updates without rewriting the experience.”

By separating content, roles, identity, and recommendations into modular components, the platform can continuously evolve as technologies and job expectations change.

“The most consistent feedback from IT practitioners is that they need to move quickly from understanding AI to actually operating it.”

Priya Vaidyanathan, director of product management, Global Skilling

A differentiated approach to AI skilling

While many platforms provide access to AI learning content, AI Skills Navigator is differentiated by how it connects learning to real-world outcomes.

“The most consistent feedback from IT practitioners is that they need to move quickly from understanding AI to actually operating it,” says Priya Vaidyanathan, director of product management for Global Skilling. “The focus on governance, security, and how to enable their organizations without slowing innovation is a key differentiator for us.”

AI Skills Navigator is different from other learning experiences in several other ways:

• Built around roles and tasks, not course catalogs. Content is organized into curated playlists aligned to roles and real work scenarios. Learners are not choosing from a library of courses; they are guided to build the specific skills needed to perform in their role, from first exposure to applied execution.
• Orchestrated by specialized agents, not a single recommendation engine. Multiple agents work together to create playlists, guide learning sessions, and ensure content quality. This allows the experience to adapt to the learner, while maintaining grounding in trusted, curated Microsoft content. The result is guidance that is both personalized and reliable.
• Designed to build capability over time, not deliver one-time learning. The platform is designed for repeat engagement. As learners return, recommendations evolve based on progress, feedback, and emerging skills; this enables continuous skill development rather than a one-time completion model.
• Embedded into how work happens, not separate from it. Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot brings skilling into the tools professionals already use and learning happens alongside real tasks, making it easier to apply skills immediately instead of learning in isolation.

Turning learning into team capability

For organizations, one of the most powerful features of AI Skills Navigator is the ability to align teams around shared learning goals. Skilling playlists enable leaders to define capability journeys that map directly to business priorities.

Instead of assigning generic training, leaders can create structured paths that guide teams toward specific outcomes, like becoming AI literate, managing agents in the enterprise, or building expertise in agent development. This approach transforms learning from an individual activity into a shared experience.

For IT professionals, this means learning is no longer abstract—it becomes directly connected to their role, their team, and the transformation initiatives they support.

Building momentum with an AI Skills Fest

To accelerate skills development through a moment of shared learning, we’re hosting our second global AI Skills Fest initiative in June 2026. The annual event is designed to bring focus, energy, and community to the AI Skills Navigator experience.

AI Skills Fest brings together:

• A global audience of learners across different roles and skill levels
• Curated learning experiences aligned to real-world scenarios
• Opportunities to engage, practice, and validate new skills

The initiative builds on the success of last year, when we brought together more than 126,000 participants in a single day of learning to achieve a Guinness World Record for AI skilling participation. This milestone demonstrated both the demand for AI skills and the power of creating a shared learning moment at global scale.

In 2026, the focus is shifting from the record itself to sustaining long-term engagement. Our AI Skills Fest is designed to help learners discover the right entry points into AI Skills Navigator and build momentum that continues well beyond the event.

“We want learners to think of it less as a single event and more as a catalyst for ongoing skilling at scale,” Radhakrishnan says.

Bringing AI skilling directly to Inside Track

To make these learning opportunities even easier to discover, we’re taking the next step by integrating AI Skills Navigator content directly into the Inside Track experience. This integration will provide IT professionals with:

• Direct access to curated learning journeys, aligned to Inside Track content
• Seamless pathways from insight to action
• A clearer connection between Microsoft’s own transformation story and the skills required to replicate it

For our readers, this creates a new kind of experience. Instead of simply learning how Microsoft approaches AI, you’ll be able to immediately start building the skills needed to apply those insights at your own organizations.

Look for curated deep links from Inside Track stories into AI Skills Navigator starting in the second half of 2026. Additionally, we’ll be adding links to our site navigation and Careers page to make it simpler to help you discover and build role-specific AI skills.

“From an assistant, to a coach, to a learning companion—the endpoint doesn’t feel like a learning platform at all. It just makes you better at your job.”

Iliyas Chawdhary, principal group software engineering manager, Global Skilling

A new model for learning in the era of AI

AI is reshaping how organizations operate, how teams collaborate, and how work gets done. For IT professionals, staying relevant means continuously building new capabilities.

AI Skills Navigator represents our answer to that challenge. The initiative moves beyond static content to create a guided, adaptive, and integrated learning experience. AI Skills Navigator just feels different—and better—than other learning platforms.

“From an assistant, to a coach, to a learning companion—the endpoint doesn’t feel like a learning platform at all,” Chawdhary says. “It just makes you better at your job.”

The era of AI demands a new approach to learning, and that approach is built on a foundation of role clarity, relevance, and continuous growth.

Key takeaways

If you are thinking about promoting AI skilling among your own employees, keep the following in mind:

• Start your journey now. Explore the IT Professional playlist in AI Skills Navigator to identify the skills most relevant to your role.
• Align learning to outcomes. Don’t just take courses: Define the AI capabilities your role or team needs, then use structured playlists to guide progress.
• Make learning continuous. Plan for regular, incremental skilling rather than one-time training events to keep pace with AI innovation. The AI Skills Navigator playlists are constantly being updated to help you keep up with the pace of change.
• Leverage AI-powered guidance. Use AI-driven recommendations, playlists, and coaching experiences to accelerate learning and reduce time to value.

Try it out

Visit our AI Skills Navigator site to start your learning journey.

Related links

• Learn how we’re skilling up for the future of work at Microsoft with Agent Launchpad.
• Discover how we enabled meaningful AI adoption internally with a Microsoft 365 Copilot Expo.
• See how we drove Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with a virtual skilling event.
• Find out what it’s like to work in Microsoft Digital in the era of AI.
• Explore the new age of AI-led engineering in IT at Microsoft.

The post Building AI skills for the future: How we’re reimagining learning with AI Skills Navigator appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

On the other: A deep responsibility to protect the enterprise—its data, employees, customers, and regulatory posture—at a time when AI systems are evolving faster than traditional governance models were designed to handle.

“In the era of AI, delaying deployment does not eliminate risk—it often increases it. We need to work even faster to enable our business with AI, while simultaneously protecting our enterprise.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

For CIOs, CDOs, and technology leaders across industries, this is no longer a philosophical debate, it’s an operating reality. How do you accelerate AI‑driven transformation without increasing enterprise risk? And critically, how do you innovate earlier, when learning is most valuable, without sacrificing trust?

At Microsoft, we’re living this tension firsthand, and our experience has led us to clear conclusions.

“In the era of AI, delaying deployment does not eliminate risk—it often increases it,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We need to work even faster to enable our business with AI, while simultaneously protecting our enterprise.”

Mastering the delicate balance between risk avoidance and AI-fueled innovation is the new challenge for technology leaders globally. This insight has fundamentally reshaped how we approach release management, AI adoption, and enterprise governance at Microsoft. We call this approach Fast Train, and it has become a core part of how we operate as a Frontier Firm—one that learns early, under control—enabling capabilities that give our employees an edge while carefully balancing enterprise risk.

Rethinking release management for the AI era

Traditional release management was designed for a different world.

“While we’ve never been as risk‑averse as some of our customers, our focus is to always be risk‑aware. When products attest to risk upfront and take ownership at design time, they’re empowered to deploy at full speed—without waiting in a backlog of exceptions.”

B. Ganti, principal architect, Microsoft Digital

Stage‑gated approvals, quarterly releases, and broad “wait until it’s safe” models worked when change was linear, infrequent, and predictable. But AI changes the equation. Models evolve continuously. Capabilities improve weekly. User behavior, as well as risks, emerge dynamically in production.

In this environment, waiting for certainty before deploying often means learning too late.

As Customer Zero for so many of Microsoft’s enterprise products, Microsoft Digital has long been risk aware, with greater tolerance for risk than some of our customers. However, with Fast Train we’re moving at greater speed in low-risk situations.

“While we’ve never been as risk‑averse as some of our customers, our focus is to always be risk‑aware,” says B. Ganti, a principal architect in Microsoft Digital. “When products attest to risk upfront and take ownership at design time, they’re empowered to deploy at full speed—without waiting in a backlog of exceptions.”

Legacy models concentrate exposure until a global rollout, when:

• Dependency has already hardened
• Mitigation options are limited
• The blast radius is at its largest

Frontier organizations take a different approach. They treat release management not as a gate, but as an adaptive operating system—one designed to surface signal early, while controls still matter.

While you won’t have access to Microsoft solutions at design time, these same principles are useful as you consider how to “shift left” when you build or acquire new digital capabilities in your environment. Design time in this context might be early visibility of new features or capabilities in the Microsoft 365 Message Center. Applying a Fast train mentality can help you to quickly identify trusted updates to bring into your environment immediately versus those that might require deeper assessment prior to deployment.

At Microsoft, that shift reframed a core question:

Not “How do we safely deploy change at scale?”, but instead “How do we learn earlier, safely, and continuously?”

Fast Train: Learning early, at enterprise scale

Fast Train is not a shortcut around governance. It is Microsoft’s primary early‑Frontier deployment model for low‑ and medium‑risk innovation.

Under Fast Train, eligible capabilities are deployed earlier—often globally—inside Microsoft’s own enterprise environment, under explicit guardrails. This allows product teams to learn from real usage patterns, real data flows, and real operational behavior before expectations harden and dependencies scale.

Critically, Fast Train operates on a simple principle: speed should align to risk, not to organizational inertia.

Instead of forcing every capability down the slowest possible path, Fast Train uses risk‑adaptive deployment shapes:

• Default‑on Frontier deployment for lower‑risk capabilities
• Admin‑gated Frontier deployment for higher‑impact or tenant‑sensitive scenarios
• Standard or deferred release only where risk truly demands it

In all cases, innovation moves forward. What changes is how it is enabled, not whether it progresses at all.

Why early deployment can reduce risk

From a security and compliance perspective, this may sound counterintuitive. Isn’t early deployment riskier?

In practice, we’ve observed the opposite. The most dangerous moment for an enterprise system is not early exposure, it’s late discovery. Waiting until adoption is widespread before learning how a capability behaves:

• Reduces mitigation options
• Expands blast radius
• Compresses response timelines under regulatory or customer pressure

“The question isn’t how to eliminate risk entirely—it’s where we’re willing to be uncomfortable, so our employees don’t work around IT.”

David Johnson, principal tenant architect, Microsoft Digital

By contrast, Frontier deployment reverses this risk profile. Fast Train allows Microsoft to:

• Surface data flow issues and edge cases earlier
• Tune controls before dependencies harden
• Establish clear accountability for rollback, disablement, and remediation

This is risk‑aware innovation, not risk‑blind speed. Guardrails are built in and not bolted on after the fact.

Governance that adapts instead of blocks

One of the most significant shifts Fast Train enabled was a change in how governance participates in innovation.

“Fast Train is fundamentally a risk-taking exercise—but it’s a deliberate one,” says David Johnson, principal tenant architect in Microsoft Digital. “The question isn’t how to eliminate risk entirely—it’s where we’re willing to be uncomfortable, so our employees don’t work around IT. If the platform honors our non‑negotiables—security, compliance, discovery—then we don’t need to over‑rotate on every new feature built on top of it.”

Traditional models treat governance as a final checkpoint. Governance is an episodic approval that happens after most key decisions are already made. Frontier models embed governance earlier and continuously, focusing attention where it matters most.

“Innovation doesn’t have to be slowed down by governance,” Ganti says. “By shifting risk consideration to design time, we remove friction at the point of deployment—so teams can move straight onto the Fast Train, with no toll booths, no gates, and no delays.”

Under Fast Train:

• Low‑risk change moves quickly under defined boundaries
• Higher‑impact capabilities shift to choice‑based enablement
• Deep governance review is reserved for material risk events like new data flows, boundary changes, or regulatory impact

This keeps governance focused, effective, and credible while avoiding the trap of over‑governing low‑risk change.

Just as importantly, Fast Train makes our Microsoft product teams explicitly accountable. Ownership for quality, rollback, and remediation sits with the teams shipping the capability, not with downstream review bodies. That means product teams have an incentive to build features that meet our Fast Train criteria, increasing the chance that our customers can also deploy new capabilities more quickly and with less risk.

Admin‑gated does not mean anti‑Frontier

A common misconception is that admin‑gated or choice‑based deployment is inherently slower or less innovative. Our experience in Microsoft Digital suggests the opposite.

Admin‑gated Frontier deployments are not a retreat from innovation. They are a different exposure shape for the same learning objective. We use them when impact is higher and explicit tenant choice matters.

In both default‑on and admin‑gated Frontier deployment:

• Capabilities reach real users early
• Deployment is global
• Learning loops start before broad GA expectations harden

The distinction is not speed. It’s enablement mechanics, informed by the risk profile of the deployment.

Becoming a Frontier Firm is a maturity journey

Frontier behavior is a maturity that advances over time.

“Our focus is evolving to put greater focus on speed and enablement. Fast Train lets governance teams focus on truly high‑risk scenarios while giving product teams the guidance and tools they need upfront so they can move faster with confidence.”

Priya Chebiyam, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

In Microsoft Digital, we measure ourselves against a Frontier Firm capability maturity model, which reflects how organizations evolve from risk averse release models toward risk aware, signal driven operations. Our internal rubric describes 5 stages of enterprise maturity:

Frontier Firm capability maturity model

“Our focus is evolving to put greater focus on speed and enablement,” says Priya Chebiyam, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Fast Train lets governance teams focus on truly high‑risk scenarios while giving product teams the guidance and tools they need upfront so they can move faster with confidence.”

Today, we assess ourselves in the Emerging Frontier stage, operating Fast Train broadly while investing to further institutionalize continuous governance, telemetry, and accountability. A critical step in that journey has been onboarding Microsoft 365 Copilot and first‑party agents into the Fast Train operating model to expand early signal and tighten ownership.

The lesson for customers isn’t to copy Microsoft’s internal processes, but to adopt the pattern:

• Define where early learning is safe through your own criteria—these are effectively your organizational “guardrails”
• Make enablement choices explicit
• Require ownership and rollback readiness
• Let real‑world signal and not assumptions drive your decisions

Trust and innovation advance together

At Microsoft, Fast Train has reinforced a simple truth: speed, trust, and compliance are not tradeoffs. They are outcomes of a risk‑adaptive operating model.

“Fast Train is built on a simple principle: ship fast when it’s safe, and slow down only when it’s necessary,” Chebiyam says. “We empower feature owners to self‑attest low‑risk features using clear criteria, while still protecting security, privacy, compliance, and regulatory requirements.”

By learning earlier—under control—organizations can reduce late‑stage surprises, accelerate transformation, and engage partners and stakeholders from a position of evidence rather than theory.

“We will be deploying earlier under the right guardrails so we can understand real world behavior, build the right controls, and earn customer trust through evidence, not assumptions. Our responsibility is not to slow innovation down, but to enable it safely—at the speed our customers and the market demand.”

Aleš Holeček, chief architect and corporate vice president, Microsoft Security

In the AI era, the greatest enterprise risk isn’t moving too fast—it’s learning too slow.  Fast Train reflects a shift from risk avoidance to risk awareness and near real-time assessment.

“We will be deploying earlier under the right guardrails so we can understand real‑world behavior, build the right controls, and earn customer trust through evidence, not assumptions,” says Aleš Holeček, chief architect and corporate vice president in Microsoft Security. “Our responsibility is not to slow innovation down, but to enable it safely—at the speed our customers and the market demand.”

Frontier firms don’t move fast despite risk. They move fast because risk is understood, bounded, and actively managed.

Key takeaways

For CIOs, CDOs, and technology leaders ready to accelerate AI adoption while minimizing risk, Microsoft Digital’s experience suggests five practical actions you can take today:

• Treat early deployment as a risk‑reduction strategy. Surface issues earlier when mitigation options are still available, instead of discovering them after global dependency sets in.
• Establish a clear Frontier cohort. Identify a workload, geography, or business unit where early learning is safe, intentional, and governed and be intentional in empowering that cohort.
• Separate innovation speed from enablement mechanics. Use default‑on deployment for low‑risk capabilities and admin‑gated choice for higher‑impact scenarios without slowing learning velocity.
• Make governance continuous, not episodic. Shift governance left by embedding it earlier with monitoring, attestation, and clear escalation triggers rather than relying on late‑stage gates.
• Require explicit ownership and rollback readiness. Ensure every deployed capability has a named owner, a defined rollback path, and continuous telemetry to support fast correction.

Try it out

Looking to accelerate your journey to the Frontier? Try Microsoft Agent 365 in your company.

Related links

• Check out our IT playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm.
• Read more about the agentic future that we’re embracing at Microsoft.
• Discover our readiness guide for deploying AI agents, based on our own company’s experience.
• Learn how we’re transforming our enterprise IT operations with AI at scale.
• Explore our five-step guide to enterprise AI maturity for IT leaders.

The post Fast Train to the AI Frontier: Balancing risk and innovation in the era of AI at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But curiosity alone doesn’t change how work gets done.

Very quickly, we saw the difference between interest and impact. Turning early excitement into meaningful, sustained behavior change required more than access to new technology—it required trust, relevance, and new habits embedded into daily work.

As our employees moved beyond experimentation, a consistent set of questions emerged:

• Is this relevant to my role?
• Can I trust the output?
• How does this fit into the way I already work?

That shift reframed how we approached adoption. Instead of treating Copilot as a deployment milestone, we began treating it as a change experience, one grounded as much in people and behavior as in technology.

Five lessons from our journey stood out.

1. Leadership makes change visible

Adoption accelerated when leaders didn’t just endorse Copilot—they used it.

Early on, we saw hesitation in teams where leadership signals were unclear. Employees were cautious about changing how they worked without explicit, visible support.

What made the difference was modeling.

When our leaders shared how they were using Copilot in their own workflows—and what they were learning along the way—it reduced uncertainty and made the change tangible.

“In the era of AI, ‘do as I say, not as I do’ won’t cut it. Leaders need to be visible and accountable for modeling the way forward in their organizations.”

Pam Maynard, chief AI transformation officer, Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions

2. Peer networks scale trust faster than top-down messaging

Enterprise-wide communications created awareness but didn’t create confidence.

Employees needed to see how Copilot applied to the reality of their own work—ideally from someone who understood it firsthand.

That’s where our champion network became essential. Early adopters ran workshops, shared practical examples, and offered real-time support grounded in everyday scenarios. Their proximity to the work made their guidance credible. Adoption became more social, and trust built faster.

3. Relevance matters more than generic training

We quickly learned that generic training wasn’t enough.

While easy to scale, broad guidance often failed to connect with employees who couldn’t immediately see how AI applied to their responsibilities.

What worked instead was role-based immersion:

• Prompts grounded in real workflows
• Examples aligned to specific responsibilities
• Scenarios that reflected day-to-day tasks

Whether drafting customer account plans, summarizing meetings, or synthesizing research, the most effective experiences mirrored the work employees already owned.

As relevance increased, so did confidence. Copilot shifted from an abstract capability to a practical tool.

4. Habits—not enthusiasm—drive lasting change

Initial experimentation was widespread. Sustained usage was not.

Like any new tool, Copilot didn’t become part of daily work by default. The real challenge was helping employees return to it often enough to form new habits.

What moved the needle were small, repeatable actions:

• Simple prompts embedded into existing workflows
• Shared examples that lowered the barrier to entry
• Low-friction ways to experiment without risk

Over time, these patterns changed behavior. Copilot became less of a novelty and more of a natural extension of how work gets done.

Some examples of practical prompts that helped to change habits include:

• “Summarize recent news, earnings highlights, and strategic priorities for (company name) and suggest three conversation starters relevant to their digital transformation goals.”
• “Based on my meeting notes, draft a follow-up email summarizing what we discussed, the next steps we agreed on, and any open questions—keep the tone warm and professional.”
• “Review my sent emails and meeting notes from the past week and list any customer commitments or action items I may still need to follow up on.”

5. Measurement only works when paired with listening

Usage data provided valuable signals—but it didn’t tell the whole story.

To understand what was really happening, we paired quantitative data with qualitative feedback such as:

• Employee surveys
• Live discussions
• Direct, in-the-moment input

This combination gave us a clearer picture of what was resonating, where friction remained, and how to adjust. Measurement shifted from just reporting outcomes to also enabling continuous learning.

Adoption without employee feedback can easily turn into guesswork. Leaders don’t have time for that when the stakes of frontier transformation are so dramatic. Organizations that win in the era of AI are ones that can measure and see the impact on their day-to-day operations.

The bottom line

Scaling AI isn’t just about access—it’s about absorption.

Our experience reinforced a simple truth: Value is created when people integrate AI into the way they already work. That requires more than tools. It requires trust, relevance, habits, and continuous feedback.

“Even with intuitive technology like Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can’t underestimate the criticality of getting human-centered change right,” says Pam Maynard, chief AI transformation officer for Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions. “Our experience makes it clear that modeling the right behaviors, engaging with champions, helping employees to build the habit, focusing on role-immersive training, and measuring what matters while listening to our employee signals are the keys to driving successful AI-transformation at scale.”

When these elements come together, adoption becomes durable, and based on our experience at Microsoft, transformation becomes sustainable.

Key takeaways

How can you replicate our success in your own organization? Focus on these key lessons:

• Leadership visibility is critical. Leaders need to model expectations to set the right tone from the top.
• Peer networks scale credibility faster than top-down messaging. Peer influence can scale further and faster than policy alone because examples are closer to real work.
• Role based immersion beats generic training. Generic training doesn’t always connect. Role specific prompts and resources tied to real seller workflows made the value concrete and raised confidence.
• Habit formation is the real adoption engine. Repeatable micro actions like practical prompts, shared examples, and low friction experiments are what move the needle, turning AI from a novelty to a productivity partner.
• Measurement without listening creates blind spots and risk. Usage data is just part of the story; pairing telemetry with employee signals prevents “guesswork” and turns measurement into learning, which is important for catching where people get stuck.

Try it out

Ready to embrace Microsoft 365 Copilot in your organization? Discover all the ways that Copilot can accelerate your AI-powered journey, especially with deliberate change management to drive adoption.  

Related links

• Read our guide to how Microsoft Digital deploys, governs, supports, and drives usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot at global scale.
• Discover how a Copilot Expo supercharged AI usage at Microsoft by promoting role-based immersion.
• Learn about our internal change management strategy for Microsoft 365 Copilot and how it helps us drive the future of work.
• Meet Opeoluwa Burnett and see how she uses Copilot to power a typical workday.
• Find out how you can pick the right Copilot for the job, based on our own experience at Microsoft.
• Check out our seven tips for driving Copilot adoption with a virtual skilling event.

The post Making AI stick for sellers: Five adoption lessons from our Copilot rollout appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Generative AI has captured the world’s attention, and businesses are taking notice.

According to our annual Microsoft Work Trends report, 70% of people would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads.

Capitalizing on this trend will mean the difference between surging ahead or getting left behind, including here at Microsoft, where we were the first enterprise to fully deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“I’m inspired by the transformative power of AI,” says Andrew Osten, general manager of Business Operations and Programs in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “I’ve been impressed with how quickly our employees have put it to work for them.”

He would know. His team is responsible for driving usage and adoption of Copilot and any new features to more than 300,000 employees and vendors across the world.

“Customers are looking to us to share what we’ve learned as the first enterprise to deploy Copilot. Our team has a unique opportunity to help them deploy and get to value as quickly as possible.”

Andrew Osten, general manager, Microsoft Digital

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to empower, enable, and transform the company’s digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. We provide a blueprint for our customers to follow as Customer Zero for the company, and as such, we’ve created this guide for deploying and adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot that’s based on our experience here at Microsoft.

“Customers are looking to us to share what we’ve learned as the first enterprise to deploy Copilot,” Osten says. “Our team has a unique opportunity to help them deploy and get to value as quickly as possible.”

Are you an IT pro?

View the full version of this deployment and adoption guide here.

Chapter 1: Getting your governance right

Before you even begin your Microsoft 365 Copilot implementation, you’ll want to consider how this tool impacts your data. Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) that interact with data and content across your organization and uses information your employees can access to transform user prompts into personalized, relevant, and actionable responses.

Giving your employees this level of access means proper data hygiene is a priority. At Microsoft Digital, we use sensitivity labeling to empower our employees with access while also protecting our data. Microsoft 365 Copilot was designed to respect labels, permissions, and rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on relevant file labels. That ensures private or confidential information stays that way.

This chapter outlines the highly robust, best-case scenario we created for Microsoft, but we know not every organization has a fully deployed data governance strategy. If you’re in that position, don’t worry! You can use Restricted SharePoint Search to provide instant value and protection without exposing Copilot to all of your internal SharePoint sites.

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

We’ve developed four data labeling practices that make up our foundation for appropriate policies and settings.

Responsible self-service

Enable your employees to create new workspaces like SharePoint sites, ensuring your company data is on your Microsoft 365 tenant. That enables your people to take full advantage of Copilot in ways that align with your organizational data hygiene while you keep your company’s information safe.

Top-down defaults

Label containers for data segmentation by default to ensure your information isn’t overexposed. At Microsoft, we default our container labels to “Confidential\Internal Only.” We use Microsoft Purview to manage this process.

Consistency within containers

Derive file labels from their parent containers. Consistency boosts security and reduces the administrative burden on your employees for labeling every file they create. Copilot will reflect file labels in chat responses so employees know the level of confidentiality of each portion of AI-created responses.

Employee awareness

We train our employees to understand how to handle and label sensitive data. By making your employees active participants in your data hygiene strategy, you increase accuracy and improve your security posture.

Self-service with guardrails

The data hygiene practices above form a foundation for compliance and security, but backstopping those efforts through Microsoft 365 features adds an extra layer of protection. Here’s how:

Trust, but verify
Empower self-service with sensitivity labels, but verify by checking against data loss prevention standards, then use auto-labeling and quarantining when necessary. We’ve configured Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to detect and control sensitive content automatically.

Expiry and attestation
Put strong lifecycle management protocols in place that require your employees to attest containers to keep them from expiring. We don’t keep items that don’t have an accountable employee or that might not be necessary for our work.

Controlling the flow
Limit oversharing at the source by enabling company-shareable links instead of forcing employees to grant access to large groups. To enforce these behaviors, you can set default link types based on labels through Purview.

Oversharing detection
Even under the best circumstances, accidents happen. When one of our employees does overshare sensitive data, we use Microsoft Graph Data Connect extraction in conjunction with Microsoft Purview to catch and report oversharing.

International compliance: No size fits all

Europe has extra requirements in the form of EU Data Boundary regulations and works councils, organizations that provide employee co-determination on workers’ rights or regulatory issues. Our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment meant we needed to partner closely with our Microsoft works councils to address complex data and privacy implications.

Your experience will vary depending on your industry and where you operate, but we’ve learned that it’s best to work closely with local subsidiaries to ensure you have a complete picture of a region’s regulatory situation. Local insiders are poised to liaise with works councils or other bodies through direct relationships. Start the process early so you can manage feedback cycles effectively and resolve any concerns through configurations that work for your employees.

Learning from our governance, security, and compliance practices

Bring the right people into the conversation

Don’t keep this conversation in the IT sphere alone. Bring in all the relevant security, legal, and compliance professionals.

Build a foundation for automation

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention has powerful intelligent detection, but it relies on establishing good defaults.

Think about how your employees will use Copilot

Determine the primary use cases. The kinds of collaboration and access employees need will affect your labeling architecture.

Take this opportunity to train employees

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to refresh employee knowledge around data privacy, let this moment be your milestone.

Don’t overwhelm your users

Make labeling easy and intuitive and ensure it isn’t overwhelming.
Employees should have a limited set of choices to keep things simple.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to tackle governance, security, and compliance at your company. It’s based on what we learned deploying Copilot internally here at Microsoft.

• Establish a clear labeling framework that defines classification levels, maps labels to the right policies (such as access control, encryption, DLP, and storage rules), sets container defaults, and ensures employees understand how to apply labels correctly.
• Implement comprehensive data loss prevention controls by configuring Microsoft Purview DLP standards and quarantines, defining lifecycle and attestation processes, and using Microsoft Graph Data Connect to identify and remediate oversharing.
• Engage globally to meet international compliance needs by partnering with local subsidiaries and works councils, addressing regional requirements and concerns, and determining where segmented or region‑specific deployments are necessary.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read our guide to governing Microsoft 365 Copilot. This step-by-step resource, based on our internal experience at Microsoft, will help you adapt your existing governance standards to reflect the new realities of AI.

Further guidance for you

• Conduct the Microsoft 365 Copilot Optimization Assessment to understand your level of AI adoption and chart your course.

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

At the time of our deployment, we were the first company to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents at scale, and our implementation team had to choose from different licensing strategies. We’ve learned from experience that it makes sense to start with pilot groups who can validate the experience and enable the rest of your organization. For us, that looked like:

Phase zero

We provided early access to our Copilot engineering team to test-drive the tool from an insider’s perspective. 

• Product engineers

Phase one

We issued a limited number of on-demand licenses in core scenarios to get validation and feedback for key use cases.

• Sales
• Marketing

Phase two

We extended licenses to teams who needed to understand and support Copilot or provide approval for use.

• Support
• HR
• Legal
• Security
• Works councils

Phase three

We deployed Copilot and started working on adoption across the entire company.

• Advancing in phases, we deployed Copilot to more than 300,000 Microsoft employees and external staff.

Scaling out your licenses

After you decide on the general shape of your rollout, you can begin building your licensing strategy. In Microsoft Digital, we started with individual licenses at the single-user level. As our implementation scaled, we tied licensing automation to Microsoft 365 groups to implement targeted licensing changes at scale. Those groups could include subsets of employees or entire organizations within Microsoft, and we keyed our automation logic to their expanding and contracting eligibility.

We highly recommend defining a phased rollout strategy and structuring your groups accordingly. That creates accountability and gives your IT admins a crucial point of contact for understanding the licensing needs of different groups within your organization.

There are three primary benefits to using groups:

Optimize licensing costs: Create groups that reflect your business needs and goals that align with your respective business sponsors. Sync your licensing status changes with your group membership changes. That way, you can assign the right licenses to the right users and adjust easily if you require frequent changes (e.g., in your early initial validation phase) and avoid paying for licenses you don’t need or use.

Refine admin costs: Group-based licensing enables your admins to assign one or more product licenses to a group. This depends on your rollout strategy and progress—your admins will be able to streamline your group setup at scale, reducing your admin overhead, which is helpful considering all the licenses you likely need to manage.

Enhance compliance and security: This ensures that only authorized users are licensed and have access to resources, enhancing your security and compliance. Your admins can use audit logs and other Microsoft Entra services to monitor and manage your group-based licensing activities.

Pre-adoption communications

Given the excitement around AI, one of the biggest challenges during our phased implementation was support requests from employees not within our initial pilot groups. Most of our support requests at this stage were essentially asking, “When do I get access?”

You can easily avoid the issue through clear and honest communication. For example, when you alert your initial implementation groups about their Copilot access, you could simultaneously deploy “Coming soon” emails to the rest of your organization. That will help you avoid any confusion while simultaneously generating excitement.

Your IT implementation team can’t work in isolation. Communication, especially with organizational leadership, is a key part of your licensing and implementation strategy.

Learning from our implementation

Design for the “who”

When you determine your initial cohorts, base your decisions on which roles have the largest coverage and will provide the most relevant feedback.

Get your groups in place

Be thoughtful about your Microsoft 365 groups and make sure everyone knows who owns them and who’s responsible.

Engage your support team from the start

This is a new technology, so your support teams will receive requests. Ensure they’re ready by giving them early access.

Manage expectations to minimize blowback

Proactively help users understand why they have licenses or don’t. Note that your rollout strategy might be subject to change.

Bring leadership on board early

Executive sponsorship isn’t just useful for adoption. Leaders will also help you identify the key use cases within their organizations.

Product feedback at every level

Encourage feedback for employees in your early implementation phases because that will guide your wider adoption efforts.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to help you with your internal implementation and admin process. They are based on our experience here at Microsoft.

• Prepare your organization for Copilot by performing the Microsoft 365 Copilot optimization assessment, defining implementation phases and audience groups, securing leadership sponsorship, and mapping your rollout plan to a clear licensing strategy.
• Onboard users and activate your environment by assembling the right security groups, building an automated licensing workflow, enabling roles for Copilot reports and dashboards, assigning and configuring licenses, and gathering early signals from pilot usage and feedback.
• Drive engagement through targeted communication by analyzing in‑app and qualitative pilot feedback, reviewing usage data, and delivering clear, ongoing communications aligned with your adoption strategy.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn about the councils steering our AI projects here at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft.

Further guidance for you

• Use the Copilot Success Kit to accelerate your implementation with templates, onboarding guides, and technical readiness resources.

Chapter 3: Driving adoption to accelerate value

The fact that your employees are excited about trying out Copilot isn’t enough. We found that you need strategic, coordinated change management to drive usage and adoption.

To do this effectively, you will need to empower change agents in your organization. These are not part-time roles; they are dedicated resources across your company who are responsible for the change management function, including creation of a deployment and adoption plan, facilitating principled change management practices, communicating and engaging with employees, preparing employee readiness and learning opportunities, and then measuring the success of your deployment across the enterprise. At a high level, your strategy should consist of the following five steps.

Microsoft 365 Copilot change management

How we drove adoption in Microsoft Digital

At Microsoft, we broke our company-wide adoption efforts into cohorts, for example, subsidiaries or business groups. Depending on the size of your enterprise, you may benefit from this approach as well. We divided our adoption along two vectors: internal organizations like legal or sales and marketing, and regions like North America or Europe. Different cohorts have different focuses, but the strategy is similar. At Microsoft, we did this in four phases:

Get ready

Effective change management requires careful planning. Begin by identifying and then working with company-wide change management leads. Next, identify members of your target cohorts who will support the adoption, including change managers, leadership sponsors, and employee champions.

Champions will be crucial to your adoption by filling several powerful roles:

• Pinpointing key usage scenarios for Copilot based on their cohort’s culture or processes.
• Providing insights that help adoption leaders build out their rollout plans.
• Most importantly, demonstrating the value of Copilot and showing their peers how powerful this tool can be in their day-to-day work.

When champions socialize their tips and tricks, our experience at Microsoft Digital has revealed that it’s best to share specific prompts and the value they provided as a concrete entry point for users. For example, a champion could say, “I saved three hours drafting this sales script in Microsoft Word using this prompt,” then share their Copilot prompt as a place for peers to start.

Works councils also play a key role at this stage. They offer the benefit of local cultural expertise and can help you identify the challenges employees face in their jurisdiction. Even something as simple as understanding proper modes of address helps smooth the road to adoption through effective communication.

Each of these sets of stakeholders has a role to play in leading your own rollout. We recommend using Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption resources to build out your own adoption plan.

Onboard and engage

At Microsoft, we implemented this phase across each adoption cohort. Because every group will have its own champions and leadership sponsors, it’s important to treat each of them as its own organization, with its own unique adoption needs.

In advance of our general rollout, we created “jump-start” communications with links to learning opportunities:

Localized training took the form of Power Hours in different languages and time zones. These training sessions demonstrated key Copilot scenarios across Microsoft 365 apps.

Self-learn assets included user quick-start guides, demo videos, and Microsoft Viva Learning modules to accommodate different learning styles and preferences.

Pre-rollout communications fulfill two needs. First, this messaging is a great opportunity to launch your champion communities. Second, these communications build your employee population’s desire and excitement for their incoming Copilot licenses, then prepare them to hit the ground running when they get access.

After your Copilot licenses are live, your launch-day welcome comms are straightforward. Invite employees to access Copilot and to start experimenting with how it can fit into their work. There are many possible vectors for deploying these communications, but a multi-pronged effort that includes Microsoft Viva Amplify will deliver the maximum impact.

For support in building out your own communication plan, our adoption team has created a user onboarding kit for Copilot. These ready-to-send emails and community posts can help you onboard and engage your users.

Deliver impact

After everyone has access, it’s time to promote Copilot usage and ensure all employees are having the best possible experience and gaining the most value. For our cohorts, employee champions and leadership sponsors were essential levers.

It’s important to remember that Copilot isn’t just another tool. It introduces a whole new way of working within employees’ trusted apps. At Microsoft, we took great care to encourage employees to adapt a mindset to see it as part of their daily work—not just something they play with when there’s time.

Microsoft Viva Engage, or a similar employee communication platform, is a helpful forum for peer community support. In our case, it provided an organic space for champions to share their expertise and change managers to provide further recommendations and adoption content. For employees who explore best on their own, Copilot Lab provides in-the-flow learning opportunities to build their prompt skills.

Meanwhile, leadership sponsors diversified our communications strategy by deploying and amplifying messaging through executive channels like org-wide emails or Viva Engage Leadership Corner posts.

Extend and optimize

Understanding overall usage patterns and impact is crucial to optimizing usage. Our Microsoft Digital team used a combination of controlled feature rollout (CFR) technology while tracking usage through Microsoft 365 admin center and the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. Together, these tools gave us the visibility and tracking we needed to establish and communicate adoption patterns.

Meanwhile, IT admins and user experience success managers can access simple in-app feedback through Microsoft 365 admin center. And to really maximize value, our Microsoft Digital employee experience teams conducted listening sessions and satisfaction surveys.

All these insights are helping us establish a virtuous cycle to drive further value and better adoption for future rollouts, extend usage to new and high-value scenarios, incorporate Copilot into business process transformation, and understand custom line-of-business opportunities.

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

Our team in Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Viva to help enable our 300,000-plus global users. Microsoft Viva is an Employee Experience Platform that brings together communication and feedback, analytics, goals, and learning in one unified solution. Our team used Viva across a range of change management scenarios, including building awareness, communicating with our employees, providing access to readiness and learning resources, and measuring the impact of our deployment.

You can see a few of the specific ways we used Viva to accelerate employee adoption below.

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva

Viva Connections

Sharing key news related to deployment and enablement, generating “buzz,” and tying Copilot to Microsoft culture.

Viva Amplify

Producing and efficiently distributing employee communications to build awareness and excitement.

Viva Learning

Courses and training for our employees on how to maximize value from Copilot, inclusive of building effective prompts.

Viva Engage

Actively engaging employees, providing leader updates, listening to feedback, and enabling Champs community.

Viva Insights

Using the Microsoft 365 Copilot Dashboard beta to identity actionable insights and usage trends.

Viva Pulse

Instant feedback from employees on their Copilot experience to fine-tune our landing and adoption approach.

Viva Glint

Understanding employee sentiment and gauging the overall effectiveness of our Copilot deployment effort.

Learning from our adoption of Copilot

Cascade adoption efforts through localization

Regional differences, priorities, even time zones—they can all block your centralization efforts. Your insider adoption leaders within each adoption cohort can help.

Empower your employee champions with trust

Monitor your user-led adoption communities at the start to provide support. As this community of power users becomes product experts, they’ll take over.

Empower employees as innovators

You’ll be surprised by what your employees dream up. Provide every opportunity for them to share their favorite tips and usage scenarios.

Create excitement, but set expectations

Encourage a healthy mindset around what Copilot can accomplish and where it fits. Don’t overpromise.

Gamify learning to build engagement and experience

Friendly competitions or cooperative challenges like prompt-a-thons generate excitement and invite creativity.

Understand that for many, AI is emotional

Overcome AI hesitancy by encouraging employees to tackle easy tasks with Copilot assistance. That will help minimize reluctance.

Use Microsoft Viva to accelerate time to value

Viva supports user enablement through learning, effective communication, usage tracking, and employee sentiment.

Key takeaways

Use these tips as your guide as you build out and implement your adoption plan. They are based on our own experience internally at Microsoft.

• Prepare your organization for adoption by identifying your adoption lead, building a cross-functional cohort-based team, defining personas and key usage scenarios, establishing communication preferences and success metrics, completing enablement training, and creating a localized communications and asset library.
• Engage your cohorts and activate readiness by deploying targeted onboarding communications, launching champion communities, running live and self-paced learning experiences, and elevating visibility with digital materials that help employees understand how Copilot improves their daily work.
• Drive measurable impact across cohorts by promoting usage through internal channels, reporting on KPIs at planned intervals, gathering employee sentiment through surveys and listening sessions, spotlighting success stories, applying learnings to refine adoption activities, and nurturing champions through deeper technical training.
• Extend and optimize your deployment by exploring new high‑value scenarios, identifying opportunities for business process transformation with agents, Copilot Studio, plugins, and connectors, and sourcing custom line‑of‑business use cases that advance your organization’s Copilot maturity.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn how we boosted our Copilot adoption with a companywide expo.
• Explore how we created a Center of Excellence to guide our adoption and use of AI.

Further guidance for you

• Access the Copilot scenario library to understand different user needs and opportunities.
• Deepen Copilot engagement through the Microsoft Modern Collaboration Architecture (MOCA).

Chapter 4: Building a foundation for support

Empowering employees means making sure they have access to the right support channels. The fact that Copilot operates across a wide spectrum of Microsoft 365 apps adds complexity to support scenarios. As a result, it’s important to get your support teams early access along with your earliest pilot implementations.

For us in Microsoft Digital, four principles define high-quality support:

Available

Highly available and in-context support should deliver both self-help and assisted experiences wherever and however the user needs it.

Consistent

Coherent and seamless access to support across the entire journey eliminates frustration and keeps the experience consistent.

Contextual

Base your support experience on where the user is and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Personal

Anchor support in a user’s goals and preferences.

Strategizing for support

Building experience and knowledge is one thing, but coming up with your approach to support requires planning and a strong idea of your users’ ideal experience. At Microsoft Digital, we take a “shift-left” approach. That means we save our human support staff time by attempting to create excellent self-service options for our users.

Shift-left principles can apply to many different support contexts, but with Copilot, we’ve found that the most important upfront action is ensuring your employees have accessible self-service support channels and communicating their availability. Work with your adoption teams to ensure they include self-service support options in their rollout communications.

Seven things we learned prepping to support Microsoft 365 Copilot

Preliminary access

Select your initial support specialists. Include people with different Microsoft 365 app focuses, support tiers, and service audiences.

Communication hub

Establish a community space where your support team can connect and collaborate on issues. Invite non-support professionals as needed.

Knowledge base

Start a collaborative document and add learnings. This will eventually evolve into your knowledge base for internal support.

Widen access

Host information sessions with the wider support team and extend access so all relevant support professionals can ramp up.

Rehearse

Conduct role-playing and shadowing sessions so support teams can build practical knowledge and confidence.

Support go-live

Get your support resources and processes ready and push them live in advance of your Copilot deployment. Consider a dry run.

Track

Determine a tracking cadence and gather data on Copilot issues that arise so support teams can identify trending issues and tickets.

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

We’re getting questions about why particular employees don’t have licenses.

Use employee change management communication waves to solve for this issue by alerting employees when they’ll have access to licenses.

Users are coming to us with questions that would be better served by adoption and employee material, and that isn’t our role as support.

Work with your adoption team to preempt these issues with proactive communications. Update your self-help content and provide your support agents with ready access to different employee education resources.

Teams are looking for integration support. Where do I send them?

Share this list of pre-built connectors to help your users integrate various data sources to Microsoft Graph. This list shares the types of content supported.

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

If employees are signed into Copilot with their Entra ID, they can enter confidential information.

My organization has concerns about who owns the IP that Copilot generates. Does the Microsoft Customer Copyright Commitment apply to Copilot?

Microsoft does not own the IP generated by Copilot. Our universal terms state “Microsoft does not own customers’ output content.”

What’s the best way to verify the accuracy of the information Copilot provides?

Copilot is transparent about where it sources responses. It provides linked citations to these answers so the user can verify further.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to manage your Copilot support efforts. They are based on our experience here at Microsoft.

• Enable and align your support team by starting with a core group of support leaders, establishing shared communication spaces and a collaborative knowledge base, expanding access to the full Copilot support team, training them through information sessions and role‑playing exercises, defining escalation paths, and partnering with internal communications to finalize user‑facing support materials.
• Deliver meaningful user impact by signaling support availability across employee communities, publishing a clear and accessible user-facing knowledge base, and standing up self-service automations where appropriate to empower users and reduce friction.
• Optimize and mature your support services by reviewing ongoing support issues and product feedback, and continually refining support workflows to drive efficiency, accuracy, and a better user experience.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read how we’re using AI to transform our Support business at Microsoft. This article shares how our Support team in Microsoft Digital is using AI to overhaul the business from end to end.
• Learn how we deployed the Employee Self-Service Agent here at Microsoft. This blog post shares how we’re using this agent to help our employees with their support needs in the flow of where they work in Copilot.

Further guidance for you

• Follow the Microsoft IT admin guide for Copilot onboarding, enablement, and support resources to ensure a smooth rollout.
• Access the Copilot Success Kit for launch day assets, support templates, and troubleshooting guides.

Chapter 5: Extending Copilot through agents

As organizations and employees have matured with respect to AI, agentic extensibility is expanding the frontiers of this technology. By using and even creating agents that surface knowledge, take actions, and reinvent workflows, employees can personalize AI’s capabilities to fulfill more specific needs.

At Microsoft, our goal has been to provide access and enable agents at appropriate levels for our employees and the company as a whole. To make that happen, we’ve adopted a maturity model for agentic AI deployment. Early phases focus on using Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases will enable our employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows.

Agentic AI at Microsoft

Each of these levels of agentic capability requires different tools to create and depends on different policies to govern. Because retrieval agents don’t require special tooling, we allow employees to create them at will through Copilot Chat and simplified agent builders in Copilot Studio and SharePoint.

For more complex agents intended to meet enterprise needs across lines of business or the company as a whole, our developers use more full-featured tools like Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. For these kinds of agents, we apply the same rigor, reviews, and software development lifecycle (SDL) we use as part of our standard internal app development.

As you explore the different kinds of agents available to your users and decide how and where to enable them, adoption.microsoft.com provides an excellent place to start. It provides three different approaches to creating agents: Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Azure AI Foundry, and Copilot Studio.

All of this choice adds complexity, so maintaining visibility and control over the agents your employees create can be a challenge. As a result, we take a matrixed approach to creating and governing agents based on different parameters. They include the type of agent, how the user creates it, its knowledge sources, the need for custom tooling, sharing and publishing permissions, and more.

Keeping agents safe and effective through good governance

At Microsoft, we incorporated elements of our tenant’s minimum bar for governance into our policies for managing agents. These measures include Microsoft Information Protection, a functional inventory, activity logging, lifecycle management, and the ability to properly isolate agents against crossing data boundaries.

To govern agentic capabilities, we introduced further controls like sharing limits, breadth of knowledge sources, agent metadata, and information about an agent’s behaviors. The result is a proactive approach to governance backstopped by reactive structures that catch any issues.

As you think about governing your own agents, consider the four core principles we’ve established at Microsoft Digital.

We empower employees to create and share simple, low-risk agents

 We provide a safe space and personal flexibility that allows individual employees to experiment without implicating company data or content users don’t own.

We capture and vet sensitive data flows at the enterprise level 

More complex or far-reaching agents owned by teams or lines of business need enterprise documentation to account for external audits or security and privacy validation.

We protect data designated confidential or higher 

We contain data flows to tenant mandates and only trust suitable storage destinations for content.

We honor the enterprise lifecycle 

We treat agents that individual employees own like any other user-created app and delete them when that individual leaves the organization. Agents owned by teams have a lifecycle defined by the tenant and tied to attestation, the SDL, and accountability confirmations.

Once you have your governance policies and procedures in place, you can begin your rollout to users through many of the same strategies and processes we’ve discussed in this guide.

Learning from our experience with agents

Connect with relevant stakeholders

Establish early communication and collaboration with members of your security, legal, compliance, IT, and other teams who can help you define ways to configure Copilot Studio agent builder safely.

Trust and empower

Provide safe spaces with appropriate guardrails for individual employees to experiment with simple agents. Copilot Studio agent builder is a great place to start.

Expand enterprise capabilities

Empower a small number of trusted creators to experiment with more powerful agent-building tools under the close watch of IT, Governance, Security, Privacy, Data, and HR teams. This will reveal gaps in process and policy and inform future reviews.

Solidify labeling and data

Revisit your labeling structures and data flows. It will be important to have these structures in place to support this new agentic environment. Start by learning from our experience governing Copilot at Microsoft.

Extend your review process

Adapt any review processes you already have in place to agents, including security, privacy, and accessibility. Embed those reviews into your publishing workflow for agents operating above the individual level. Consider adding reviews for Responsible AI.

Prevent agent sprawl

Establish a reasonable enterprise lifecycle for agents that includes attestation. That will keep agents from sprawling or remaining in place after employees have left your organization or simply no longer need a particular agent.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to manage your Copilot support efforts. They are based on our experience here at Microsoft.

• Plan and refine your governance approach by aligning with Security, Legal, Compliance, HR, and IT; updating existing governance and labeling policies for agents; defining your review process; building a matrix that maps agent capabilities to governance controls; and determining how your SDL procedures apply to agents.
• Pilot with targeted teams to validate your controls by selecting groups such as Security, HR, and IT; establishing clear feedback and monitoring channels; and iterating on your review and remediation procedures based on insights from early adopters.
• Enable agents responsibly across the organization by ensuring foundational protections like Purview DLP and Microsoft Information Protection are in place, deploying adoption and change‑management communications, enabling simple agent‑builder capabilities for broad users, and unlocking advanced agent development scenarios for IT and line‑of‑business developers.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read about how embracing the agentic future is enabling us to become an AI-first Frontier Firm. This article shares our vision for using agents to transform the workplace.
• Find out more about our deployment of Microsoft Agent 365 at Microsoft. This post shows how we’re using this new platform to manage our agent ecosystem. 

Further guidance for you

• Follow the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents Deployment Blueprint to enable agents at scale with security, governance, and measurement strategies.
• Learn about the Responsible AI policies and practices that we use to guide our use of AI at Microsoft.

Applying our lessons to your own Copilot deployment

Embarking on your Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and agentic extensibility journey might seem daunting, but by capitalizing on the lessons that Microsoft Digital has learned from our internal deployment, you can both speed up the process and avoid any pitfalls.

“Deploying Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience.”

Stephan Kerametlian, business program management senior director, Microsoft Digital

By anchoring your work in careful planning and making use of the steps and resources provided in this guide, you can unleash a new era of productivity through Copilot.

We’ve learned a lot on our journey with Copilot, and we’re happy that we get to share our experiences with you—hopefully they help you on your journey.

“Deploying Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a business program management senior director in Microsoft Digital.

You’re not in this alone. If you’re looking for support or knowledge on any aspect of your deployment, reach out to our customer success team.

Key takeaways

This guide reflects our learnings and the processes we followed during our internal rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot. This last set of tips summarizes the major actions you can take to get started with Copilot at your company. 

• Start with strong governance: Build a clear labeling and data protection strategy before deploying Copilot to safeguard sensitive information and meet compliance needs.
• Pilot, then scale: Roll out Copilot in phases, beginning with pilot groups to gather feedback and refine your approach before expanding companywide.
• Communicate early and often: Proactive communication and leadership sponsorship are essential for managing expectations and driving successful adoption.
• Empower champions: Identify and enable employee champions to share best practices, tips, and real-world scenarios that help others get value from Copilot.
• Invest in training: Provide tailored learning resources and support to help users build confidence and skills with Copilot in their daily workflows.
• Measure and optimize: Track usage, collect feedback, and continuously refine your deployment to maximize impact and uncover new opportunities.
• Plan for support: Set up self-service and human support channels early so employees can get help quickly and keep momentum going.
• Extend with agents: As your organization matures, explore agentic AI to automate workflows and unlock even greater productivity gains.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read our IT playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm in the era of AI.
• Review our five-step AI maturity guide for IT leaders.
• Learn how our IT organization is powering our companywide digital transformation.
• View the full, detailed version of this guide.

Further guidance for you

• Read the Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report.
• Find the best overall Copilot deployment and adoption guidance at adoption.microsoft.com.

Try it out

• Learn how to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

The post Microsoft 365 Copilot for executives: Sharing our deployment and adoption journey at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

That’s where the promise of AI transformation comes in.

We at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, have developed and implemented a diverse portfolio of agentic, AI-driven capabilities that are now embedded directly in our day-to-day IT operations. These agentic systems—AI solutions that can reason across data, recommend actions, and, in some cases, execute workflows with human oversight—turn telemetry and insights into action, making our IT infrastructure and processes more resilient, auditable, and proactive.

“We’ve crossed an important threshold in the evolution of AI for IT. We’re now using the capabilities these technologies provide to transform all our core IT services, making everything we do on that side more efficient and secure.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

While your organization’s IT infrastructure may not match our size or complexity, we believe any company can benefit from the AI-driven innovations that we’ve implemented in recent years.

We focus our AI investments across three core areas:

• Network management and infrastructure
• Tenant and device management
• Employee and engineering productivity

We’re also using AI across our IT systems to increase security, both as a standalone initiative and an integrated priority. This principle is baked into all our compliance, vulnerability response, and governance scenarios.

“We’ve crossed an important threshold in the evolution of AI for IT,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We’re now using the capabilities these technologies provide to transform all our core IT services, making everything we do on that side more efficient and secure.”

Pillar One: AI in network management and infrastructure

We have applied AI throughout our global network and IT infrastructure, enabling us to keep up with the ever-increasing demands for capacity and services while reducing disruptions and incidents.

The different innovations we’ve made that fall under this pillar demonstrate the breadth of the opportunity to reimagine IT services with AI.

Supporting enterprise IT at Microsoft: Our three pillars

Network management with AI

• AIOps
• Network infrastructure Copilot (NiC)
• Vuln.AI
• Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant

Tenant and device management with AI

• Digital Asset Management Copilot
• Works councils and tenant trust review
• Enterprise vulnerability management
• IntelLicense
• myDevice AI Agent

Employee and engineering productivity with AI

• ADO Copilot
• ADO Work Item Assistant
• Automation Hub/Automation Catalog

The impact of AI technologies on enterprise IT operations at Microsoft can be divided into three main areas: network management, tenant and device management, and employee and engineering productivity.

AIOps: Transforming network management with operational excellence

AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, involves the application of machine learning, big data analytics, and automation to streamline and improve IT operations processes. In Microsoft Digital, we use AIOps to help us to manage our complex global IT infrastructure.

Our AIOps solution leverages sophisticated data insights to detect and remediate network issues before they become impactful. We use our internally developed AIOps tools to turn raw signals and institutional know-how into guided actions that have led to major time and cost savings.

AIOps benefits include:

• Enhanced productivity: AIOps reduces cognitive load by automating routine tasks, allowing teams to focus on more strategic activities.
• Proactive issue resolution: AIOps executes automatic troubleshooting and remediation, minimizing downtime and reducing incident impact.
• Improved decision-making: AIOps leverages advanced analytics and machine learning to provide actionable insights, which enhances our decision-making capabilities.

The impact of our AIOps work is huge: thousands of hours of engineering time saved and a significant reduction in total disruption time for employees across the company’s global workforce.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI Services

NiC: A network engineer’s companion

Our Network Infrastructure Copilot (NiC) serves as an everyday companion for our network engineers and field IT professionals. With NiC, our IT pros can use natural-language queries to gain quick, accurate insights into network health, configuration states, documentation, troubleshooting resources, and live device data—all in one place.

Some of the typical use cases for NiC include:

• Summarizing syslogs for specific devices
• Recommending circuit upgrades
• Checking deployment status
• Listing devices missing required controls (such as AuditD)

In aggregate, NiC streamlines network device lifecycle management and operation, delivering significant time savings while improving the consistency of operational decisions.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Data Explorer

Vuln.AI: Proactively keeping our systems safe

Leaving just a single connected device unpatched could put our entire enterprise at risk. That’s why we developed Vuln.AI (Vulnerability Management Copilot), our intelligent agentic system that has transformed the way we identify, prioritize, and resolve these vulnerabilities across our enterprise network.

Vuln.AI coordinates two agents that enable our network engineers to gather, analyze, and respond to vulnerabilities proactively using AI insights. The research agent maps the vulnerability to the Microsoft infrastructure, significantly increasing accuracy and reducing manual effort and time involved. It then feeds this information to an interactive AI agent, which becomes a gateway for a security engineer or device owner to interface with the data, ask detailed questions, and gather the required information.

Thanks to Vuln.AI, we’ve been able to accelerate infrastructure compliance, reduce exposure windows, streamline security operations, improve endpoint hygiene, and lower operational risk. Our data show thousands of hours of engineering time saved and meaningful improvement in the accuracy of impacted-device identification.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Data Explorer

Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant: Scaling support to meet demand

Engineering disciplines across Microsoft rely on production-like Azure lab environments for testing Windows updates, investigating incidents, and building customer demos. We created the Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant to enable the rapid creation and management of these lab environments in the face of increasing user demands across our operations. This tool uses AI to help speed tasks such as the development and testing of Windows updates, investigating security incidents, and creating prototypes for customer demos.

Time is a critical component for all lab scenarios, whether it be resolving a customer support issue or testing a Windows Update ahead of a patch release. Our goal is to reduce “Customer Pain Time” (CPT), which measures the amount of time it takes to solve a customer’s problem. Every hour saved in the support process represents a multi-hour reduction in customer pain.

Our most recent data shows that Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant reduced tickets submitted to our Tier 1 teams by 50% and saved 500 hours by leveraging support chats, configuration guides, and other artifacts In addition, new user onboarding training tickets were reduced by 90%, and individual support interaction time was reduced from an average of 20 minutes to 30 seconds.

Related products:

Azure OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Bot Framework, Azure Adaptive Cards

Pillar Two: Tenant and device management

One of the most complicated dimensions of managing IT services at Microsoft is our tenant. This refers to the internal instance of all our cloud services, including Teams channels, SharePoint sites, Power BI workspaces, apps, and email accounts, as well as the millions of devices used by our global workforce.

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed a number of AI-powered tools and solutions to help us manage this gigantic management challenge.

Digital asset management with AI: Governing the tenant

Microsoft empowers our employees to create assets—apps, groups, sites, Power Platform environments, Power BI workspaces—at self-service speed, and our governance must match that pace. Our Digital Asset Management Copilot is a multi-agent solution that surfaces risk and policy violations, recommends fixes, and enables self-service remediation.

Our employees can access a Copilot-like experience to self-manage their assets and ensure app compliance accountability. The agent surfaces insights and recommendations related to asset compliance like oversharing of sensitive documents, highlights tenant assets that pose a security risk, offers remediation mechanisms, and can execute compliance tasks with end-user or admin validation.

The benefits include a more secure enterprise tenant and an embedded culture of compliance: Simplify compliance responsibilities, making them intuitive and seamless for our employees. Success is gauged through end user NSAT scores from our compliance solutions.

The scope of this tool spans more than 1.5 million digital assets in the tenant. The benefits include a more secure enterprise tenant and an embedded culture of compliance. With the help of the Digital Asset Management Copilot, we aim to reach our overall goal of 90% compliance with policies covering ownership, labeling, oversharing, and periodic attestation across the tenant.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Azure AI Service, Power BI Copilot

Works councils and tenant trust reviews: Optimizing tenant onboarding

In the past, fragmented and manual processes around works councils and tenant trust reviews consultations in the European Economic Area  could result in delays to our product launches by as much as four to six months. Our AI-driven optimization program streamlines the end-to-end process, improving submission quality and routing and providing other efficiency recommendations.

The result of these efforts is significant: We’ve managed to reduce the average works councils and tenant trust review cycle times from 133 days to 40—about a 70% improvement—while strengthening trust and transparency across roughly 17 European Economic Area countries.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Service, Power BI

Enterprise Vulnerability Management: Reducing risk to our device fleet

Our extensive companywide Windows device fleet is exposed to vulnerabilities for extended periods after remediations (patches) are applied, increasing the risk of security breaches and operational inefficiencies. Relying on manual processes can lead to slow response times.

Enterprise Vulnerability Management (EVM) is a multi-phase strategy that uses AI technology in combination with Microsoft first-party vulnerability management solutions to proactively secure and maintain the fleet. While Vuln.AI helps us keep our enterprise infrastructure safe and secure, EVM does the same for our fleet of Windows devices.

EVM minimizes risk and reduces manual effort by integrating advanced detection, automated remediation, and compliance acceleration, minimizing risk and manual effort. This holistic approach ensures our devices stay secure and compliant with minimal IT intervention, delivering resilient, self-healing endpoints across the enterprise.

AI-driven EVM delivers measurable impact across our security, compliance, and IT efficiency. Our goal is to reach 95% compliance within a week of a major patching event while reducing operational overhead and enhancing enterprise resilience.

Related products:

Windows Autopatch, Intune, Windows Update

IntelLicense: Our AI-driven license optimization and audit readiness

Managing a software estate the size of ours—including 28 disconnected systems, 400,000 software assets, and more than 800 suppliers—requires license intelligence. IntelLicense is a set of advanced, AI-driven solutions we’ve developed to help us revolutionize our software discovery and acquisition processes.

These solutions optimize our software asset management throughout the enterprise software lifecycle, reducing fragmented data, lowering audit risk, and accelerating decision-making. These changes have delivered substantial cost savings and efficiency improvements. One standout example: Our external vendor audits that previously took an average of 154 days are targeted to drop to about 15 minutes, thanks to IntelLicense changes.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Service

myDevice AI: Transforming our IT asset management

Ensuring the security of our physical assets requires a unified and accurate inventory. Fragmented IT asset data leads to inconsistent policies and exposes vulnerabilities, making it difficult for security teams to quickly isolate threats and limit potential impact.

The myDevice AI Agent advances an AI-native approach to IT asset management across our IT tenant. The agent automates our high-volume employee requests, clarifies inventory, and streamlines our procurement. While this is occurring, the agent’s recommendation engine matches devices to our users’ needs to improve satisfaction and security.

Early results from myDevice AI include an approximately 50% reduction in time and costs in asset management (eliminating thousands of hours in manual processes annually), as well as improved security and a more personalized device-procurement experience for employees. In time, we will broaden this impact as agentic workflows expand to include labs, printers, conference rooms, and Internet of Things devices.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Service

Pillar Three: Our employee and engineering productivity

Building the software and systems needed to power Information Technology at Microsoft is a time-intensive job. Our engineers have been hard at work building AI-powered solutions that make building and maintaining those systems more efficient and streamlined, answering the question, “How can we apply AI to make this more efficient?”

Here are a few of the solutions we’ve found to help cut down the time and effort involved in some of the routine, day-to-day IT procedures that help keep our systems running smoothly.

ADO Copilot: AI with Azure DevOps

ADO Copilot empowers all our developers and product managers by providing instant, AI-driven insights and automation within Azure DevOps (ADO). This AI-driven assistant seamlessly integrates into ADO and acts as a “trusted copilot” with natural-language capabilities that automate workflows; enhance productivity, compliance, and velocity; and amplify decision-making across the planning, building, and deployment phases.

This agentic solution reduces the time we spend searching for information, managing permissions, planning sprints, summarizing KPIs, and resolving engineering friction points. It enables our engineering teams to move from planning to execution faster and with greater quality and consistency.

The early results from our use of this tool show extensive time savings, which projected over a full year would mean 73,000 fewer hours of engineering time required for the same output.  We’ve also seen greater developer satisfaction and faster movement from planning to execution.

Related products:

Azure DevOps, Azure AI Service

ADO Work Item Assistant: Automating our ADO processes

Building consistent, high-quality ADO work items manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Our ADO Work Item Assistant is a generative AI-powered tool that streamlines the creation and understanding of Azure DevOps work items, including features, user stories, tasks, bugs, and custom item types.

The benefits of our assistant include:

• Greater efficiency: The potential to cut the amount of time it takes to craft an ADO feature or user story in half (50%).
• Project delivery enhancement: A streamlined approach mitigates errors and inconsistencies.

By leveraging the power of AI within Azure DevOps, we can significantly simplify and accelerate the work-item authoring process for our product management and engineering teams, improving quality and reducing workload.

Related products:

Azure DevOps, Copilot Studio, ES Chat

Automation hub and catalog: Solving task fragmentation

Large enterprises face major productivity challenges stemming from scattered information, fragmented systems, and reliance on numerous disconnected apps. This fragmentation leads to increased meetings, duplicative effort, and significant time spent on lower-level tasks.

Automation Hub/Automation Catalog is our customizable Teams app—built on Power Platform and Power Catalog—that addresses this challenge by applying AI-powered automation solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems. Common automations include a daily consolidated task list, cancelled-meeting alerts, flags for important emails, and nudges on unanswered messages. The app streamlines workflows and jump-starts productivity gains, enabling you to enhance operational efficiency while maximizing your ROI.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform

The future of AI in IT

As enthusiastic as we are about our progress so far, we’re even more excited about the great potential that AI agents show in terms of lowered costs, time saved, and boosted productivity across our IT operations.

“The advent of AI agents is the next big step in AI-powered innovation. We are actively working towards our vision of deploying, governing, and managing a fleet of agents across our IT organization, pushing Microsoft to the boundaries of the AI Frontier.”

Monika Gupta, partner group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

We’re anticipating that these solutions will continue to scale up as we further optimize and standardize large language models and agent patterns in our engineering organizations. Multi-agent orchestration will make an impact on governance and vulnerability response, and autonomous actions will become more common in everyday IT workflows. Measurement rigor will continue to sharpen, ensuring that value is tracked and amplified as AI tools and technologies proliferate across the enterprise.

“As exciting as it’s been to see the many practical applications of AI across our IT portfolio the last two years, 2026 is shaping up to be even more exciting,” says Monika Gupta, partner group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “The advent of AI agents is the next big step in AI-powered innovation. We are actively working towards our vision of deploying, governing, and managing a fleet of agents across our IT organization, pushing Microsoft to the boundaries of the AI Frontier.”

Key takeaways

Here are some important factors to consider as you contemplate adding AI tools and innovations to your IT operations and workflows:

• Think holistically: Evaluate the major categories of your IT organization where AI can drive transformation—network management, tenant and device governance, and employee productivity.
• Leverage AIOps for resilience: Use AI-driven operational tools to automate troubleshooting, reduce downtime, and improve decision-making across your network infrastructure.
• Embed compliance into workflows: Implement AI-fueled governance solutions that make compliance intuitive and self-service, reducing risk while fostering a culture of accountability.
• Accelerate vulnerability response: Adopt multi-agent AI systems to proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities, minimizing exposure windows and operational risk.
• Boost productivity with AI assistants: Deploy AI Copilots and automation hubs to streamline engineering tasks, reduce cognitive load, and eliminate inefficiencies caused by fragmented systems.
• Plan for scale and autonomy: Prepare for the next wave of AI in IT—multi-agent orchestration, autonomous workflows, and rigorous measurement frameworks to amplify value across the enterprise.

Try it out

Learn more and sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Azure AI apps.

Related links

• Learn how we’re enhancing our network reliability with AIOps and Network Infrastructure Copilot.
• Find out more about our AI-powered leap into vulnerability management at Microsoft.
• Check out our playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm in the AI era.
• Explore our 5-step guide to enterprise AI maturity.
• Discover how we’re transforming the employee experience at Microsoft with AI.
• Read about how we’re using AI to reinvent our network security practices.

The post AI at scale: How we’re transforming our enterprise IT operations at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“Agents are the most significant technological change we’ve seen since the shift to the cloud, and arguably since the advent of the Internet.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

This emerging model emphasizes hybrid human-agent teams, dynamic organizational structures, and a culture of continuous innovation. Employees evolve into “agent bosses,” orchestrating outcomes by delegating tasks to autonomous agents that plan, reason, and adapt.

IT teams are essential to enabling this transformation, from shaping and governing the data that informs AI, to deploying and managing the systems that power agentic workflows, to driving the culture and learning programs that are essential to unlocking a frontier mindset.

“Agents are the most significant technological change we’ve seen since the shift to the cloud, and arguably since the advent of the Internet,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “They represent a generational opportunity to rethink our entire portfolio of IT services. But that innovation requires a careful and thoughtful strategy to maximize impact and minimize time to value.”

This guide is our blueprint for other IT organizations to follow, so you can ensure your own team is on the pathway to becoming a Frontier Firm.

Read and prepare

Why 2025 will go down as the year the Frontier Firm was born.

Transforming business and IT with AI agents

The integration of agents in the enterprise presents transformative opportunities for every organization, but becoming a Frontier Firm requires a clear understanding of the journey ahead. IT leaders must recognize three patterns that mark the evolution toward frontier status. Each pattern reflects increasing organizational, technical, and cultural maturity, unlocking greater value from agents:

1. Human with assistant: In this foundational pattern, employees leverage intelligent AI assistants—such as Microsoft 365 Copilot—to enhance their productivity and effectiveness. This is the starting point where individuals develop an “AI habit,” reimagining legacy workflows and discovering new efficiencies with the support of AI.
2. Human-led agents: The second pattern introduces autonomous agents as “digital workers” who perform specific tasks under human direction. Here, agents join teams and execute actions independently, allowing employees to delegate routine work and focus on higher-value activities.
3. Human-led, agent operated: In the final pattern, the synergy between humans and agents is fully realized. Human-led, agent operated teams set strategic direction, while agents autonomously run entire business processes and workflows. Agents periodically report their progress to support scalable and resilient operations, while human oversight is maintained through evaluation and audits to verify accuracy and quality of outcomes.

Becoming a Frontier Firm

Pattern 1

Human with assistant

Every employee has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster

Pattern 2

Human-agent teams

Agents join teams as “digital colleagues,” taking on specific tasks at human direction

Pattern 3

Human-led, agent-operated

Humans set direction and agents execute business processes and workflows, checking in as needed

AI maturity starts at simple AI assistance, then progresses to more complex patterns between humans and agents.

As organizations experience these patterns, agents evolve from basic information retrieval to sophisticated, autonomous systems capable of executing complex, end-to-end workflows. These mature agents drive transformation through self-directed operations, continuous adaptation, and improvement powered by data and feedback. Multiagent systems further enable scalable, personalized services, automate intricate tasks, and optimize resource allocation.

Microsoft categorizes agents into three tiers, reflecting the different uses we’ve observed across the enterprise:

• Personal Agents: Designed for individual users, these agents automate personal tasks like meeting summaries, email drafting, and task reminders. They operate within a single user’s scope and permissions. Personal agents can be enabled at scale with no friction due to low risk.
• Team (Business) Agents Designed for departmental or team workflows that are built in Copilot Studio or with Copilot Studio Lite. They handle tasks like tracking project status, routing expense approvals, and answering FAQs within a shared team context. Teams can share these low-risk agents, each limited to the data the team requires, while operating in secure, policy-governed environments.
• Enterprise Agents: Operating at an organizational level, these agents integrate with authoritative systems to deliver large-scale services such as compliance checks, enterprise search, and policy enforcement. They are centrally governed, leverage enterprise data platforms and differ from personal and team agents due to their scale, complexity and impact.

Within Microsoft Digital, our strategic investments across all three classifications have already generated meaningful business benefits. The following sections detail how these investments are accelerating our path to becoming a Frontier IT organization—and how they can propel your organization too.

Discover

The future of work is here: Transforming our employee experience with AI.

The evolving role of enterprise IT

Our journey to becoming a Frontier Firm started with AI agents, which are the next major step in our evolution of IT. Agents provide us with a foundation that we’re using to reimagine our IT services with potential to lower our costs, improve our outcomes, and accelerate our innovation.

IT plays an essential role for businesses that aspire to become Frontier Firms. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve identified eight core services that IT teams must provide to enable organizations to become Frontier Firms.

1. Driving strategic business objectives

To succeed in this transition to the frontier, we’ve found that enterprise IT must become a highly valued consultative partner to our internal business leaders by helping them to understand where agents can drive strategic goals and then jointly developing those solutions.

For example, if a strategic goal is to expand into a new market without a large support staff, our IT team might propose deploying multilingual customer service agents to handle inquiries in that market. This kind of proactive solutioning demonstrates how our team is thinking beyond just keeping systems running—we’re contributing to growth and innovation. In effect, our role shifts from technology enablement towards business strategy execution via technology architecting.

Envision, empower, govern, transform

Inside Microsoft: Being Customer Zero in an AI-powered world

2. Enabling agentic capabilities

To accelerate the adoption and impact of agents, we must take a proactive role in building the foundational platforms, tools, and infrastructure that empower our larger organization. This means developing systems specifically designed for agent memory and orchestrating seamless integration between agents and core enterprise systems. IT teams like ours should also curate and expose certified data sources, ensuring agents have reliable information to draw upon.

The IT function must evolve from managing technology to offering AI capabilities as a strategic service. For instance, for us establishing an “agent development sandbox” is enabling our business groups to safely prototype and test agents using secure access to scoped corporate data—empowering innovation while maintaining necessary oversight and governance. We also need to define and shepherd processes so agents can safely “graduate” from personal or team-based tenants to becoming available enterprise-wide.

By leading this charge, we ensure that our business units see us as a trusted partner rather than a gatekeeper. Without this support, organizations may try to implement agents independently, resulting in unmanaged “shadow IT” and increased organizational risk. Providing intuitive AI platforms, clear guidance, support structures and effective training encourages collaboration and positions us as the enabler of safe, scalable agentic transformation.  

Find out how

AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft

3. Managing AI-enabled enterprise architecture

The rise of agents is transforming enterprise architecture into a more dynamic, adaptive, and intelligent system. Traditional systems were largely deterministic, with predictable inputs and outputs. In contrast, agentic systems introduce probabilistic behaviors, autonomous decision-making, and continuous learning, which require new architectural thinking and governance models. Our IT architects must evolve their design principles to address this shift:

• Ensuring reliability in AI-driven systems: AI components, including agents, operate with varying degrees of confidence and uncertainty. We in IT must implement mechanisms such as confidence thresholds, fallback logic, and human-in-the-loop controls to ensure that agentic decisions are reliable and aligned with business goals.
• Auditing and accountability of agents: Agents must be discoverable, observable and auditable. Our organization must design systems that log agent decisions, track their reasoning paths, and enable post-hoc analysis. This supports compliance, risk management, and continuous improvement of agent behavior.
• Integrating agents into service-oriented architectures: Agents should be treated as first-class citizens within the enterprise architecture. This means defining clear APIs, service contracts, and interaction patterns that allow agents to interoperate with existing services, data platforms, and business processes.
• Determine your agent creation enablement strategy: It was important to clarify which employees are empowered to build, and how and when they engage with us in IT throughout the process. Start by allowing employees to create agents in self-serve environments for personal productivity. As agents mature, establish clear checkpoints for them to engage with you, such as review and publishing for compliance, security, and governance before agents are scaled to broader use. This staged approach ensures your employees can assist and find value quickly, while you provide oversight and support to maximize impact and maintain organizational standards.
• Agent governance platform: As organizations deploy multiple agents across domains—customer service, finance, operations, legal, HR, etc.—we are finding there is a growing need for centralized agent governance. This layer is not just a technical construct; it is a strategic capability that we must design, implement, and operate. Its responsibilities include managing how agents interact with each other and with human users, policy definition and enforcement, monitoring and observability of agent activity, agent lifecycle management, security and access controls, and agent interoperability and integration.

By owning this layer, we in IT have become the steward of our agentic governance, ensuring that autonomous systems remain aligned with enterprise objectives. This also positions us as a strategic enabler of innovation, allowing business units to deploy agents confidently within a controlled and scalable framework.

Unlock Agentic AI

Deploying Microsoft Agent 365: How we’re extending our infrastructure to manage agents at Microsoft

4. Driving data and integration strategy

For agents to operate effectively, they require reliable access to accurate, comprehensive data and seamless connectivity across enterprise systems. This places us at the heart of enabling agent-driven workflows. We proactively identify and catalog data sources, we break down data silos, ensure data hygiene, and build “AI Ready” data access layers, like APIs and data lakes, enabling agents and AI-powered solutions via data that is easily discoverable and well managed. By leading these efforts, we are strengthening our strategic role, with data architecture and governance becoming foundational to AI success.

Additionally, we must oversee the integration of agents with legacy systems to ensure they can securely initiate transactions within core systems. Ultimately, we in IT move from simply maintaining operations to actively designing and supporting intelligent, future-ready workflows that position the enterprise for ongoing innovation and event driven and real time systems.

Plan and adapt

Transforming our data culture with AI-ready data

5. Stewardship of governance and ethical AI

Robust governance is foundational to successful agent adoption. We in IT must partner closely with risk and compliance teams to lead the implementation of a comprehensive AI governance framework. We find that agreeing and aligning to the right levels of governance are the key to enabling AI successfully. To get there, you need the following:

• Senior leaders who are responsible for driving enterprise agentic prioritization and initiatives across disciplines and organizations to realize business value.
• A cross-discipline team to provide technical and strategic guidance serving to help accelerate, learn and land delivery of AI initiatives to drive adoption, impact and build an “AI forward” culture in IT.
• Human stewards augmented by AI who enable AI transformation through enterprise grade data strategy, governance, and architecture.
• Agentic collaboration and productivity through strong data hygiene standards to help you make sure only the right data is available to agentic systems.
• Adherence to global compliance regimes and privacy frameworks, as well as responsible and ethical applications of AI, like our Microsoft Responsible AI principles.

By setting clear standards for transparency, fairness, and security, we are driving innovation and ensuring alignment with our company’s values and regulatory responsibilities.

Our stewardship extends across the entire lifecycle of agents, including versioning their models, updating their knowledge bases, and retiring or replacing agents as needed. It also includes mirroring software version controls for intelligent, learning systems.

While this increases the complexity of what we manage, it expands our strategic value. With a holistic approach, we can break down silos and build a unified, effective ecosystem of agents that work collaboratively across the enterprise.

Guide operational change

Riding the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with good governance

6. Training and education

Our role is evolving to provide high quality and authoritative education and training content for the larger company. By providing a centralized repository of training on agent development, we are maintaining our relevance with our business partners. We are providing a visible way to gather input, suggestions, and maintain insight to the use cases that our employees and business partners require—this is enabling us to provide feedback on current solutions and to identify data and APIs required for us to deliver desired results.

As agents become integral to enterprise workflows, we must take a proactive role in cataloguing and delivering high-quality, authoritative training and educational resources to our business partners. Establishing a centralized hub for agent development training not only strengthens our partnership with our business stakeholders but it also ensures that the technical solutions we build are informed and validated by our colleague’s real-world needs.

IT teams should implement visible mechanisms—like feedback channels and suggestion platforms—to collect input, track emerging use cases, and maintain ongoing insight into evolving business requirements. This continuous dialogue enables us to refine current solutions and identify the critical data sources and APIs necessary to support future agent-driven initiatives, fostering a culture of innovation and responsiveness across our organization.

Learn more

Enabling meaningful AI adoption at Microsoft with a Microsoft 365 Copilot Expo

7. Change management and adoption

Agents mark a transformational shift in human-computer interaction. This profound change requires us in IT to play a central role in supporting our employees as they adapt and rethink their daily work with agents. Effective change management is therefore a critical responsibility for us—it’s enabling us to move beyond technology deployment to actively guiding our employees, business units, and leaders through this transition to agent-driven workflows.

We must develop and execute comprehensive strategies that include clear communication plans, targeted training and enablement, and robust feedback mechanisms to identify challenges and accelerate adoption. By embedding change management into our core mandate, we ensure that agent-driven innovation is not only implemented but also embraced across the organization—driving tangible business value, resilience, and positioning us as a strategic partner in enterprise transformation.

How to accelerate value

Driving the future of work: How we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft

8. Measuring agent impact and outcomes

Measuring the success of the journey to becoming an AI frontier firm requires that we take a comprehensive approach to evaluating business outcomes for the company. Enterprises that aspire to become Frontier Firms must establish a unified dashboard and a recurring cadence to review key performance indicators (KPIs) that capture the full spectrum of adoption, impact, maturity, and responsibility. These metrics are providing us with clear and actionable insights across several critical domains. Examples include:

• Usage and adoption: We’re tracking the percentage of our employees leveraging AI-agents and the number of AI use cases deployed in production.
• Efficiency gains: We’re monitoring hours saved, automation rates, and cost reductions achieved through AI-driven processes.
• Business performance: We’re evaluating improvements in operational metrics, output quality, and the speed of decision-making cycles.
• Employee and customer satisfaction: We’re assessing our employees’ survey results regarding AI adoption and we’re monitoring customer satisfaction scores.
• AI maturity and coverage: We’re gauging the maturity level of our AI capabilities and the extent of AI projects that our employees have implemented across all departments.
• Responsible AI and governance: We’re tracking the percentage of models audited, monitoring bias and fairness metrics, and aiming for zero compliance incidents.
• Cross-functional engagement: We’re measuring our executive sponsorship of our AI initiatives and counting the number of joint projects spanning multiple business units.

“A thoughtful, structured approach is key to accelerating your journey to the frontier. Making the time at the start of the journey to ensure you have the right processes and frameworks in place as well as an empowered leadership team to make quick decisions will ensure your IT organization is poised to accelerate your company’s frontier journey.”

Monika Gupta, partner group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

By defining clear outcomes and tracking progress against targeted metrics, we’re objectively demonstrating where agents are creating business value and identifying areas where we can improve. This approach is reinforcing that agent adoption is a strategic priority, ensuring that our victories are recognized and that we’re proactively addressing our risks, which is driving responsible innovation and lasting impact throughout our enterprise.

Define and measure

Measuring the impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI at Microsoft

Enabling the agentic revolution at Microsoft

In the era of agents, we and IT organizations like yours have an opportunity to be a strategic cornerstone for companies aspiring to become Frontier Firms. By managing the foundational infrastructure, data, and governance frameworks that support agents, the IT function is pivotal in enabling agent-driven digital transformation. The evolution of IT—from a traditional service provider to an orchestrator of AI capabilities, a champion of responsible technology practices, and a true partner in business innovation—will determine whether we and organizations like yours can fully realize the benefits of agents.

“A thoughtful, structured approach is key to accelerating your journey to the frontier,” says Monika Gupta, a partner group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “Making the time at the start of the journey to ensure you have the right processes and frameworks in place as well as an empowered leadership team to make quick decisions will ensure your IT organization is poised to accelerate your company’s frontier journey.”

IT teams that proactively embrace this shift will enhance their strategic value, guiding their organizations through the complexities of intelligent automation and positioning them for competitive advantage. Conversely, passive IT risk being sidelined, which can lead to fragmented user experiences and increased security vulnerabilities.

The charge for CIOs is clear: Take the lead in adopting agents and redefine IT’s role at the core of your business strategy. This is a generational opportunity for IT to move beyond routine operations to instead become a driver of lasting innovation and impact.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips to power enable your company to become a Frontier Firm:

• Your IT team will play an essential role in facilitating the transition to becoming a Frontier Firm. At a minimum, your IT leaders and practitioners must prepare your data estate for agentic workloads, partner to identify and enable prioritized business scenarios, and then actively participate in enterprise transformation through skilling, change management and measurement activities.
• Your enterprise IT architecture must evolve to embrace dynamic and adaptive agent-based systems. Moving from traditional deterministic systems to agentic systems that introduce probabilistic behaviors, autonomous decision-making, and continuous learning require new architectural thinking, audit capabilities, and governance models.
• Your journey to becoming a Frontier Firm starts with mindset and ambition. Even the most visionary companies will require time to transform their IT operations to enable this transition. If you start your journey with a well-defined plan based on the eight principles defined in this article, you’ll accelerate your journey toward becoming an AI-powered Frontier Firm.

Try it out

• Start building enterprise agents with a free trial of Copilot Studio.
• Build and deploy your next agent and discover the latest AI models in the Azure AI Foundry.

Related links

• Learn how Microsoft governs its M365 tenant to maximize the value of AI and agents.
• Discover how Microsoft Digital evaluates and measures the impact of our AI investments.
• Looking to maximize usage? Learn how Microsoft Digital is maximizing the value of AI through principled change management.
• Microsoft is transforming its employee experience with Agents and AI. Learn how.
• Continuous improvement helps Microsoft to identify agentic opportunities, and can help your company too.
• Need insight into your Agentic estate? Agent 365 has you covered!

The post Becoming a Frontier Firm: Our IT playbook for the AI era appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“While AI enables amazing capabilities for knowledge workers, it also increases the threat landscape, since bad actors using AI are constantly probing for vulnerabilities. Vuln.AI helps keep Microsoft safe by identifying and accelerating the mitigation of vulnerabilities in our environment.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital 

Enter Vuln.AI, an intelligent agentic system developed by our team in Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—to transform how we identify, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities across our enterprise network.

Manual methods can’t keep up

As a company, we detect over 600 million cybersecurity threats every day, according to our latest Digital Defense Report. Some of those signals are bad actors probing our internal network and infrastructure looking for unpatched vulnerabilities. Our infrastructure supports over 300,000 employees and vendors, 25,000 network devices, and over 560 buildings across 102 countries. This scale means we face a constant stream of vulnerabilities—each requiring triage, impact analysis, and remediation.

“While AI enables amazing capabilities for knowledge workers, it also increases the threat landscape, since bad actors using AI are constantly probing for vulnerabilities. Vuln.AI helps keep Microsoft safe by identifying and accelerating the mitigation of vulnerabilities in our environment,” says Brian Fielder, a vice president within Microsoft Digital. 

Historically, our Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team here in Microsoft Digital relied on manual assessments to determine which network devices were impacted by new vulnerabilities. Traditional vulnerability scanning tools generate a lot of false positives and false negatives, and a significant amount of analysis still falls to security engineers, requiring manual validation before any vulnerability impact can be communicated to device owners. These manual methods were time-consuming, error-prone, and reactive—our security engineers were spending hours on each vulnerability, at times missing critical threats or sinking too much time into false alarms.

“AI’s true power lies in the problem it’s applied to. Start by identifying the most time-consuming or painful task in your organization-then explore how AI can augment or improve it. Begin with a small, targeted enhancement and iterate continuously.”

Ankit Bansal, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

With the vast number of vulnerabilities coming in every day, security engineers needed a scalable way to quickly analyze, prioritize, and respond.

The solution: Vuln.AI

We already achieved dramatic impact with our AI Ops and Network Infrastructure Copilot, which is on track to save us over 11,000 hours of network service management time per year. We built Vuln.AI on top of that investment:

1. The Research Agent analyzes vulnerability feeds and network metadata from our Infrastructure Data Lakehouse (IDL) built on top of Azure Data Explorer, which regularly ingests data from our device vendors and other sources. Once new vulnerabilities are detected, it automates the identification of impacted devices and integrates with other internal tooling for validation and reporting.
2. The Interactive Agent acts as a gateway for engineers and device owners to ask follow-up questions and initiate remediation. Through agent-to-agent interaction, it leverages our Network Infrastructure Copilot to query the research agent’s findings. This agentic interface enables real-time decision-making and contextual insights.

Together, these agents are significantly improving our network security operations. The results we’re seeing so far are compelling:

• A 70% reduction in time to vulnerability insights, enabling faster prioritization and mitigation, minimizing exposure windows.
• Lower risk of compromise through increased accuracy, quicker detection, and containment of threats.
• A stronger compliance posture that supports adherence to financial, legal, and regulatory requirements.
• Higher accuracy in identifying vulnerable devices, reducing false positives and missed threats
• Engineering hours saved and reduced fatigue, significantly improving productivity.

Our gains translate to lower operational risk, faster response times, and more resilient infrastructure—critical outcomes for any enterprise navigating today’s threat landscape.

“AI’s true power lies in the problem it’s applied to,” says Ankit Bansal, a senior product manager within Microsoft Digital. “Start by identifying the most time-consuming or painful task in your organization-then explore how AI can augment or improve it. Begin with a small, targeted enhancement and iterate continuously.”

How Vuln.AI works

The system continuously ingests our CVE data from our device suppliers’ API feeds and a publicly available database of known cybersecurity vulnerabilities.  It correlates that data with device attributes such as its hardware model and OS to identify the potential impact on the network and surface actionable insights.

Engineers interact with the system via Copilot, Teams, or custom tooling, which allows seamless integration with our network security teams’ daily workflows.

“We built a hybrid approach in Vuln.AI to guide LLMs through complex security advisories,” says Blaze Kotsenburg, a software engineer in Microsoft Digital. “By combining structured function calls, templated prompts, and data validation, we keep the model focused on producing reliable, actionable insights for vulnerability mitigation.”

“We chose Durable Functions for Vuln.AI because it allowed us to confidently orchestrate complex, stateful research. The reliability and simplicity of the framework meant we could shift our focus to engineering the intelligence behind the agent, especially the prompting strategies used in Vuln.AI’s backend processing.”

Mike Lollis, a senior software engineer in Microsoft Digital.

When it came to building Vuln.AI, we relied heavily on our own technology platforms, including: 

• Azure AI Foundry for model development and deployment
• Azure Data Explorer to store device metadata and CVEs
• Agent to agent interaction with Network Copilotto query our database for device and inventory knowledge
• Azure OpenAI models for natural language processing and classification
• Azure Durable Functions for fine-grained orchestration and custom LLM workflows

“We chose Durable Functions for Vuln.AI because it allowed us to confidently orchestrate complex, stateful research,” says Mike Lollis, a senior software engineer in Microsoft Digital.  “The reliability and simplicity of the framework meant we could shift our focus to engineering the intelligence behind the agent, especially the prompting strategies used in Vuln.AI’s backend processing.”

Vuln.AI in action

Consider a common scenario: a new CVE that affects a network switch has just been published. Vuln.AI’s research agent immediately flags the vulnerability, maps it to potentially affected devices in our network inventory, and pushes the findings to an internal database.

“AI is only as good as the data you provide. Much of the success with Vuln.AI came from our dedicated efforts to source comprehensive vulnerability data and device attributes. For effective AI-powered solutions, you really need to invest in a strong data foundation and a strategy for how to integrate into the rest of your infrastructure.”

Linda Lee, product manager II, Microsoft Digital

This data then becomes immediately accessible in our internal tools, where it is validated and approved by security engineers. Following this, network engineers are provided with precise information about their vulnerable devices.

Engineers can prompt Vuln.AI’s interactive agent to instantly retrieve the following information:

With Vuln.AI, network engineers can now begin vulnerability response operations much more quickly—no spreadsheet wrangling and no delays.

“AI is only as good as the data you provide,” says Linda Lee, a product manager II within Microsoft Digital. “Much of the success with Vuln.AI came from our dedicated efforts to source comprehensive vulnerability data and device attributes. For effective AI-powered solutions, you really need to invest in a strong data foundation and a strategy for how to integrate into the rest of your infrastructure.”

It’s about automating manual workflows and research.

“Vuln.AI has reduced our triage time by over 50%,” says Vincent Bersagol, a principal security engineer in Microsoft Digital.

This is allowing our engineers to focus on deeper analysis.

“The synergy between security and AI engineering has unlocked a new level of precision in vulnerability insights,” Bersagol says. “This is just the beginning.”

The journey ahead

Our journey with AI-powered vulnerability management has only just begun. Looking ahead, our roadmap for Vuln.AI includes:

• Extending data coverage to include more hardware suppliers
• Integrating more detailed device profiles for more targeted vulnerability response
• Supporting autonomous workflows to streamline network engineers’ remediation efforts
• Incorporating other AI agents to support more security use cases

These enhancements will further reduce risk, accelerate response times, and empower engineers to focus on more strategic initiatives.

“Trust is the foundation of everything we do in Microsoft Digital,” Bansal says. “Securing our network is essential to upholding that trust. Intelligent solutions like Vuln.AI not only help us stay ahead of emerging threats—they also establish the blueprint for integrating AI more deeply into our security operations.”

For IT leaders, Vuln.AI offers a blueprint for modern vulnerability management:

• Scalable: Handles thousands of devices and vulnerabilities with ease
• Accurate: Reduces false positives and missed threats
• Efficient: Saves time, money, and resources
• Secure: Built on Microsoft’s trusted AI and security frameworks

In a world where every second counts and any threat can be costly, Vuln.AI transforms vulnerability management from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage for Microsoft.

Key takeaways

As your organization looks for ways to improve security and threat response in a fast-changing landscape, consider the following insights on how AI is reshaping vulnerability management at Microsoft:

• Fight fire with fire: The threat landscape has broadened dramatically due to bad actors using AI. Supplementing your own efforts with AI can help you manage your risk more effectively than traditional vulnerability management.
• Agility is key: Effective vulnerability response hinges on acting fast. An AI-powered solution like Vuln.AI can cut the time needed to analyze and mitigate vulnerabilities by over 50%, enabling organizations to enhance security operations at scale.
• The future is now: Looking ahead, Microsoft Digital will integrate agentic workflows into more security operations, boosting efficiency in risk prevention, threat detection and response, thereby enabling security practitioners and developers to focus on more strategic projects.

Try it out

• Learn how to manage network vulnerabilities with Microsoft Defender.
• Find out how to manage your unmanaged network devices.
• Get information on adaptive network hardening, firewall configuration guidance, and how to reduce your attack surfaces in Azure and hybrid environments.

Related links

• Learn how we enhanced our network reliability with our AIOps and Network Infrastructure Copilot.
• Find out how we’re reshaping Microsoft with continuous improvement and AI.
• Check out h ow we’re unleashing API-powered agents internally here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re using AI to reinvent our network security.

The post Vuln.AI: Our AI-powered leap into vulnerability management at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve been on the front lines of this AI-powered revolution, translating vision into reality and reimagining what’s possible for the enterprise.

“We’ve learned so many lessons over the past few years building AI-powered solutions and driving an AI-forward culture. We’re excited to share them with our customers and partners so they can learn from our journey.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

As generative AI leapt into the mainstream with the arrival of models like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and transformative tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, the stakes for IT leaders have never been higher.

The challenge isn’t just about deploying the latest AI tools—it’s about architecting a foundation for sustained, responsible, and scalable change across the enterprise.

That’s where this guide comes in. We’re opening a window into our own AI evolution—sharing our hard-won lessons, proven frameworks, and actionable steps that can help you steer your organization from AI exploration to AI acceleration. Whether you’re just beginning your journey or ready to scale enterprise-wide adoption, this guide is built to empower you to make informed decisions, sidestep common pitfalls, and unlock the full promise of AI-driven transformation.

“We’ve learned so many lessons over the past few years building AI-powered solutions and driving an AI-forward culture,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We’re excited to share them with our customers and partners so they can learn from our journey.”

Read on to discover how we moved from AI vision to AI reality here in Microsoft Digital. You’ll learn how you can drive measurable business outcomes while building a culture that’s ready for what’s next.

The five stages of AI-powered transformation

We have led Microsoft through five stages of AI maturity—from initial exploration to becoming an AI-driven enterprise. This has been a three-year journey, and you and your digital leaders will need to be prepared to take time to fully experience each of these stages to truly unlock the potential of AI to transform your enterprise.

What follows is a stage-by-stage summary of how we achieved our transformation, followed by a list of empowering actions you can take to help you on your own journey.

Mapping our journey to AI maturity

Stage 1: Awareness and foundation

Set a bold vision for your AI journey, anchored in clear business outcomes—avoid implementing “AI for AI’s sake.” Engage your executive sponsors early and form an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to foster cross-functional collaboration and empower experimentation. Establish Responsible AI principles alongside your organization’s ethics team and assess your data readiness from the start—remember, “no AI without data.” By building these foundations, you’ll position your teams to confidently launch AI initiatives and drive meaningful transformation.

Target outcomes

A foundational strategy, governance principles, and leadership buy-in to kickstart AI projects.

Learn more

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

“At the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence, we’ve learned that combining strong governance, data readiness, and a continuous-improvement mindset transforms AI pilots into enterprise-scale solutions,” says Nitul Pancholi, the AI CoE lead in Microsoft Employee Experience. “This guide distills our three-year journey into clear, actionable steps to accelerate responsible AI adoption, mitigate risk, and drive measurable business impact.”

Stage 2: Active pilots and skill building

To accelerate your AI journey, start by launching targeted pilot projects across diverse areas of your organization—think automated support chatbots or network analytics. Encourage experimentation and leverage hackathons to surface a broad range of ideas. Narrow these down to your most promising initiatives by evaluating business value against implementation effort and focus resources on a select group of high impact “big bets.”

Empower your teams by investing in upskilling: offer discipline-aligned learning paths, issue digital credentials, and celebrate progress to foster a culture of continuous learning and knowledge-sharing. Establish early-stage governance by requiring all pilots to undergo Responsible AI and architectural reviews. By following these steps, you’ll create early momentum, build internal expertise, and identify the AI solutions most likely to drive meaningful impact at scale.

Target outcomes

The first tangible benefits of AI: efficiency gains, time and cost savings, and quality improvements, and an internal talent pool emerging, paving the way to scale successful solutions.

Learn more

Find out how we’re embracing AI at Microsoft with new AI certifications.

Stage 3: Operationalize and govern

To scale and integrate AI solutions across your organization, move beyond pilot projects by deploying AI solutions directly into production and embedding them within core business workflows.

Strengthen your data and AI infrastructure—consider implementing a unified data platform and robust Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) pipelines—to support this transition. Formalize enterprise governance with clearly defined steering teams: empower your AI Center of Excellence to accelerate implementation and establish a Data Council to ensure data quality and “AI-ready” assets and a Responsible AI Office to oversee ethical use and compliance. Encourage collaboration among these groups and designate domain leads to ensure your AI initiatives consistently deliver tangible business value.

By putting these practices in place, you can drive successful scaling and operationalization of AI throughout your enterprise.

Target outcomes

Multiple AI use cases running at enterprise scale under robust oversight with cross-functional alignment on AI objectives and the business value they’re delivering.

Learn more

Read our guide for tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance your company.

Stage 4: Enterprise-wide adoption

To consolidate your gains and achieve AI adoption across the enterprise, make AI a core consideration in every new project and process.

Ask where AI-driven intelligence can deliver real impact, whether by boosting efficiency, enhancing user experiences, or unlocking new business value. Align AI initiatives with your organization’s strategic goals by empowering business leads to synchronize efforts and continuously update your AI roadmap. Cultivate a data-driven culture through ongoing, large-scale training and make AI tools a natural part of everyday work. Establish rigorous impact tracking with clear metrics for value delivered—such as time savings, cost reduction, and quality improvements—and review these outcomes regularly at the leadership level to maintain accountability.

By integrating these practices, you can drive AI adoption throughout your organization and ensure sustained, measurable impact.

“What’s unique about our approach is that every agent is engineered for responsible action. We design agents to operate within enterprise workflows, guided by policy-aware controls, telemetry integration, and human oversight,” says Faisal Nasir, the AI CoE and Data Council lead in Microsoft Employee Experience.

Through the AI Center of Excellence and the Data Council, we ensure agents are grounded in AI-ready data and undergo comprehensive architecture and governance reviews.

“This ensures our AI solutions are not only intelligent, but also accountable, governable, and fully production-ready,” Nasir adds.

Target outcomes

AI is a pillar of your operational strategy, backed by a data-driven culture and continuous monitoring of business impact.

Learn more

Learn how we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.

Stage 5: Transform your business with agentic AI

To drive a lasting AI-powered business transformation, organizations must embed AI into every aspect of their operations and culture.

Start by leveraging the expertise of your AI CoE to foster innovation, drive continuous improvement, and keep your AI initiatives evolving. Use structured mechanisms like a Kaizen funnel to crowdsource, prioritize, and advance ideas that extend the impact of AI across the enterprise.

Strengthen governance to address the advanced challenges of agentic applications, including responsible scaling of generative AI and effective mitigation of AI hallucinations. Focus on refining human-AI collaboration so your teams are empowered to offload routine tasks to AI agents and concentrate on higher-value work.

Another tactic that’s been highly successful in Microsoft Digital is “Fix, Hack, Learn” weeks, where employees are encouraged to identify opportunities to improve our services. Multi-disciplinary teams are empowered to innovate with AI to improve our organizational effectiveness, yielding multiple AI-powered breakthroughs that are already in production.

“In Microsoft Digital, continuous improvement is a driving force behind our AI transformation,” says Don Campbell, principal product manager within Microsoft Digital and member of our AI Center of Excellence. “By embedding it and AI into every layer of our operations, we’re not only optimizing how we work today, but we are also strategically preparing our processes to become agentic tomorrow. This disciplined approach ensures that when we make a process agentic, it’s not just automated—it’s intelligent, secure, and purpose-built to scale across the enterprise.”

Target outcomes

An organization transformed by AI, achieving significant efficiency gains and innovations, and recognized as a leader in enterprise AI adoption.

Learn more

Guiding hands: take a look inside the councils steering AI projects here at Microsoft.

What our experts have to say:

“In Microsoft Digital, continuous improvement is a driving force behind our AI transformation. By embedding it and AI into every layer of our operations, we’re not only optimizing how we work today, but we are also strategically preparing our processes to become agentic tomorrow.”

Don Campbell, principal product manager and CoE member, Microsoft Digital

“At the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence, we’ve learned that combining strong governance, data readiness, and a continuous-improvement mindset transforms AI pilots into enterprise-scale solutions. This guide distills our three-year journey into clear, actionable steps to accelerate responsible AI adoption, mitigate risk, and drive measurable business impact.”

Nitul Pancholi, AI Center of Excellence lead, Microsoft Employee Experience

 “What’s unique about our approach is that every agent is engineered for responsible action. We design agents to operate within enterprise workflows, guided by policy-aware controls, telemetry integration, and human oversight.”

Faisal Nasir, AI CoE and Data Council lead, Microsoft Employee Experience

Enabling success—lessons from our journey as the company’s IT organization

Achieving AI maturity is dependent on a combination of technological, organizational, and cultural factors. These enablers support the successful adoption and integration of AI within the organization.

For IT decision-makers charting the course to enterprise-scale AI, the journey is about far more than technical implementation—it’s about activating the right enablers to unlock both rapid and sustainable business impact.

Successfully scaling AI means orchestrating executive vision, robust governance, responsible innovation, resilient data foundations, and a culture of empowered talent—all working in harmony. Each of these levers is crucial not only for accelerating the path from pilot to production, but also for ensuring that every AI initiative delivers measurable outcomes, mitigates risk, and creates lasting organizational value.

By prioritizing these foundational pillars, IT leaders can fast-track value realization, embed accountability, and transform AI from a promising experiment into a strategic engine for competitive advantage. The following items explore the essential enablers that drive AI maturity at pace and why they matter now more than ever for organizations determined to lead in the age of intelligent transformation.

Seven enablers of enterprise AI transformation

Executive sponsorship and governance

To accelerate AI maturity within your organization, start by securing strong executive sponsorship and establishing clear governance structures. Appoint dedicated AI leaders and form cross-functional teams such as an AI Center of Excellence and supporting councils with well-defined roles and responsibilities. Maintain alignment with your business strategy through regular steering meetings and roadmap reviews. This approach will ensure your AI initiatives remain focused, impactful, and strategically integrated across the enterprise.

Responsible AI by design

To embed ethics and effectively manage risk in every AI project, integrate Responsible AI principles from the outset. Establish a Responsible AI Council or similar oversight group to ensure all solutions are rigorously reviewed for ethical standards before launch. By instituting mandatory Responsible AI assessments, you’ll foster trust, safeguard your organization, and address potential issues proactively—setting a strong foundation for sustainable AI adoption. This not only reduces reputational and regulatory risk, it also enables faster adoption, strengthens stakeholder confidence, and ensures AI initiatives deliver lasting value aligned with your business goals.

Data foundation, architecture reviews, and technical readiness

Treat data as a strategic asset by establishing a unified data strategy—start with a Data Council to catalogue key sources, improve data quality, and implement robust governance and access controls. Build AI-readiness across your enterprise by embedding architecture reviews and design validation into your engineering lifecycle, ensuring every solution is scalable, composable, and compliant by design. Leverage architecture forums to crowdsource feedback, align on technical standards, and promote reusable patterns that accelerate delivery. With secure cloud environments, ML Ops pipelines, and standardized AI platforms in place, your teams will be equipped to develop and scale AI solutions quickly, safely, and consistently.

Talent, skills, and culture

To build an AI-ready workforce and foster a culture of innovation, prioritize company-wide training and upskilling programs that elevate AI literacy at every level. Establish a Center of Excellence and empower “AI champions” within teams to drive adoption and celebrate meaningful impact. Encourage open collaboration—share code, best practices, and project outcomes across your organization—to accelerate learning and scale success. By breaking down silos and enabling employees to experiment with intelligent solutions, you’ll create the environment needed for sustained growth and enterprise-wide transformation. In Microsoft Digital, we are not just training our employees to use AI, we are empowering them to co-create the future of their roles. When employees are empowered to build and govern their own agents, that is when transformation truly scales.

Impact tracking and accountability

To drive meaningful business impact with AI, start by defining clear, measurable success metrics—think hours saved, cost efficiencies, and quality improvements—that can be rolled up into an organizational AI scorecard. Review these outcomes regularly at the leadership level to keep the focus on what matters. For every major AI initiative, assign an accountable owner who champions the solution, communicates the business story, and manages performance reporting.

Foster transparency by consistently comparing targets to actual results and openly sharing lessons learned when goals are missed. By embedding accountability into your rhythm of business, you’ll enable agile decision-making, concentrate your efforts where AI delivers the most value, and nurture a culture of continuous improvement. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve defined an AI value measurement framework with six dimensions of value that you can use as benchmarks to determine the impact of your own investments.

Change management and communication

To drive successful AI adoption, treat it as a people-first transformation—not just a technology deployment. Start by developing robust deployment and adoption plans for your key solutions: invest in training, craft clear communications, and establish dedicated support channels such as FAQs and help desks. Maintain a steady pulse of communication with your stakeholders—consider newsletters, interactive town halls, and a centralized library of AI success stories to celebrate impact and progress. By prioritizing transparency and providing ongoing support, you’ll smooth the path to change, encourage enthusiastic adoption, and sustain momentum throughout your organization.

Continuous improvement, innovation, and partnerships

To drive continuous improvement and innovation with AI, keep a dynamic backlog of opportunities and support each with a clear value case and refresh your pipeline regularly. Adopt structured forums such as continuous improvement and Kaizen events to identify, evaluate, and prioritize new AI use cases that deliver tangible business outcomes. Use a robust prioritization framework to ensure focus on initiatives with the greatest impact.

Identify partner teams who can serve as early adopters and provide feedback to inform your continuing journey. By building a disciplined innovation pipeline and fostering a collaborative ecosystem, you create a foundation for ongoing experimentation, accelerated learning, and sustainable AI innovation across your organization.

Advancing your organization into the frontier of AI

To embrace the next era of AI, it’s time to look beyond traditional automation and prepare your organization for agentic AI frameworks and autonomous, interoperable agents. These advanced systems aren’t just digital assistants—they’re designed to plan, act, and collaborate across workflows with minimal intervention, offering the potential to fundamentally transform how work gets done.

Start by identifying areas where agentic AI can drive real business value. Empower domain experts within your teams to become Agent Leaders—individuals who can design, oversee, and govern agent ecosystems at scale. Align your AI strategy with forward-looking industry insights and best practices—sources like the 2025 Annual Work Trend Index: The Frontier Firm Is Born offer invaluable guidance for responsible AI adoption and organizational transformation.

Recognize that the impact will be significant. Industry analysts such as Gartner predict that by 2028, about a third of enterprise applications will feature agentic AI capabilities and over 15% of daily work decisions will be handled by AI agents.

Evolving from large language models to agents

To get ahead, foster a culture of experimentation. Host hackathons, pilot agentic AI prototypes, and develop governance frameworks that ensure responsible management of these emerging technologies. Treat your AI journey as a continuous process—a growth mindset and incremental progress are key. As AI evolves, so should your practices: be ready to adapt your governance, refine human-AI collaboration, and embrace new paradigms like fully autonomous agents.

Each stage of this journey unlocks new possibilities. Ensure your organization remains at the forefront of AI maturity by committing to continuous improvement and innovation. The future of work isn’t a destination—it’s a dynamic path. Evolve your strategy, cultivate expertise, and enable your teams to thrive in the rapidly advancing digital landscape, powered by AI innovation and continuous improvement.

Key takeaways

To help your organization progress on its AI journey, consider the following strategies:

• Invest in data infrastructure and AI platforms. Building robust data infrastructure ensures your organization is prepared to leverage AI, supporting scalable, innovative, and secure AI-driven solutions.
• Foster a culture of innovation and collaboration. Champion an AI-forward culture where innovation and collaboration drive the adoption of agentic AI.
• Develop AI expertise through training and development. Upskilling your teams empowers them to navigate the rapid advances of AI, drive innovation, and ensure your organization stays competitive as agentic AI transforms workflows and business outcomes across every industry.
• Align AI initiatives with strategic business goals. Ensuring AI initiatives align with business goals maximizes impact and positions your organization to succeed in the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI.
• Implement ethical AI practices based on Microsoft’s Responsible AI Principles. Adopting ethical AI practices builds trust, ensures responsible innovation, and prepares your organization to navigate the evolving landscape as AI becomes central to business operations and decision-making.

Try it out

Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Related links

• Learn how we’re using good governance to ride the wave of agents washing over Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Take a look inside the councils steering AI projects here at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Copilot Studio.

The post Enterprise AI maturity in five steps: Our guide for IT leaders appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Fast forward to 2025, and the employee experience landscape has evolved dramatically, both here at Microsoft and in the world at large.

“One of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to enhance collaboration across disciplines, product groups, time zones, and even languages. The benefits of these new agentic capabilities have been transformative for Microsoft and our customers.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

Teams remains the backbone of enterprise collaboration at Microsoft and for millions of information workers globally. But today, it’s AI-powered agents, intelligent experiences, and integrated tools like Microsoft Loop and Pages that are currently transforming how we work together. 

“One of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to enhance collaboration across disciplines, product groups, time zones, and even languages,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “The benefits of these new agentic capabilities have been transformative for Microsoft and our customers.”

At Microsoft, we’ve embraced a new era of collaboration—one where human intelligence is augmented by AI-powered tools and capabilities that vastly improve our productivity and collaborative possibilities across our company. 

Key moments in Microsoft collaboration history

SharePoint

Enterprise content management with document sharing, intranet portals, and workflow automation.

Office 365

Unified cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools.                     

Microsoft Teams

Centralized collaboration hub integrating chat, meetings, calls, file sharing, and apps.

Microsoft Viva

Employee experience platform integrating communications, knowledge, learning, and insights.

Microsoft Loop

Real-time co-authoring across apps with portable components, enhancing fluid collaboration.

Copilot Studio

Creation of custom AI copilots using low-code tools, integrating with business data and workflows.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages

AI-powered content creation and knowledge management within Microsoft 365.

SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot are the bookends of a collaboration journey that we have been on internally at Microsoft over the last 25 years.

Collaboration in 2025: A new paradigm 

At Microsoft, Teams is where we collaborate. But now the spotlight is shifting to different experiences that Teams enables, including AI-powered agents.

“(Microsoft Teams) is how we stay connected. It’s what brings our people, our content, and workflows together in this age of AI.

Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Since the pandemic disrupted the world of work beginning in 2020, we’ve had to adjust to the fact that the modern workplace is no longer defined by an employee’s location or time zone. Instead, it’s defined by context, clarity, and connection. Our company’s internal transformation—powered by new agentic capabilities in Teams—reflects this shift: 

• AI-powered agents like Facilitator guide our meetings by managing our agendas and keeping track of time, and by ensuring inclusive participation by nudging quieter participants.
• Intelligent Recaps integrate seamlessly into Teams, delivering meeting insights that help our employees catch up on what they missed, review key information, and take follow-up actions quickly and effectively. 
• Loop components in Teams chats and meetings allow for dynamic brainstorming, insightful decision making, and easy content creation. 
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages provide a flexible canvas for sharing knowledge, updates, and project status in a visually engaging format. 

Teams remains the connective tissue that binds us together even as we have shifted into this new AI-powered world.

“It’s how we stay connected,” says Sara Bush, a principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital, noting that much of our work today is powered by new Microsoft 365 Copilot and other AI capabilities that have been rolled into Teams. “It’s what brings our people, our content, and workflows together in this age of AI. It continues to redefine how we plan, meet, decide, and drive impact internally here at Microsoft.”  

Agents in action: Copilot Studio accelerates enterprise AI

Teams is our cornerstone for collaboration but we use many other tools as well, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, our Power Platform-based stage for building, deploying, and managing enterprise level AI agents. These agents have moved beyond simple chatbots— they’re enabling our employees to rapidly build and deploy intelligent systems that can operate on behalf of individuals, teams, and entire organizations, revolutionizing the way we work.

Copilot Studio capabilities include: 

• Custom and autonomous agents that complete tasks, answer questions, and escalate work items based on enterprise data and context. 
• Multi-agent orchestration, where agents collaborate across systems. For example, a data agent retrieves insights from Fabric, a Microsoft 365 agent drafts documents, and an Azure AI agent schedules meetings—all orchestrated toward a single successful business outcome.
• Agent flows and templates that streamline structured tasks like IT support, recruitment, compliance checks, and contract reviews. 
• Governance and security built into the Power Platform admin center, enabling safe deployment and lifecycle management at scale. 

Microsoft employees have already used Copilot Studio to build agents that automate tasks as disparate as reconciling balance sheets, triaging support tickets, and simulating sales training conversations. These agents are embedded directly into Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat—meeting our employees where they work. 

Unlocking knowledge with Agent Builder in SharePoint

To further democratize AI, Microsoft has empowered employees to build retrieval agents using Agent Builder in SharePoint. These agents are designed to surface relevant information from organizational knowledge bases, making them ideal for onboarding, training, and cross-team collaboration.

By putting agent creation in the hands of employees, we’re empowering our employees to scale their knowledge access and reduce friction in their everyday work.

AI-powered collaboration scenarios across the enterprise

In a complex organization like Microsoft, collaboration takes many forms—and AI is increasingly embedded in each one. Beyond meetings and documents, here are some other common scenarios where AI is enhancing how we work together:

Cross-team knowledge discovery: Microsoft 365 Copilot helps our employees find relevant documents, conversations, and experts across silos. We use semantic search and retrieval agents to surface answers to common questions, like “How can I find a mentor?” or “Who has worked on generative AI pilots in the manufacturing sector?”

Change management: We use Copilot to draft adoption plans, to anticipate blockers, help with our localization of resources, to prepare readiness assets, and to evaluate the effectiveness of our campaigns.

Communications: AI assists our communications professionals with draft messaging, sentiment analysis, and suggests optimal timing and formats for announcements.

New employee onboarding: AI-powered agents create adaptive onboarding paths for our new employees, answering their real-time questions and recommending mentors and resources based on their goals and activity.

Customer and partner collaboration: Our sellers use Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to seamlessly integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales, draft communications, and coordinate their partner engagements across geographies and business units.

Engineering teams: Our product managers and software engineers are using Loop components to co-author specs and track decisions in real time, reducing email churn and version confusion. 

Across all disciplineswe’re seeing employees use Copilot Pages to refine AI-generated ideas and help accelerate ideation, creativity, and solution delivery.  These scenarios demonstrate how AI is becoming a trusted partner across Microsoft—we’re using it to amplify our human capabilities, reduce friction, and unlock new levels of productivity.

“For organizations looking to transform their own collaboration culture, the path is clear—embrace AI and empower your people with agentic capabilities, and, at the organizational level, build on an enterprise collaboration platform that scales, like Microsoft Teams.”

Matt Hempey, partner group product manager, Microsoft Digital

The future of collaboration

Our agentic journey here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across Microsoft is ongoing, and our goal is to ensure that our employees—and by extension, the employees of our customer—are the most productive in the world. To enable that vision, we’re working hard to: 

• Integrate and extend AI across Teams and our entire collaboration stack 
• Integrate Loop and Pages more deeply into everyday workflows and provide the awareness and training necessary for our employees to incorporate these new tools into their workflows
• Empower employees to build and deploy their own agents with Copilot Studio and SharePoint

“For organizations looking to transform their own collaboration culture, the path is clear,” says Matt Hempey, partner group product manager. “Embrace AI and empower your people with agentic capabilities, and, at the organizational level, build on an enterprise collaboration platform that scales, like Microsoft Teams.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for transforming collaboration at your organization using Microsoft Teams and our agentic Microsoft tools:

• Teams offers an expansive canvas for driving the future of work. Don’t just use the basic features; explore the many ways that AI and agents can accelerate teamwork and improve outcomes directly within Teams.
• The easiest way to unlock the power of AI is by using Agent Builder in SharePoint. Enable your employees to leverage your enterprise knowledge by training information retrieval agents that can accelerate onboarding, unlock hidden knowledge, and enhance cross-team collaboration.
• Copilot Studio is the Microsoft low-code solution for building, deploying, governing, and managing AI agents. Empower your employees with the tools to build their own agents, which they can then use directly within Teams to supercharge enterprise productivity.
• Generative AI in the enterprise is still new. Give your employees the tools they need to succeed, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, and support their growth and development by encouraging usage and providing role-based training to accelerate time-to-value.

Try it out

• Learn more about how Microsoft Teams can transform the way your organization communicates.  
• Join the Microsoft Teams public preview program to get early access to the latest features.

Related links

• Check out different ways to use Copilot in Teams.
• Learn how we’re embracing this ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Read more about the advantages of Intelligent Recaps in Microsoft Teams Premium.
• Explore how we’re using good governance to ride the wave of agents washing over Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re transforming meetings at Microsoft with the Facilitator feature in Teams.

The post Reimagining how we collaborate with Microsoft Teams and AI agents appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital stories

The rate of change in IT is accelerating at a blistering pace. AI-powered capabilities like Microsoft 365 Copilot have enabled a new era of employee productivity. Today, agentic capabilities are supercharging IT like never before. As IT leaders, we are living in extraordinary times.

But change can be destabilizing, even during normal times for the most confident and sure-footed IT teams. That’s why our commitment at Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—to act as Customer Zero for our company and our customers has never been more important.

“We need to shepherd the company through this era of AI disruption. We’re working to transform all of Microsoft into an AI-first workplace, sharing our insights with customers so they can follow our lead.”

Matt Hempey, partner product manager, Microsoft Digital

If we can navigate this era of generational change, powered by AI with confidence, and provide a clear blueprint for our customers to follow, we will truly live up to Microsoft’s mission to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

“We need to shepherd the company through this era of AI disruption,” says Matt Hempey, partner product manager in Microsoft Digital. “We’re working to transform all of Microsoft into an AI-first workplace, sharing our insights with customers so they can follow our lead.”

Like the advent of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, AI is having a transformative effect on information technology—and the risks and opportunities are potentially even greater than those earlier breakthroughs. In Microsoft Digital, our role as Customer Zero has become more critical than ever. We serve as Microsoft’s first and best customer for each of our groundbreaking technologies, ensuring that they’re enterprise and world-ready.

An evolving approach

Being Customer Zero means a deep partnership between our IT organization and our company’s product engineering teams to envision the right experiences, co-develop innovative products, and both listen to and act on the insights we gather from our employees and customers. We work closely together to stay grounded in the way our employees use our products every day, so your employees can benefit from our experiences and takeaways.

“In Microsoft Digital, we’re well aware that the only constant is change. But the last 12 months have shown that our old models are no match for the wave of change we’re seeing at Microsoft. We have to adapt our approach.”

Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

But just like changes in the tech industry caused Microsoft to embrace an agile approach to software development, the advent of AI compels us to reimagine our role as Customer Zero. Since the first version of this article was published three years ago, our approach in Microsoft Digital has changed. Today, our focus is on helping our employees to harness the transformative power of AI to reimagine the world of work.

Customer Zero evolution

“In Microsoft Digital, we’re well aware that the only constant is change,” says Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “But the last 12 months have shown that our old models are no match for the wave of change we’re seeing at Microsoft. We have to adapt our approach.”

Our philosophy has shifted from envisioning new experiences to a wholesale reimagining of the workplace. We’re moving beyond deploying, governing, and building solutions to a world where we empower our employees to define and deploy agentic capabilities that dramatically increase their productivity.

While we still deploy, govern, and operate our productivity tenants in secure and compliant ways, we also focus on defining guardrails that enable our employees to maximize their productivity and creativity. And we continue to be the voice of the organization’s own digital transformation, with an intentional focus on how AI is helping us transform our enterprise from the inside out.

Envisioning the future

When we began our Customer Zero journey, our charter was to envision transformative employee experiences. With advances in AI and the advent of Microsoft 365 Copilot, our ambition has moved beyond experiences to consider entire workflows, as well as the agentic workplace of the future. Here are some of our plans:

• We engage with our employees and customers around the world to better understand their needs, then work with product engineering to co-develop AI-powered solutions.
• We anticipate and address product requirements that our large enterprise customers will have as they pursue agentic workflows, based on our experience reimagining business, operational, and technological processes at Microsoft.
• We leverage our insights gained from managing a vast array of IT services at Microsoft—including network, infrastructure, devices, and end-user services—to design and build new AI-powered capabilities, then ensure they meet the needs of our employees.
• We evaluate and improve our processes using continuous improvement techniques to ensure they’re ready for an agentic future.

{Learn more about Microsoft Digital’s IT journey and how it’s enabled AI transformation at Microsoft.}

Empowering our employees

While Microsoft Digital still builds, deploys, and drives adoption of new employee capabilities, our posture has shifted from employee enablement to employee empowerment. Some examples of how we’re empowering our employees include:

• Within our productivity tenants, we create whatever digital assets and containers they need to be productive. That could be a new SharePoint site, Teams group, Power BI workspace, agent, or even an Azure subscription. The key is that the new tool or asset is in our tenant, which means its lifecycle can be securely managed, enabling productivity while also helping to cut down on shadow IT.
• Our employees can create agents using Agent Builder in SharePoint or Copilot Studio. These AI-powered agents are helping our teams achieve new levels of productivity, and future capabilities are only going to accelerate that trend.
• We’ve nurtured and empowered a Copilot champions community at Microsoft that stands at nearly 10,000 employees. These enthusiastic champions are helping to shape the future of AI at the company, as they build new AI-powered experiences while sharing their knowledge and excitement with their peers. Their expertise and passion augment our ability to drive change in the enterprise, with role-based champions helping to supercharge AI-powered transformation across Microsoft.

{Learn how we’re driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot with our Champs community.}

Defining the guardrails

In an era of agentic transformation, simply deploying, operating, and managing our services is no longer enough. To support employee empowerment, we need to define appropriate guardrails to maintain a secure and compliant environment while also enabling innovation. We do that by:

• Applying controls to ensure that users and apps don’t gain access to privileged information.
• Keeping employees from creating agents that violate company policies.
• Balancing between the freedom for employees to share their creations and the need to prevent agent sprawl.
• Delineating which agents are authoritative and safe for enterprise functions.
• Maintaining an inventory of agents to provide lifecycle management.

These guardrails keep our environment safe and secure while simultaneously allowing our employees to define the future of AI-powered productivity.

{Discover how we’re governing AI here at Microsoft.}

Creating the AI-powered IT blueprint

Transformation with AI is hard work, but thankfully our Microsoft Digital team is actively working to share insights from our own transformational experience. We do that in person, through our global network of Experience Centers. We do it virtually, through hundreds of virtual customer engagements each year. And we do it right here on Inside Track, where we share detailed guides, stories, and other artifacts designed to accelerate your own AI-powered digital transformation.

Our commitment is to not only share our IT blueprint, but also to listen to our customers so we can amplify your insights to improve Microsoft enterprise products and services.

“In our Customer Zero capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring AI-powered experiences to life. Everything we do as Customer Zero helps Microsoft serve as the showcase for AI-powered digital transformation.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

Customer Zero: A mentality and a promise

Microsoft Digital continues to evolve, and our approach as Customer Zero is key to that evolution. We obsess over applications of AI to ensure that our employees are the most productive in the world. As a customer, you can have even greater confidence in our AI-powered solutions since we’ve already deployed and tested them at a global enterprise scale.

“We’ve become an increasingly strategic contributor to Microsoft’s product offerings, especially in this era of AI,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “In our Customer Zero capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring AI-powered experiences to life. Everything we do as Customer Zero helps Microsoft serve as the showcase for AI-powered digital transformation.”

The next chapter of our Customer Zero journey is the most exciting yet. As we continue to learn, we’ll share more stories from the front lines of AI-powered digital transformation here on Inside Track.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to keep in mind as you contemplate your own organization’s transformational journey with AI:

• The pace of change in IT is faster than it’s ever been. As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital is focused on co-developing, deploying, governing, and driving adoption of new services, and sharing our IT blueprint so you can learn from our experience.
• Shepherding your company through AI-driven disruption is essential in a complex and rapidly evolving technology environment. Define your own vision for an agentic future and share it with your employees so they understand how they’ll need to learn and grow to support it.
• Empowering your employees while implementing the right guardrails is an effective strategy to maximize the benefits of AI-driven transformation, powered by employee innovation.

Try it out

Ready to enable your own AI-powered transformation? Sign up for a free trial of Copilot Studio and take your first steps toward an agentic future. 

Related links

• Trace the history of digital transformation at Microsoft.
• Learn how our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents.
• Find out how we’re approaching change management with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• See how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.

The post Inside Microsoft: Being Customer Zero in an AI-powered world appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Employee engagement is a global challenge

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the experts at Gallup saw that employee engagement—defined as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace—was extremely low. In fact, in 2009 only 12% of employees globally indicated that they were engaged at work. While that number steadily improved over the next 15 years, by 2024 only 21% of employees globally indicated they were engaged in their workplace. (Gallup, 2025)

Interestingly, the numbers are not uniform globally. At one end of the spectrum, in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, 31% of employees indicate they are engaged in work. At the other end of the spectrum, only 13% of European workers indicate they are engaged. (Gallup, 2025)

No matter where a region falls on this spectrum, it’s not very promising for companies who want to attract, retain, and develop the best employees. Data indicates that engaged employees are one of the best predictors of economic success:

In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across all of Microsoft, our goal is to ensure our employees feel engaged at work by providing the digital tools, access to information, and personal connections that enable them to live our culture no matter where they are in the world. 

{Read Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report.}

AI is fundamentally changing the world of work

While flexible work created new challenges for employee engagement, generative AI tools have created unprecedented opportunities to increase employee productivity and positively impact engagement in the workplace.

Each year, the team at Microsoft WorkLab generates a report called the “Work Trends Index.” This annual survey of over 20,000 knowledge workers globally illuminates challenges and opportunities as companies pursue strategies to harness the power of AI in the enterprise.

A few data points from past surveys that are particularly resonant:

Aligned to these insights, digital leaders need to consider three things:

Enterprise AI solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot are optimized to help employees discover enterprise knowledge that was previously hidden in various SharePoint libraries, Teams Channels, and OneDrive for business repositories. Copilot can reason across your entire Microsoft 365 estate instantly to help employees find the information, answers, and connections needed to quickly address business opportunities and challenges.

While employees are starting to actively use generative AI at work, if they don’t have access to a solution that’s grounded and secured in your enterprise data, your confidential or proprietary data could be at risk. This is especially true when you consider that most employees are new to this and may not have the training or knowledge necessary to navigate the risks of AI in the enterprise.

Burned out employees are not engaged employees. AI-powered solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot make it easy for employees to reason across their Outlook inbox, Teams Channels and Groups, Viva Engage posts and more, to quickly identify the information that’s important to them. While the volume of activity in the enterprise will likely only increase, the ability to manage information more effectively is now in the hands of employees – especially those who are trained to effectively harness AI.

How has Microsoft adapted?

Times of change demand strong vision and action, and Microsoft emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever. Reflecting on that success, Microsoft Chief Human Resources Officer Amy Coleman enumerated several reasons. Among them:

• A strong corporate culture that helped to counteract chaos
• A focus on management excellence
• An inclusive work environment that enables all employees to thrive
• And critically—a recognition that the digital employee experience is as important as the in-person experience

Prior to the pandemic, the digital employee experience wouldn’t have been high on the list of key enablers for many executives. After witnessing the power and flexibility of our digital tools during the pandemic to keep our employees connected, productive, and thriving, it became clear to us that a modernized digital employee experience had to become a key tenet of our workplace strategy.

Formula for success

Right as we found our footing post-pandemic, the next big disruptor landed: generative AI and our industry-leading productivity tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot. The digital employee experience, enhanced by the power of AI, is now more important than ever. As we in the company’s IT organization look to the next decade of employee productivity and enterprise growth, our formula for success is simple:

1. Create a physical and digital environment where our employees are engaged, energized, empowered, and invested in their work.
2. Continue to give our employees the very best productivity tools in the world, powered by Microsoft 365 and made exponentially more powerful by AI-powered tools like Copilot.
3. Combining these forces leads to facilitate a high-performance work culture, enabling us to achieve sustainable business outcomes while generating a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Your company can use the same formula to achieve the same competitive advantage. At Microsoft, we make that vision real by focusing on the three critical dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces and facilities, and culture.

Focusing on our employee experience

Digital capabilities

We keep employees productive and out environment safe and secure, no matter where employees are or how they connect. AI is defragmenting the employee experience.

Physical spaces

We partner with Global Workplace Services to imagine & deploy capabilities that support an inclusive approach to productivity.

Culture

A strong partnership with HR ensures our digital employee experience enables our aspirational culture, regardless of an employee’s physical location.

Digital capabilities

In Microsoft Digital, our mission is to power, protect and transform the digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. Simplifying the employee experience has long been a goal of our team. We want Microsoft employees to be the most engaged, efficient, and productive in the industry.

Our vision is to revolutionize the employee experience at Microsoft, using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to “defragment” the many tools, websites, and applications Microsoft employees need to interact with to complete their jobs. By using Copilot as our “UI for AI”, Microsoft Digital is using Copilot to:

• Provide contextual support in the flow of work
• Reduce the number of sites and apps an employee must remember
• Enable seamless collaboration globally

In addition to AI, our team here in Microsoft Digital continues to accelerate collaboration through enhancements to Microsoft Teams and Teams Rooms, enables employee innovation with the Power Platform, and delivers a world-class employee experience powered by Microsoft Viva. Read on to learn how.

Accelerating productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data to turn your employees’ words into some of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet—all within the flow of work. It works alongside the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, to provide real-time intelligent assistance.

At Microsoft, we began deploying Copilot to our own employees back in November of 2023, and by March of 2024 all our employees and vendors globally had access, making Microsoft the first enterprise to deploy Copilot at global enterprise scale.

A key lesson we’ve learned is that enterprise AI is a significant cultural and technological change that shouldn’t be underestimated. Consider that knowledge workers have been trained to interact with systems and data using the graphical user interface for over 40 years. The magic of Copilot is that it upends that human-computer interaction paradigm, bringing the power of natural language interaction to employees to find information or answers, to augment their creativity, or to accelerate workflows.

But those skills are new for nearly every employee on the planet, which is why you need to focus on skilling and reinforcement to help employees to maximize the potential value of generative AI in the enterprise. Help your employees to jumpstart their skilling journey by carefully selecting training paths—both virtual and instructor-led—to accelerate their productivity journey with Copilot. Microsoft offers some great free training programs to help your employees build the skills necessary to maximize the value of Copilot. 

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed a six-step process for unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot based on these lessons that you can apply in your own enterprise. Being deliberate as you deploy, understanding employee pain points, measuring the before and after, and focusing on the developing of AI skills, you can accelerate and prove the value of Copilot in your environment, as well as recapture value so you can pursue new business opportunities or challenges.

{Read our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.}

Empowering our employees with agents and Copilot Studio

In Microsoft Digital, we are embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of employees who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.

For example, our Employee Self-Service (ESS) agents have already demonstrated the power of agents to simplify and improve the employee experience at Microsoft.

• Using ESS, employees were 36% more likely to solve their own IT support issues.
• Similarly, employees were 42% more likely to answer their own HR questions.
• Employees were 18% more satisfied using ESS to address their issues than traditional support methods.

As we continue our journey with AI-powered agents, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows.

Phases of maturity

Each step on our agentic journey marks a significant leap forward in capability, with both opportunities and risks for our leaders.

Employee learning and skilling are key to unlocking the value in each phase of agentic maturity.  

• Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-ready AI-powered like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. Becoming accustomed to AI in the enterprise and learning how to prompt AI for effective results is the key to unlocking value in later phases.
• Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
• Knowledge and actions. Powered by built-in connectors in Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience.
• Workflow reinvention. Human-led, agent operated teams perform fully autonomous actions to complete end-to-end workflows, enabling employees to focus on the highest value work while agents take care of repetitive tasks.

Emerging industry standards and open protocols including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, and NLWeb are enabling an agentic powered future where human-led, agent operated teams will take employee productivity to new heights.

We’re making progress on each type of agent here at Microsoft:

• Microsoft was the first company in the world to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale. Every employee at Microsoft now has an AI-powered assistant to enhance their productivity.
• Every employee at Microsoft also has the tools and support to build simple Retrieval agents that are trained using knowledge stored in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive for Business.
• Our engineering teams are using Copilot Studio to create Agents that can retrieve information then act on it, using built-in connectors in Copilot Studio to enable actions.
• And with the advent of new industry protocols, we’re just beginning to enable fully autonomous end-to-end workflows powered by Agents.

{Learn how we’re governing our use of agents at Microsoft.}

AI-powered meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams benefits from Copilot integration as well, enabling users to quickly recap, identify follow-up tasks, create agendas, or ask questions for more effective and focused meetings. Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium can summarize key takeaways, help employees see what they’ve missed, and even pinpoint key people of interest in chats.

We’re continuing to retrofit conference rooms to utilize the latest Microsoft Teams Rooms features and capabilities, and we’ll keep partnering with the Microsoft Teams product group to push the envelope with innovative new capabilities that take advantage of investments in hardware, software, and physical space to create immersive and inclusive environments. Our goal is to improve our current meeting rooms at a global scale while selectively deploying high-end rooms in targeted locations based on need. In that way, we’ll modernize the experience for all our employees while also delivering maximum value to Microsoft.

{Check out our Microsoft Teams Rooms meeting guide.}

Empowering our citizen developers

While we have thousands of highly skilled developers and engineers at Microsoft, we also have many more employees who are not engineers by trade, but who contribute to business success as citizen developers using the Microsoft Power Platform.

Citizen developers use no-code/low-code solutions to accelerate digital transformation of their workstreams. At Microsoft, the technologies that comprise the Microsoft Power Platform empower anyone in the company to transform our employee experience. After all, who’s the person most likely to identify a process that could benefit from automation, or most likely to need to collect, visualize, and analyze data? It’s not normally someone in a central IT team—it’s the employee who is closest to the problem or opportunity.

The Microsoft Power Platform—as shown in this companion infographic—is comprised of four distinct capabilities that have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before. Each tool is easy to learn and allows your team to accelerate digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

Microsoft Power BI

A collection of software services, apps and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize, and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Microsoft Power Apps

A suite of apps, services, and connectors that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

With Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365. or SQL Server)

Microsoft Power Automate

Enables you to automate business processes quickly and easily, with support for over 500 data sources or using any publicly available API.

Microsoft Virtual Agents

Lets you create powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service.

{Learn how we’re empowering our employees with the Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft.}

Physical spaces and facilities

Having the best digital experiences means very little if you don’t have the right physical space or hardware to maximize potential for your employees to collaborate when they’re in the office.

For us, Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) and our Microsoft Digital team represent the company’s “front door.” The first impression employees and visitors have when they walk into Microsoft is the physical environment and the technology they interact with, and we want their experience to be amazing.

While Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leaders and digital transformation leaders see things through different lenses, when both functions are aligned on vision with shared priorities and implementation, accelerated transformation of the employee experience is possible. A few examples of the work we’ve done with our counterparts in GWS to enable new experiences include:

• The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility. Working together, we built an amazing new guest management system, with streamlined check-in and optimized check-out procedures to help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.
• Through our Microsoft employee mobile app, we’re enabling several new capabilities in conjunction with GWS, including the ability to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, find a parking spot, or book a conference room or workspace.
• With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft.

None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of our employee experience. By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation for innovation that will help our employees thrive.

{Learn how we’re accelerating our global real estate transformation.}

Culture

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he made lasting and powerful changes to our company culture. Our early culture was extremely competitive, and people often succeeded by showcasing their own individual work and achievements. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has undergone significant change, starting at the top. He instilled in us that, to stay relevant, we needed to find the courage to change our culture and embrace a growth mindset.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture and it all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Attributes of our aspirational culture include:

• Embracing learning and curiosity. Instead of being “know-it-alls” we need to be “learn-it-alls.”
• Trying new things and not being afraid to fail.
• Obsessing over what matters to our customers.
• Being diverse and inclusive in everything we do.
• Operating as “One Microsoft”.
• Making a difference in the lives of each other, our customers, and the world around us.

Satya made it clear that our aspire-to culture was key to our future business success, and the ensuing decade was one of the most successful in the history of Microsoft.

But how do you bring culture to life digitally, especially in a global company that has embraced flexible work? The answer was to build an employee experience platform that allowed our employees to live our culture, no matter where they were in the world.

Supercharging our culture with Microsoft Viva

The Microsoft Viva Suite delivers an integrated employee experience platform that empowers people and teams to thrive by bringing together communications, knowledge, learning, goals, and insights directly into the flow of work. Built on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Viva helps organizations foster a culture of engagement and performance by providing personalized, data-driven experiences that support employee well-being, growth, and productivity. Viva enables leaders to align business outcomes with employee success, making it a strategic investment in both people and performance.

The various modules and capabilities in the Viva Suite enable Microsoft employees to experience and participate in our culture digitally. Each module supports different dimensions of Microsoft’s “aspire-to” culture, with the Viva Suite collectively serving as the underpinning of our shift to growth mindset.

The Viva Suite is comprised of numerous modules, including:

Viva Connections

Delivers a secure, customizable gateway to internal communications and resources, seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Teams to enhance employee engagement without adding new infrastructure.

Viva Insights

Provides privacy-protected, data-driven insights that help improve productivity and well-being while ensuring compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.

Viva Learning

Centralizes learning content from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and third-party providers into Teams, simplifying deployment and governance of upskilling initiatives.

Viva Amplify

Empowers corporate communicators to manage multi-channel campaigns with analytics and targeting, all within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary.

Viva Engage

Fosters community and connection through social experiences in Teams, with enterprise-grade compliance and identity management built in.

Viva Pulse

Enables managers to gather real-time team feedback securely, with built-in templates and analytics that respect data privacy and organizational policies.

Each of these tools helps to bring our culture to life while simultaneously providing our employees with best-in-class, AI-enhanced tools that foster and enhance collaboration in the enterprise.

{Learn how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.}

Adopting new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change managementto ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve learned that even the most useful, intuitive technologies will not see widespread adoption and usage without a deliberate and sustained change management effort.

Our Microsoft Digital organization is fortunate to have a global team of change management practitioners to help ensure that our employees benefit from the value of our innovations. We’ve learned that effective change management requires careful planning, and localized change efforts are crucial to maximizing the impact of our digital investments. Our change management efforts take inspiration from the Microsoft 365 Adoption Framework as well as Prosci’s ADKAR model, which progresses through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

As you’re considering your approach to change in this era of AI and flexible work, we suggest reviewing our Copilot deployment and adoption guide, which details our learnings in four chapters with useful checklists and best practices you can apply in your own enterprise. Microsoft also publishes free courseware to develop your skills as a service adoption specialist. This is a great way to develop the skills your team will need to unlock the value of AI—or any other digital investment.

{Learn how we’re driving the future of work: How we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.}

Thriving in an AI-powered world

The world of work has changed dramatically with the advent of flexible work and generative AI.

Flexible work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re oceans apart.

Copilot and agentic AI have the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness like never before. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition. Focus on skilling and learning to ensure your employees are getting value from AI-powered tools.

The future of work will continue to evolve, and we’ll all learn along the way. As we continue our journey, we’ll keep you updated on our progress and learnings in Microsoft Digital as we continue to define the future of work, powered by AI.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for transforming your employee experience:

• Focusing on the three critical elements of your employee experience—digital capabilities, facilities, and organizational culture—will enable your enterprise to thrive.
• Empowering “citizen developers” with the Microsoft Power Platform can supercharge enterprise productivity.
• Ensuring effective change management will accelerate value from your investments in AI-powered digital transformation.
• Automating tasks with agents will unlock employee productivity, allowing you to expand operations and take on new challenges.

Try it out

• Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how to customize Microsoft 365 Copilot and to create your own agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Related links

• Learn how we’re digitally transforming Microsoft.
• Check out five key things we learned serving as the company’s IT organization for 50 years.
• Find out more about our Zero Trust security model.

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