Embracing AI at Microsoft with New AI Certifications

Copilot for Microsoft 365 Deployment and Adoption Guide

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As an organization, we immediately saw that advanced AI was going to create opportunities for our employees to increase their reach and impact. We knew we needed to move quickly to help them get ready for the moment.

Our response?

We assembled an ambitious data and AI curriculum through Microsoft Viva Learning that draws from Microsoft Learn and other content sources. This curriculum is empowering our employees at Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization, with the skills they need to harness these tools.

Microsoft Viva Learning and Microsoft Learn

Microsoft Viva Learning and Microsoft Learn are two distinct platforms that serve different purposes.

Microsoft Viva Learning is a centralized learning hub in Microsoft Teams that lets you seamlessly integrate learning and building skills into your day. In Viva Learning, your team can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries provided by both your organization and partners. They can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Learn is a free online learning platform that provides interactive learning content for Microsoft products and services. It offers a wide range of courses, tutorials, and certifications to help users learn new skills and advance their careers. Microsoft Learn is accessible to anyone with an internet connection and is available in multiple languages.

It’s all part of our approach to infusing AI into everything we do to support the company. The more successful we are in MSD, the better our team can deploy our new AI technologies to the rest of our colleagues across the organization.

It’s not just about winning with technology. It’s about supporting the community and doing things the right way.

— Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management

Infusing AI into Microsoft through a learn-it-all culture

Fully unleashing AI across Microsoft is a bold aspiration that will require plenty of guidance and support from our MSD team. It’s both a technology and a people challenge that requires us to have more than IT knowledge to deliver.

“We take a holistic approach,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management in MSD. “It’s not just about winning with technology—it’s about supporting the community and doing things the right way.”

As a tech company, we’re always encountering new concepts and new technologies. It’s part of our culture to absorb technology and consume concepts very quickly, and AI just the latest example.

— Miguel Uribe, principal product manager lead

With our learn-it-all culture and Microsoft Viva Learning, Microsoft Learn, and other content sources at our disposal, a progressive curriculum was the natural choice for upskilling our technical professionals. Microsoft Viva Learning connects content from our organization’s internal learning libraries and third-party learning management systems. As a result, it makes it easy for our team to develop learning paths with content from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, and external providers like Pearson.

“As a tech company, we’re always encountering new concepts and new technologies,” says Miguel Uribe, principal product manager lead for Employee Experience Insights in MSD. “It’s part of our culture to absorb technology and consume concepts very quickly, and AI is just the latest example.”

[Learn how we’re managing our response to the AI Revolution internally at Microsoft with an AI Center of Excellence. See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.]

Building meaningful AI certifications for Microsoft employees

The AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE), our MSD team tasked with designing and championing how our organization uses AI, is at the forefront of these efforts. They’re working to standardize how we leverage AI internally.

The AI Center for Excellence team’s areas of responsibility, including strategy, architecture, roadmap, and culture. — We’ve created four pillars to guide our internal implementation of generative AI across Microsoft: Strategy, architecture, roadmap, and culture. Our AI certifications program falls under culture.

“Our first priority is creating a common understanding and language around these fairly new topics,” says Humberto Arias, senior product manager on the Frictionless Devices team in MSD. “The technology changes constantly, so you need to learn continually to keep up.”

Fortunately, enterprising employees within Microsoft have been laying the groundwork for this moment for years. Our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) community had been working on their own time to deepen their knowledge through research and independent certifications.

When generative AI took off at the start of 2023, that community began partnering with the AI CoE and got serious about empowerment. They brought their knowledge. The AI CoE brought their organizational leadership.

“No other organization within Microsoft can provide such a clear picture of what you need for upskilling,” says Urvi Sengar, AIML software engineer in MSD. “Only our IT organization is functionally diverse enough.”

MacDonald, Uribe, Arias, Sengar, Pancholi, Ceurvorst, Philpott, Bodhanampati, and Paniaras pose for pictures that have been assembled into a collage. — From left to right, Sean MacDonald, Miguel Uribe, Humberto Arias, Urvi Sengar, Nitul Pancholi, Amy Ceurvorst, John Philpott, Sunitha Bodhanampati, and Yannis Paniaras, as well Dave Rodriguez (not pictured), are all part of a larger Microsoft Digital team implementing a new AI training curriculum for employees at Microsoft.

Their work is a testament to the power of trusting your technology champions to lead change. In previous years, Sengar and her AIML community colleagues had already built a learning path focused on AI-900, a pathway dedicated to AI fundamentals. They relaunched the course in 2023 to represent the core of our AI certifications.

From there, a diverse group of technical and employee experience professionals collaborated to assemble, create, and structure a series of learning paths to launch MSD’s employees into the next level of AI expertise. That’s where Microsoft Viva Learning really shines. The platform makes it easy to curate our AI content actively as the technology landscape evolves.

“So much is changing that we don’t want to stop at just one static certification,” Sengar says. “We want to keep the learning going along with everything new and relevant so we can take this community forward.”

The result is a granular, multidisciplinary curriculum that gets MSD employees not just up to AI literacy, but AI proficiency.

Innovative AI certifications designed for employee success

Our AI and Data Learning curriculum breaks into three distinct learning paths: basic, intermediate, and advanced.

AI Learning Basic gives beginners a ground-level, conceptual understanding of the technology. It builds familiarity with generative AI, Azure OpenAI Service, and no-code AI, as well as more theoretical frameworks like the Responsible AI principles, AI ethics, and how to align AI projects with our values.
AI Learning Intermediate is where things get more functional. Here, employees learn about natural language processing and prompt engineering, as well as several specific AI tools, including ChatGPT, AI Builder in Power Automate, Semantic Kernal for building AI-based apps, Microsoft 365 Copilot Extensibility Framework, and more.
AI Learning Advanced goes from function to innovation. This is where employees can dive deeper into technologies like large language models (LLMs), training neural networks, self-supervised machine learning, and other skills that will help them develop more advanced solutions and automations.

When employees complete each learning path, they receive a sharable badge. We used Credly, a digital credentialing solution created by Pearson, to design and manage those badges. We can then distribute them to our employees through Credly’s integration with Microsoft Viva Learning.

The three AI certification badges available through Microsoft Viva Learn: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. — Microsoft employees can obtain three levels of AI certification: beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

Curating the curriculum is only one part of the AI CoE’s job. It’s also crucial to promote and socialize these learning opportunities internally. The wider Microsoft Viva employee experience suite takes care of that.

We actively socialize the AI certifications through Microsoft Viva Engage, our employee communication platform, but top-down promotion is only one component of their success. MSD employees often share their certifications via LinkedIn or through Viva Engage. As a result, there’s an element of virality that leads even more of our employees to take these courses—even outside MSD.

Our teams are clearly excited about their success. The share rate for AI Learning badges is 72 percent, well above Credly’s average of 47 percent.

Beyond MSD, lines of business across Microsoft are even adapting these certifications for their own needs.

“People are observing the work we do and looking for ways to bring it into their organizations,” says Nitul Pancholi, engineering product manager in MSD leading the AI CoE’s culture pillar. “Even external customers are asking how they can set up their own centers of excellence and what to prioritize.”

Freshly empowered AI practitioners, ready for the future

We’re still at the beginning of our internal AI adoption journey. But by raising the baseline of AI knowledge, these certifications ensure our technical professionals are ready to lead the rest of our organization.

“That’s one of the super cool things about Microsoft,” MacDonald says. “We have the playground at our fingertips, and we have the autonomy and opportunity to dream up whatever we want.”

The advent of advanced AI supported by thoughtful empowerment initiatives will only amplify our employees’ ability to experiment with emerging technologies. We’re confident that developing our own AI curriculum will help us work our way into a virtuous cycle of more learning, more creativity, and more business innovation.

Customers with access to Microsoft Viva Learn can start assembling their own AI curriculum from Microsoft Learn content, their own organizations’ educational materials, and external providers and learning management systems today. By unlocking AI for employees through education, organizations are positioned to ride the wave of the next digital revolution.

Here are some things to consider as you think about launching an AI curriculum at your company:

Leverage your integrations with tools like Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning.
Actively curate your courses to keep your curriculum up to date.
Busy schedules get in the way: Build time for learning into your employees’ days, then support them with curriculum.
Leverage executive sponsorship, employee champions, and the social aspects of learning.
Incentivize and recognize progress through gamification, friendly competition, badges, and testimonials.
Build a diverse enablement team from across different disciplines, seniorities, and technical backgrounds.
Think about how to segment learners by level of expertise and learning style, then tailor the learning to those segments.