In an always-on business environment, even routine collaboration can be overwhelming. But in an environment of Frontier Transformation, this challenge represents an opportunity for AI.

Our employees don’t need to handle all their work alone anymore, because agents can now extend their responsiveness and reach. Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, one of those AI agents is acting as a digital twin for just that purpose. It’s called DigitalMe, a personal virtual proxy designed to keep work moving when our employees are busy with other tasks.

Always-on knowledge without always-on employees

Large meetings generate a constant stream of questions, side conversations, and follow-up items. They’re often more than a single presenter or moderator can manage in real time. Important insights get buried in chat threads, queries go unanswered, and valuable momentum gets lost.

For our teams at Microsoft, this challenge became especially visible during large-scale readiness sessions, where subject matter experts found themselves inundated with requests for clarification and guidance.

“In order for our transformation into a Frontier Firm to be successful, we need to step back and ask what works well for employees, what doesn’t work well, and where agents can help.”

Stephan Kerametlian, senior director, Microsoft Digital

That’s not the only place where employees can use an extra hand. When people are out of the office, that doesn’t mean work stops. Their coworkers often need access to their colleagues’ knowledge to move mission-critical work forward, even when they’re not reachable.

“In order for our transformation into a Frontier Firm to be successful, we need to step back and ask what works well for employees, what doesn’t work well, and where agents can help,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a senior director in Microsoft Digital. “We’re crossing the horizon into human-led, agent-operated patterns of work.”

One team in Microsoft Digital created DigitalMe to explore what that future could look like in practice.

Go deeper

Becoming a Frontier Firm: Our IT playbook for the AI era

DigitalMe: A personal digital twin for Microsoft employees

For the members of our Employee Experience Success team responsible for adoption efforts around Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio in the Greater China Region, readiness meetings were becoming unwieldy because of attendee questions.

“Our purpose was to use as little code and as much natural language as possible so people could modify their own personal DigitalMe easily. In Copilot Studio, you can manage agents as a solution. So users can just download and import a zip file, modify an agent like DigitalMe according to their business context and preferences, then use it.”

Ju Bu, business program manager, Microsoft Digital

The team wanted a way to focus on running the meeting while simultaneously providing their knowledge to participants. They decided to create an agent to help deal with the deluge of queries: DigitalMe.

At its core, DigitalMe is a personal, context-aware digital twin with versions that operate in both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook. It draws on the same knowledge bases and resources that its user can access, for example, SharePoint sites and Teams channels.

The team designed DigitalMe in Microsoft Copilot Studio and prioritized a low-code approach. At most, the creators used code to build 15–20% of the agent and accomplished the rest using natural language prompts.

“Our purpose was to use as little code and as much natural language as possible so people could modify their own personal DigitalMe easily,” says Ju Bu, a business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “In Copilot Studio, you can manage agents as a solution. So users can just download and import a zip file, modify an agent like DigitalMe according to their business context and preferences, then use it.”

Equipped with an employee’s full knowledge base, DigitalMe can respond in Outlook and Teams on its human counterpart’s behalf. To ensure transparency, a label appears at the beginning of each message indicating that it originates from the agent.

DigitalMe also reinforces context for the requester by including their original question in quotations. Finally, the agent @-mentions the recipient to notify them effectively.

The team identified two primary use cases for the agent:

• Moderating live sessions. In large meetings, DigitalMe acts as an always-on co-moderator, answering questions in real time using scoped, preloaded knowledge. By speaking for them in the meeting chat, it helps presenters stay focused while ensuring attendees receive timely, accurate responses. Surfacing information instantly enhances both the efficiency and quality of the session. DigitalMe has the added advantage of being able to pull from resources the presenter might not recall in the moment. Over time, the agent captures and reuses questions and answers, turning live engagement into a growing knowledge base.
• Extending employee availability. DigitalMe also provides a way for employees to remain responsive when they’re out of the office. It can monitor Teams chats or incoming emails, generate context-aware replies, and surface relevant knowledge for colleagues without human intervention. In practice, it’s proven especially valuable for teams distributed across widely different time zones and for handling project handoffs during onboarding or time-off scenarios.

A key advantage of DigitalMe is its ability to move beyond simple question-and-answer use cases. In some scenarios, it can also trigger workflows like creating tasks or capturing frequently asked questions.

“Our vision was that DigitalMe shouldn’t just be an assistant. It should function as our digital twin in the cyber world.”

Kai Cheng, program manager, Microsoft Digital

It was important to incorporate human-in-the-loop capabilities. When DigitalMe encounters gaps in its knowledge, it can flag those moments for follow-up, prompting users to refine and expand their knowledge sources. It represents another way that human-led, agent-operated processes continuously improve outcomes.

“Our vision was that DigitalMe shouldn’t just be an assistant,” says Kai Cheng, a program manager working in change management, digital transformation, and AI in Microsoft Digital. “It should function as our digital twin in the cyber world.”

In live sessions, DigitalMe has helped presenters stay focused while maintaining high levels of engagement, responsiveness, and support for participants. Employees are increasingly using it to bridge time zones, support knowledge transfer, and keep projects moving in their absence.

Extending the impact of DigitalMe

After seeing DigitalMe’s early success, our global readiness and adoption professionals identified the agent as an opportunity to turn individual innovation into a scalable capability. After templatizing the agent in collaboration with its original creators, we’ve now included it in our Agent Starter Kit. This resource makes it easy for employees to create their own personal versions of several useful agents.

“Employees often think building an agent might be complex and time-consuming, and that limits their willingness to try and turn their ideas into working solutions. But tools like this show them how easy it can be.”

Alexandra Jones, director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

Our Agent Starter Kit walks employees through importing a ready-made agent, connecting it to their knowledge sources, and adapting it to their specific workflows. This approach has shifted DigitalMe from a single solution into a repeatable pattern, helping employees across the company move from curiosity to hands-on adoption. We’ve also incorporated the Agent Starter Kit into our Agent Launchpad skilling program to accelerate our employees’ agentic expertise as part of a Frontier firm

There’s an added benefit as well. By getting tools like DigitalMe into people’s hands through templatized versions they can modify and configure themselves, we’re highlighting how easy it can be for even nontechnical workers to build agents themselves.

“Employees often think building an agent might be complex and time-consuming, and that limits their willingness to try and turn their ideas into working solutions,” says Alexandra Jones, director of business programs in Microsoft Digital. “But tools like this show them how easy it can be.”

For organizations that want to replicate this kind of solution, the path is increasingly straightforward. By lowering the barrier to entry with templatized agents and no-code tools, our team in Microsoft Digital has demonstrated that any employee can build tailored, high-impact assistants without deep technical expertise.

“The goal of Frontier Transformation is that AI is just there as you’re working, helping you practically do your job to enhance the experience and add value in real time.”

Kevin Wooldridge, senior director of digital transformation, Microsoft Digital

Looking ahead, we’re exploring ways to deepen these capabilities by adding memory and behavioral context so DigitalMe can better reflect individual working styles. The goal is to evolve it from a helpful assistant into a more complete digital representative.

Together, these advances point toward a future where employees routinely work alongside agents that grow, learn, and contribute more over time.

“DigitalMe is an example of the genuine, practical application of agentic use in the flow of work,” says Kevin Wooldridge, senior director of digital transformation in Microsoft Digital. “The goal of Frontier Transformation is that AI is just there as you’re working, helping you practically do your job to enhance the experience and add value in real time.”

The post Meet DigitalMe: Our AI digital twin that works on our behalf 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.

Our Global Collection team in the Microsoft Treasury division makes sure payments are seamlessly executed in our fast-moving global enterprise environment. However, our case managers were often losing valuable time figuring out things like who the right contact was for a given customer, which issues were likely to be challenged by a customer, and where an exception should be routed next. This information was spread across systems or buried in handoffs.

To solve these challenges, our team built a human-led, AI agent-assisted support system to reduce preparation time and streamline their processes.

“Building the AI assistance wasn’t the hard part,” says Kathy Brustad, a director in the Global Treasury and Financial Services division at Microsoft. “The hard part was reimagining the collection experience with AI front and center, and bringing the underlying infrastructure up to speed to get it there.”

In this post, we explain how we did it so you can learn from our experience.

“We have over 1,000 collectors around the world who perform collections for Microsoft. They had multiple systems they had to go to in order to find out things like the totality of the customer’s invoice and what conversations a different team had with the customer. The information was fragmented.”

Kathy Brustad, director, Global Treasury and Financial Services

Stitching together information across systems

Our AI agent is focused on helping our case managers prioritize high-value work by:

• Predicting late payments and possible customer disputes
• Summarizing customer case interactions for use by case managers
• Routing customer emails to the right collections manager faster and with greater precision Automatically matching payments to invoices
• Automatically responding to customer inquiries

“We have over 1,000 collectors around the world who perform collections for Microsoft,” Brustad says. “They had multiple systems they had to go to in order to find out things like the totality of the customer’s invoice and what conversations a different team had with the customer. All of this information was fragmented. We didn’t have a single view of how much a customer owed us.”

We started by consolidating these dispersed tools and systems into an SAP and Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, creating a single source of truth for all relevant customer, invoice, and payment data.

On that foundation, we layered on Microsoft’s IQ intelligence platform to infuse semantic understanding and business context. That standardized our workflows by simplifying templates and worklists to reduce complexity and put consistent global practices into place. Routine communications became fully automated.

We then applied AI to improve payment matching accuracy from 40% to 90%, generate customer response drafts, and intelligently route cases to reduce time-consuming back‑and‑forth.

Copilot assistance was embedded directly into the daily workflow of our case managers to reduce administrative load by providing inline knowledge suggestions, summarizing calls, and automatically drafting replies. With these standardized automated workflows, we could apply 98% of payments within 48 hours.

“In a nutshell, this is the collection story: We have various agents and models deployed to assist our human agents with all the activities they have to do, saving hundreds of thousands of hours that we spent on manually tracking things before.”

Kathy Brustad, director, Global Treasury and Financial Services

Moving faster on ‘act ready’ work

Deploying the agent was only the starting point. The harder work was helping our collection team change established ways of working. Brustad described the shift as learning to “run it in a different way,” moving from manual, fragmented preparation toward workflows where prioritization, context gathering, and routing were increasingly supported within the system.

To make that shift possible, the team introduced a change management work stream program and role-based training focused on real, day-to-day scenarios alongside the rollout. By anchoring the work in clear business pain points and showing tangible improvements, our team saw how the new approach made their work easier. Each morning, the agent prioritized each case manager’s workload according to urgency and past client behavior so case managers could immediately focus on the accounts that were the most pressing.

We reduced repetitive communications using automatically drafted responses and automated statements.

“In a nutshell, this is the collection story: We have various agents and models deployed to assist our human agents with all the activities they have to do, saving hundreds of thousands of hours that we spent on manually tracking things before,” Brustad says.

After deploying this system to our case managers, we saw measurable improvements in both productivity and speed, including:

• Hundreds of thousands of hours unlocked annually in order to do more human-led high-value work rather than routine administrative tasks
• 40% reduction in call preparation time
• 2X growth in automatic cash applications
• 2.5X acceleration of customer inquiry resolution time

Operationally, the team also saw up to 60% reduction in inquiry handling time through inline suggestions, summarized calls, and automatically drafted replies. To ensure these improvements were real and repeatable, we emphasized observability in our evaluation approach. Our team tracked dollars collected through collections and hours worked to create productivity metrics.

Data, trust, and good governance

When introducing AI systems or agents into finance workflows, leaders often ask two questions:

1. Can we trust the outputs?
2. Can we govern the process?

“The biggest takeaway is to know your own process very, very well. You need to understand where all the bottlenecks and pain points are. Start from there to design the new agent-enabled process instead of saying, ‘I’m going to just inject the agent into my existing process.’”

Kathy Brustad, director, Global Treasury and Financial Services

For us, trust came from getting the basics right in the form of right-sizing our enterprise data, standardizing our workflows, and establishing clear ownership for each part of the work. When we tested early and included frontline users throughout the process, outcomes improved.

“The biggest takeaway is to know your own process very, very well,” Brustad says. “You need to understand where all the bottlenecks and pain points are. Start from there to design the new agent-enabled process instead of saying, ‘I’m going to just inject the agent into my existing process.’”

Embed custom agent assistance directly into the moments where time disappears, such as prioritization, preparation, routing, and drafting so adoption feels natural and can be measured. You can prove impact with a small set of metrics like cycle time, throughput, dollars collected, and hours saved, and iterate from there.

Key takeaways

Modernizing collections is about fixing the fundamentals first, before you add AI into the mix. As you begin to streamline your own finance workflows, keep these lessons in mind:

• Fix fragmented workflows before adding intelligence: AI delivers the most value when it’s layered on top of standardized processes and a unified data foundation rather than disconnected systems and ad hoc handoffs.
• Embed assistance where time is actually lost: Copilot-style support works best when it shows up directly in prioritization, preparation, routing, and drafting to reduce friction without changing how people work.
• Focus AI on high‑ROI decisions, not just automation: Predicting late payments, flagging likely invoice disputes, and surfacing context can help teams spend time where it matters.
• Design around the practitioner’s day: When work arrives prioritized and prepped, case managers spend less time chasing context and more time resolving exceptions.
• Measure what matters to prove impact: Cycle time, dollars collected, throughput, and hours saved provide a clear, repeatable way to track productivity gains and cashflow velocity.
• Pair generative AI with strong governance: Trust comes from clear ownership, standardized workflows, quality data, and ongoing human oversight.

Editor’s notes:

• SAP is an enterprise finance system that many organizations use to manage invoices, payments, and financial records in a single, centralized platform.
• All metrics cited are based on Microsoft internal data gathered during the writing of this article. They’re best read as directional signals from that period, and they may change as systems, processes, and behaviors evolve. Microsoft makes no warranties, express, implied, or statutory.

Try it out

• Build and test an AI‑assisted workflow with Microsoft Copilot Studio to see how agents can help prioritize work, summarize context, and route cases more efficiently.
• Start a Dynamics 365 free trial.

Related links

• Discover the five lessons we learned on how to make AI stick for sellers during our Copilot rollout.
• See how we revamped and modernized our Microsoft Treasury infrastructure using Azure.
• Explore how we’re supercharging our support experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI.
• Learn how we’re transforming the marketing function at Microsoft with AI.
• Read about our role as Customer Zero in an AI-powered world.
• Check out how we’re measuring the impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI internally.

The post Streamlining finance cash collection at Microsoft with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

As AI capabilities advanced, we saw an opportunity to move beyond individual productivity gains and toward something more transformative: Empowering our developers to build intelligent agents that can automate workflows, streamline operations, and create new business value.

Realizing this vision required more than new tools. We needed to rethink how we foster development, govern innovation, and operate at scale.

“We’ve made a lot of progress enabling our developers to build agents that make us more productive. We’re Customer Zero at Microsoft, which means we’re the first to deploy and use the technology and services that we later sell to our customers. Those learnings give us a unique perspective and story to share about the journey our developers have been on with AI and agents.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Today, we’re sharing the foundation we built that supports this shift.

We’re driving employees across Microsoft to create and use AI agents—from simple, task-focused solutions to enterprise-grade applications available across the company. It’s all supported by a secure, governed, and extensible platform.

“We’ve made a lot of progress enabling our developers to build agents that make us more productive,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re Customer Zero at Microsoft, which means we’re the first to deploy and use the technology and services that we later sell to our customers. Those learnings give us a unique perspective and story to share about the journey our developers have been on with AI and agents.”

Within the context of Microsoft Build 2026, we’re sharing what it really takes to move from experimentation to impact. Through this collection of stories and resources, we highlight how we’re empowering our developers to build with agentic AI—from establishing governance and platform capabilities to driving adoption and delivering real-world outcomes. Our goal is to provide practical insights you can use to accelerate your own AI journey.

“We hope you find the journey we’ve been on practical and useful,” Fielder says. “When it comes to agents, we’re accelerating fast and scaling at an enterprise level. As our story continues to evolve, we look forward to sharing it with you.”

Guidance for developers: How we manage agentic AI at Microsoft

These articles outline our vision for agentic AI, showing how we’re building a secure, governed, and extensible foundation for AI agents—from Work IQ and Copilot Studio to Agent 365, Azure DevOps, and Model Context Protocol—so developers can create scalable, high-value solutions across the enterprise.

April 16, 2026

Alex Fleck

Becoming a Frontier Firm: A guide for deploying AI agents based on our experience at Microsoft

May 21, 2026

Alex Fleck

Governing AI agents at scale: Lessons from our journey at Microsoft

• How Work IQ is supercharging our AI usage at Microsoft
• Shaping AI management at Microsoft with Agent 365 and Copilot controls
• Deploying Microsoft Agent 365: How we’re extending our infrastructure to manage agents at Microsoft
• Unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Powering AI value with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at Microsoft
• How our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents
• Transforming our approach to sensitivity labels at Microsoft with Microsoft Entra
• Reclaiming engineering time with AI in Azure DevOps at Microsoft
• Protecting AI conversations at Microsoft with Model Context Protocol security and governance

UPCOMING POSTS

• Intelligence on tap: Our guide for How Work IQ enables Microsoft 365 Copilot to better understand how we work at Microsoft
• Our guide for deploying Agent 365 based on our experience at Microsoft
• Agentic modernization: Securing Python at scale for agentic AI at Microsoft

Our IT guide to becoming a Frontier Firm

These stories share our IT playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm, highlighting a practical path to enterprise AI maturity through agentic transformation, operational scale, responsible innovation, and partnership—showing how IT leaders can balance governance, modernization, and employee engagement while building an AI-first organization.

December 4, 2025

Keith Boyd

Becoming a Frontier Firm: Our IT playbook for the AI era

• Enterprise AI maturity in five steps: Our guide for IT leaders
• The agentic future: How we’re becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm at Microsoft
• AI at scale: How we’re transforming our enterprise IT operations at Microsoft
• Transforming into an AI-first Frontier Firm in partnership with our works councils
• Fast Train to the AI Frontier: Balancing risk and innovation in the era of AI at Microsoft

Working as developer in IT at Microsoft in the era of AI

These stories explore what it means to work in Microsoft Digital during the AI era, showing how developers and knowledge workers are reshaping engineering, the employee experience, and their own career growth through AI-powered tools, new ways of working, and personal journeys that reflect the evolving culture of IT at Microsoft.

May 21, 2026

Matthew Cooke

IT on the cutting edge: Working in Microsoft Digital in the era of AI

• Powering the new age of AI-led engineering in IT at Microsoft – Inside Track Blog
• The Frontier Firm: How knowledge workers are forging their own AI tools at Microsoft – Inside Track Blog
• The future of work is here: Transforming our employee experience with AI – Inside Track Blog
• Olutunde Makinde: From Lagos to Redmond, a Microsoft IT engineer’s journey – Inside Track Blog
• Building from the inside: Anahit Hovhannisyan’s impact on IT at Microsoft – Inside Track Blog

Key takeaways

From our journey enabling agentic AI across Microsoft Digital, several key principles have emerged to help organizations move from experimentation to scalable, enterprise-wide impact.

• Treat your organization as Customer Zero. Use your own AI capabilities first to generate real-world insights, validate scenarios, and build credibility before scaling to customers.
• Build a foundation for scale. Establish a secure, governed, and extensible platform that enables developers to create AI agents—from simple solutions to enterprise-grade applications.
• Empower developers to drive transformation. Move beyond productivity gains by enabling developers to build intelligent agents that automate workflows and unlock new business value.
• Align governance with innovation. Rethink how you enable development, govern AI, and operate at scale to balance flexibility with responsible use.
• Connect tools, platforms, and workflows. Integrate AI capabilities across your ecosystem—linking platforms, governance models, and development tools to support consistent, scalable adoption.
• Translate experimentation into impact. Focus on turning early AI exploration into coordinated, enterprise-wide efforts that deliver measurable outcomes.

Try it out

Learn more about Microsoft Build.

Related links

• Read our guide for deploying AI agents based on our experience at Microsoft.
• Learn about how we’re governing AI agents at scale internally.
• Find out how Work IQ is supercharging our AI usage at Microsoft.
• Check out an IT playbook for the AI era and see how we’re becoming a Frontier Firm.

The post Microsoft Build 2026: Empowering our developers to adopt agentic AI at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Working in Microsoft Digital, the company’s internal IT organization, means being part of a group that operates at massive scale, deploying and managing the technology solutions that enable the company to collaborate, achieve, and fully embrace its shift to a Frontier Firm.

“Being successful in today’s fast-paced environment requires more than technical expertise. Success comes from embracing change, adapting quickly, and continuously learning alongside others. The most impactful teams combine technical capability with curiosity, collaboration, and a mindset of continuous evolution.”

Miguel Uribe, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Our work touches on nearly every aspect of the business, from the network our employees rely on to safely connect to corporate resources, to the productivity apps they rely on every day, to the devices that power our global enterprise. We’re also key to the internal deployment and adoption of agentic AI tools for a global workforce of over 200,000 people.

Microsoft Digital employees have the daily opportunity to tackle complex, real‑world challenges while shaping how Microsoft develops new technologies, serving as Customer Zero for the company’s use of its own products and services.

“Being successful in today’s fast-paced environment requires more than technical expertise,” says Miguel Uribe, a principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital. “Success comes from embracing change, adapting quickly, and continuously learning alongside others. The most impactful teams combine technical capability with curiosity, collaboration, and a mindset of continuous evolution.”

The path to Microsoft Digital

Managing the full breadth of IT responsibilities at an organization the size of Microsoft requires a workforce with a diverse range of perspectives and lived experiences. Accordingly, the people who work here possess a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets, and hail from around the world.

Networking and relationship-building are often helpful in finding your way into the organization. Mykhailo Sydorchuk, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, started his career in Ukraine at a SharePoint solution startup with some prominent global customers. After a successful implementation with one of them, he built a strong relationship with a manager there.

When that person’s company later opened up a SharePoint role, Sydorchuk applied, was hired, and relocated to Los Angeles. He wore many hats in the job, serving as a SharePoint administrator, Microsoft 365 tenant administrator, developer, and project manager for internal IT rollouts and large-scale change management efforts.

Eventually, he was ready for a change.

“My colleague eventually joined Microsoft,” Sydorchuk says. “She felt I would be a good fit and suggested I apply. I went through the interview process and landed the role here about six years ago. So, I got the job very much through networking.”

Some employees at Microsoft Digital have an extensive work history, while others are just getting started in their careers.

“The internship structure is very supportive. Interns are given broad, open‑ended problems rather than tightly scoped tasks, which allows for deeper exploration.”

Jeni Huang, product designer, Microsoft Digital

Internships offer a great opportunity for many candidates who are new to the job market, giving them a way to get a foothold at the company. Microsoft hires thousands of interns each year globally, with year-to-year fluctuations based on hiring conditions and program scope. Within that broader program, design interns are part of a smaller, close-knit cohort, making mentorship and studio connections especially meaningful.

“The internship structure is very supportive,” says Jeni Huang, a product designer in Microsoft Digital who started with the company as an intern in 2022. “Interns are given broad, open‑ended problems rather than tightly scoped tasks, which allows for deeper exploration.”

In Huang’s early work as an intern at the company, she was encouraged to explore more forward-thinking design concepts rather than incremental improvements. That freedom helped her build strong relationships with her manager and others working in the design studio.

“Even though I’m now on a different team, many of the same people remain,” Huang says. “Those connections played a big role in my return as a full‑time Microsoft employee.”

Interesting, impactful work

The people who work at Microsoft Digital routinely tackle ambitious, forward‑thinking projects, with an eye toward reimagining how IT operates at a global scale. Our teams focus on building intelligent, AI‑powered employee experiences, using cloud-native platforms and data-driven insights to simplify work, boost productivity, reduce friction, and help everyone at the company do their best work.

“Microsoft, even after a long and storied history, remains one of the best places for employees to thrive professionally and personally. Experimenting and innovating are at our core—managers are encouraged to provide the time and space for innovation, and to celebrate both successes and learnings.”

Andrew Osten, general manager, business operations and programs, Microsoft Digital

Many of our projects involve large-scale automation, modernizing legacy systems, and embedding responsible AI into everyday workflows, including personalized self‑service technologies, adaptive productivity tools, and predictive insights for decision making. This environment creates a feeling of autonomy for employees and allows them to make significant impact.

“Microsoft, even after a long and storied history, remains one of the best places for employees to thrive professionally and personally,” says Andrew Osten, general manager for business operations and programs in Microsoft Digital. “Experimenting and innovating are at our core—managers are encouraged to provide the time and space for innovation, and to celebrate both successes and learnings.”

Microsoft Digital employees work on front-line technologies that matter. Their efforts serve as living case studies for Microsoft products, testing them in real-world conditions before they reach our customers. The result is a portfolio of work that combines innovation, pragmatism, and long-term thinking.

“We run hackathons sessions like ‘Fix, Hack, Learn,’ where we train ourselves on new technologies and then actively experiment,” Osten says. “That’s one of the most exciting parts of working here: We’re always pushed to explore the latest and greatest technologies and find real value in them.”

The pace can be fast and intense, but it offers the opportunity to work at the cutting edge and be part of transformative software releases. Innovative products result from being given the time and trust to invest and iterate.

“Open-mindedness and flexibility are critical here,” Sydorchuk says. “Technology evolves too quickly to get attached to specific ideas or scopes. Constant change is the norm, and learning to live with uncertainty is essential.”

Customer Zero: Our defining mission

A central component to working in Microsoft Digital is our role as Customer Zero. This concept describes how we use our own products and services internally before releasing them to customers, subjecting them to security, compliance, and productivity demands at an enterprise-level organization.

“Because we deploy these products internally at scale, we learn a tremendous amount, especially since many of these capabilities are early-stage or newly released.”

Andrew Osten, general manager, business operations and programs, Microsoft Digital

This approach surfaces functionality gaps, risks, and usability issues early, turning internal teams into live stress tests for new technologies before they are released to customers. Customer Zero helps ensure our products are resilient, fit for purpose, trustworthy, and grounded in real-world needs, not idealized scenarios. Just as importantly, these practices help create repeatable governance, adoption, and change strategies that customers can reuse, translating internal learning directly into external value.

“Because we deploy these products internally at scale, we learn a tremendous amount, especially since many of these capabilities are early-stage or newly released,” Osten says. “Our role is to generate energy and interest, help teams adopt the tools in ways that deliver real value, and then capture those learnings.”

Customer Zero means that Microsoft Digital functions differently from a typical IT organization, even though we’re still on point for the fundamentals, like keeping the network and its related infrastructure running safely and securely, managing the tenant, providing IT support, driving deployment and adoption, and ensuring our employees have the right tools, devices, and AI-powered services to succeed in a complex global enterprise.

What makes us unique is that we get access to ground-breaking new Microsoft products, features, and capabilities first. We provide early feedback, are the first to try out new experiences, and validate them at enterprise scale.

“We’re often operating at the edge,” Osten says. “For example, I’m currently using early-stage hardware and agentic technologies that haven’t been released yet for general availability, to both provide product feedback and drive value realization as soon as possible. Years ago, through our internal dogfooding program called Elite, I was using a next‑generation Xbox before it launched publicly. Those experiences are part of how we learn about and improve our products.”

Growing AI-based skills

A good example of something truly transformative to emerge from Microsoft Digital recently was our enterprise‑wide deployment and operationalization of Microsoft 365 Copilot—acting as Customer Zero for generative AI technology at scale.

Rather than treating Copilot as a productivity add‑on, we led a full reinvention of how knowledge work happens at the enterprise level. Building everything from governance and data-hygiene standards to role‑based adoption models and change management playbooks, we went all out to change employee habits and safely embed AI into daily workflows across the company.

“AI is behavioral,” Osten says. “To get real value, we work closely with business units to understand the problems they’re trying to solve, map those processes, identify where people can focus on higher-value work, and then build and drive adoption of agents to support that shift.”

In essence, Microsoft Digital is engaged in building an entire business model with AI serving as a governed, trusted, role-aware layer of intelligence. The company refers to this as the Frontier Firm concept, combining human judgment with AI agents—tools that can reason, plan, and execute tasks across systems.

“Building agents just because we can isn’t the goal. The goal is value. Microsoft Digital plays a key role in identifying the right problems, ensuring the right tools are available, and scaling solutions responsibly, so we’re solving problems while not creating new ones.”

Aisha Hasan, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

The work Microsoft Digital does to conceive, build, and incorporate agents falls under a company-wide initiative known as Microsoft Agent 365. It focuses on three broad questions:

• What problems are we trying to solve?
• How can we build AI agents and workflows to solve them?
• How do we manage and scale this work without creating sprawl or duplicative solutions?

“Building agents just because we can isn’t the goal,” says Aisha Hasan, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The goal is value. Microsoft Digital plays a key role in identifying the right problems, ensuring the right tools are available, and scaling solutions responsibly, so we’re solving problems while not creating new ones.”

Prospering in Microsoft Digital

In addition to the central role they play as Customer Zero and the opportunity to engage closely with agentic AI, Microsoft Digital employees also benefit from a wide range of opportunities that go beyond technical skills. Rather than limiting our roles within narrow job definitions, we focus on a more holistic career experience that supports pursuing growth opportunities across Microsoft.

“We invest in growth, exposure, innovation, and collaboration in a way that makes the work both challenging and fulfilling,” Osten says.

Employees at Microsoft Digital use traits like curiosity, empathy, and adaptability to thrive within a fast-moving technical landscape. Being curious leads to learning, learning enables adaptation, and empathy pulls it all together, helping people grow as they collectively manage challenges.

“Technology is evolving so fast that keeping up with everything is a challenge in itself,” Hasan says. “Empathy, for yourself and others, matters when everyone is navigating constant change.”

It’s common for employees to leverage a range of responsibilities both within and between different jobs. Open-mindedness and flexibility are critical. Technology evolves too quickly to get attached to specific ideas or job scopes.

“I began in engineering and operations, moved into network engineering, and then gradually ‘peeled back the onion’ by stepping into technical program management,” Hasan says. “That allowed me to see the end-to-end picture: business value, technology, end users, adoption, and long-term maintenance.”

To be successful at Microsoft Digital, technical skills are important, but what really matters is the ability to innovate and work through uncertainty.

“I look for people who thrive in ambiguity, who enjoy taking on new challenges rather than waiting for perfect clarity,” Osten says. “Collaboration is equally important. In an environment this dynamic, you may be accountable for an outcome, but your success depends on the work of many other teams.”

How Microsoft values drive our work

No description of what it’s like to work at Microsoft Digital is complete without a discussion of the principles that fuel us, both at the department level and for the company as a whole.

“It often feels like drinking from a firehose, in terms of the volume of information one needs to process. It’s high-intensity, but being able to work at the cutting edge and be a part of major technological transformation that empowers everyone on the planet to achieve more makes it totally worth it.”

Mykhailo Sydorchuk, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Here are four core Microsoft Digital value pillars, as Osten describes them:

1. People development and skilling. This includes technical skills—including around emerging technologies like agentic AI—as well as people skills. We focus on stakeholder management, storytelling, and career development skills that support long‑term employee growth.
2. Leadership and manager development. We continually build leadership capability through a growth mindset, reinforcing principles like creating clarity, generating positive energy, and driving success. We invest heavily in helping both current and future leaders build “model‑coach‑care” skills.

3. Connection and collaboration. We intentionally create opportunities for teams to understand one another’s dependencies, whether through global meetings or structured collaboration initiatives. It’s easy to become siloed in a large enterprise, and these connections are critical, especially as AI continues to blur traditional boundaries.
4. Inclusion. This means being inclusive across communities, geographies, languages, cultures, and work environments. We focus on how we meet, how remote participation works, and how to ensure everyone can contribute effectively, regardless of location or role.

Following our pillars, and being benchmark examples of Microsoft’s value model, contributes to the success of Microsoft Digital and enables our employees to thrive  working at one of the world’s most prominent tech companies.

“Microsoft is a fast-paced environment, primarily due to scale and constant innovation,” Sydorchuk says. “It often feels like drinking from a firehose, in terms of the volume of information one needs to process. It’s high-intensity, but being able to work at the cutting edge and be a part of major technological transformation that empowers everyone on the planet to achieve more makes it totally worth it.”

Key takeaways

Here are five keys to employee success at Microsoft Digital, which can be applied to any IT organization:

• To get a foot in the door, be resourceful. Microsoft Digital employees find their way into the company through a variety of channels, including personal networking, internships, vendor relationships, and Microsoft external and internal career sites.
• Embracing Customer Zero is crucial. The concept of using Microsoft employees as early adopters of new products and services is a strategic cornerstone and an essential aspect of how the company operates.
• Understand what it means to be a Frontier Firm. Orienting your approach to work in a way that corresponds with the benefits of agentic AI can help you align with Microsoft Digital’s journey, as we become a lighthouse example of a Frontier Firm for other IT organizations.
• Develop your curiosity, empathy, and versatility. Technical skills are valuable, but continuous learning and softer skills are foundational to professional and personal growth and success.
• Know your organization’s core values. Collaboration, connection, and inclusion are vital tenets for succeeding at Microsoft Digital, as reflected in the organization’s values.

Try it out

Empower your future with an IT career at Microsoft.

Related links

• Learn more about our company’s mission, values, and products.
• Check out the main Microsoft Careers page.
• Read about Olutunde Makinde’s journey to Microsoft.
• Learn about Anahit Hovhannisyan’s impact on IT at Microsoft.
• See how Microsoft Digital is transforming IT at the company.
• Discover how Microsoft Digital leverages Customer Zero to drive AI innovation.
• Understand more about how agentic AI is core to becoming a Frontier Firm with this deployment readiness guide.

The post IT on the cutting edge: Working in Microsoft Digital in the era of AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But in practice, the technical side of transformation is only part of the story. The missing piece is us humans.

When we encounter these kinds of challenges internally at Microsoft, we think of ourselves as “Customer Zero.” We roll out our technology across our own organization first, learning what works and what doesn’t in real time and at scale so we can pass our lessons on to you.

“After an early wave of enthusiasm for Copilot, adoption declined. People questioned whether AI was relevant to their role, worried about what it might mean for their work, and disengaged when the change they experienced didn’t match the change they imagined.”

Daniel Bertrand, senior director, AI Transformation Office

We learned valuable lessons about AI adoption and sustainable change when we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot across our Microsoft Commercial organization, one of the company’s largest sales and service organizations. What we observed led us to reset our strategy and build a more human-centered process for deploying and driving adoption of our AI technology.

Driving AI adoption with role relevance and daily habits

Here on the Customer Zero team in Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS), our 60,000-employee strong sales organization, we saw that getting access to Copilot didn’t automatically result in widespread AI adoption.

“After an early wave of enthusiasm for Copilot, adoption declined,” says Daniel Bertrand, a senior director on the AI Transformation Office team in MCAPS. “People questioned whether AI was relevant to their role, worried about what it might mean for their work, and disengaged when the change they experienced didn’t match the change they imagined.”

Initially, people used Copilot like a search engine and expected it to make work go away. When that didn’t happen automatically, they didn’t know how to approach prompting the AI, or how to create value with it. The gap between access and know‑how is where adoption slowed.

“I knew from experience that people prefer to hear from—and learn alongside—those closest to their day-to-day work, to build trust and confidence.”

Susan Neece Robien, senior director of adoption and change, AI Transformation Office

We reframed the problem from “How do we scale the technology?” to, “What does this change feel like for people doing the work every day?”

By talking to people in our larger organization about why they were reluctant to work with Copilot, we discovered the adoption barrier was less about the technology being available and more about whether people trusted it, understood how it fit their role, and felt confident enough to build new habits around it.

The ‘Adoption-in-a-Box’ approach

After these conversations, we changed our strategy across the board.

“I knew from experience that people prefer to hear from—and learn alongside—those closest to their day‑to‑day work, to build trust and confidence,” says Susan Neece Robien, a senior director of adoption and change on the AI Transformation Office team. “That led me to conceptualize Adoption‑in‑a‑Box—a repeatable approach that combines behavior‑change guidance, peer influence, habit‑forming activities, and light gamification so people can experiment with AI in a non‑threatening way and build confidence over time.”

We rolled out the Adoption-in-a-Box concept across the team in the following ways:

• Emphasized visible leadership support: We circulated videos and “day in the life” PowerPoint 1-pagers of how our leaders were using Copilot.
• Formed a community of early adopters: They becamepeer champions for adoption, evangelizing best practices and leading workshops.
• Created a Role Hub: The hub contained practical, role-specific learning about how to use Copilot rather than doing high-level general trainings.
• Ran prompt campaigns: To get our team started with habitually using AI in their daily roles, we ran prompt campaigns to make prompt learning accessible and actionable.
• Created the Copilot Cup: We encouraged friendly competitions with leadership support. We also ran hackathons and prompt-based scavenger hunts to gamify learning about and using the AI for our team.
• Created ongoing measurement mechanisms: We stood up dashboards with monthly, weekly, and daily average usage reports. We also ran quarterly surveys to track sentiment around AI adoption on the team.

After our initial success with Adoption-in-a-Box, we scaled it to adoption leads, who brought the model to life within their teams.

When people feel safe in experimenting with AI and incorporating it into their day-to-day work, that’s when it provides real value for the organization and the individual. We’ve learned that sustainable, scalable AI transformation succeeds when we put people first.

Key takeaways

If you’re wondering how to encourage your own team to adopt new AI technology into their workflows, you can learn from our experience:

• Prioritize visible leadership participation. Leaders set the tone of any transformation, and AI adoption is no exception.
• Roll out for role relevance. Specificity is the key here: How does AI relate to each person’s individual role? If the tool provides value and saves time, people will incorporate it into their workflow.
• Establishing habits is crucial. Sustainable adoption means people use the tool on a daily basis in the natural flow of their work. Give them low-friction opportunities to learn the ropes.
• Encourage peer-to-peer experimentation. Early adopters can be a valuable resource for showing others the way. Lowering the stakes by having a peer guide employees in a workshop or one-on-one can take the pressure off as they experiment with the tech.

Try it out

Test drive an AI-assisted workflow of your own with Microsoft 365 Copilot to see how agentic AI can transform your team.

Related links

• Discover the five lessons we learned about how to make AI stick for sellers during our Copilot rollout.
• Check out our full guide describing how we deployed and drove adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot across our global organization.
• Read about our internal change management strategy for Copilot and how it helps us drive the future of work.
• Learn how the creation of a Copilot Expo propelled AI usage at Microsoft.
• See our seven tips for driving Copilot adoption with a virtual skilling event.
• Discover how one Microsoft Digital employee powers her typical workday using Copilot.

The post Staying human: How we’re using AI to transform the sales experience at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In 2026, we’re celebrating 25 years of SharePoint at Microsoft. Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, is commemorating this anniversary by reflecting on the journey we’ve taken with the product over the last quarter-century.

In this article, we’ll share our journey as SharePoint’s Customer Zero and step through the lessons we’ve learned building and maintaining an IT stack in the age of agentic AI.

Why SharePoint?

In the early 2000s, we faced a technical challenge familiar to just about any organization: We had important documents and data scattered across siloed file shares, institutional knowledge hidden away in email attachments, and access challenges preventing different teams from collaborating across geographical borders and departmental boundaries.

SharePoint offered the solution to these challenges.

Its flexible, web-based platform gave us the ability to collaborate using shared sites, centralized document libraries, and widely accessible workspaces. The application also fundamentally reshaped our corporate communications and publishing capabilities, providing features that would power key internal portals like Microsoft Web (our longtime internal company homepage, often called MSW), HRWeb, and MS Library.

“At the time, because there were so few customers running SharePoint at scale, the product was in many ways directly built to meet our IT needs.”

Sam Crewdson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

The evolution of how we used SharePoint in Microsoft Digital can best be described in three phases:

1. Our on-premises expansion and optimization
2. Our migration to the cloud, self-service growth, and modernization
3. Our incorporation of agentic AI

On-premises expansion and growing pains

When we first adopted on-premises SharePoint at scale, it became indispensable almost immediately. Internal teams used SharePoint to replace their existing file shares, publish information internally, and create many custom workflows and applications tailored to their needs.

Our team at Microsoft Digital was responsible for deploying SharePoint on an enterprise scale. Because we were one of the first enterprise customers to fully use SharePoint’s capabilities, we worked closely with the SharePoint product team from the beginning of its existence as a company. This meant we played a sizable role in influencing what SharePoint ultimately became.

“At the time, because there were so few customers running SharePoint at scale, the product was in many ways directly built to meet our IT needs,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital. “A result of our being their first and best customer at the time was that the SharePoint team often built capabilities for us that no one else was asking for yet, such as specific portals features and supportability needs.”

Our initial adoption of SharePoint exposed some structural limitations and gaps. To meet the goals of our internal customers, we often relied on custom code, which made upgrades more difficult. And data governance and lifecycle management could be challenging, with our internal teams creating thousands of sites with little or no ownership tracking.

Using SharePoint in this way meant rapidly accumulating abandoned sites and outdated content. Trying to conduct even routine maintenance became difficult because there was no reliable way to contact site owners.

“Because of the initial difficulties, SharePoint was frustrating at first, especially for admins. But then I realized how important it was for our users—the product saved them so much time, and they were so happy that it was available. It was a complete 180-degree shift in my mindset towards SharePoint.”

Thomas Snyder, principal service engineer, Microsoft Digital

These challenges meant tensions often ran high for the IT team during the initial adoption phase. Tempers sometimes flared as we navigated this period in SharePoint’s evolution at Microsoft.

However, the time and effort we put into overcoming these growing pains—time and effort our customers didn’t have to invest themselves—made the frustrations well worth it.

“Because of the initial difficulties, SharePoint was frustrating at first, especially for admins,” says Thomas Snyder, a principal service engineer in Microsoft Digital. “But then I realized how important it was for our users—the product saved them so much time, and they were so happy that it was available. It was a complete 180-degree shift in my mindset towards SharePoint.”

Scalable self-service, effective governance, and the cloud

SharePoint’s role at Microsoft quickly expanded from a collaboration platform into a more powerful application where our teams could build workflows, forms, dashboards, and other solutions.

Thanks to a decision to enable SharePoint’s self-service site creation capabilities, our internal customers were able to use it to build the sites they needed without having to wait for us in IT. By removing the friction of having to work with IT, they innovated faster and built new capabilities on their own using SharePoint’s out-of-the-box technology.

However, this self-service power we gave to our users also drove some sprawl that we were not initially ready to manage. By the late 2000s, the information explosion that SharePoint sparked at the company was increasing our operational and governance burden. The rapid growth in sites delayed upgrades and introduced security and compliance issues stemming from a lack of clear ownership when site owners changed jobs or left the company.

As a result of this growth, we made the decision to invest heavily in building up our governance and lifecycle management for SharePoint. We prioritized defining clear ownership for all SharePoint sites, establishing best practices around data cleanup, and building the guardrails necessary to make widespread adoption and use more manageable.

Moving SharePoint to the cloud

Our cloud migration started in late 2010 and quickly became the driving force for us in IT. Rather than see the migration as a simple lift-and-shift activity, we took the opportunity to strategically reconfigure the architecture and customization level of our SharePoint instance.

This was a huge undertaking.

We had to think globally across all our sites in different regions and countries. The tooling suite for migration was immature at the time, meaning some of our portals and sites would require refactoring. We also had to contend with the constraints of varied and sometimes conflicting regional data residency requirements.

“It’s effectively filtering, so you don’t migrate everything. You’re cleaning your house before you move. You don’t move everything in your garage—you clean it out first. The easiest move is the one you don’t have to do.”

David Johnson, principal product manager architect, Microsoft Digital

Our approach to moving SharePoint to the cloud took several phases

First, early adopters who expressed active interest in migrating were provisioned the first sites in the cloud. By harnessing their enthusiasm for cloud services, we allowed them to self-migrate their own site content

Second, we did extensive analysis of all sites to establish actively used sites. Sites where we had no recent usage were backed up, stored offline, and deleted. If nobody screamed, we didn’t move them to the cloud.

Third, we moved the zero- and low-customization sites. These were sites using out-of-box features that had the highest likelihood of a successful migration

Finally, all we had left were the highly customized sites, which often used customization approaches which were not supported in the cloud. These we chose to manually rebuild and often to refactor as part of our migration approach.

While we were making these first-in-the-world migrations, we spent a lot of time with our SharePoint product team partners to learn how best to move sites and to document the approaches for the millions of sites that would follow. Sites which had high levels of customization or features that the cloud couldn’t support were instead rebuilt in the cloud environment from the ground up.

We treated our SharePoint cloud migration as an opportunity to take stock of what we had and decide what we didn’t want to bring with us into the new age of SharePoint at Microsoft. We cleaned our data and retired unused sites based on which content and functions employees told us they regularly used and relied on.

“It’s effectively filtering, so you don’t migrate everything. You’re cleaning your house before you move,” says David Johnson, a principal product manager architect in Microsoft Digital. “You don’t move everything in your garage—you clean it out first. The easiest move is the one you don’t have to do.”

Cloud migration also presented fresh governance challenges for our team. Governance practices had to be established for this new environment that would allow for effective self-service across multiple sites.

Building governance around lifecycle management, attestation, ownership policies, and guarding against oversharing required a significant amount of effort from the team, but it was necessary to ensure a smooth transition from an on-premises tool to the cloud.

Site modernization: Reducing the need for customization

Around 2016, SharePoint rolled out what came to be known as SharePoint Modern. This new version was a game changer for our major portals, as it reduced the need for heavy, developer-driven customization and replaced it with powerful out-of-the-box page creation capabilities, responsive design, and improved accessibility. The product also eventually added seamless built-in integration with solutions like Microsoft Teams and OneDrive.

Less custom code meant we could upgrade faster and dramatically lower our development, support, and maintenance costs. But the best part was the improved user experience and better navigability of the new version. Before this, our IT team fielded numerous questions about SharePoint on a weekly basis. The more intuitive, user-friendly experience of modern SharePoint reduced the volume of inquiries and service requests drastically. Our internal users were happier, and so were we.

SharePoint in the age of agentic AI

We see SharePoint as a key “knowledge platform” for AI. It’s a critical enterprise-scale repository for our documents and data and other information that we use to power our global enterprise.

“Security through obscurity is dead. It’s the double-edged sword of semantic search.”

Thomas Snyder, principal service engineer, Microsoft Digital

As such, it’s one of our key “knowledge platforms,” locations where we store the information that is the lifeblood of our enterprise. And as our enterprise-scale repository for documents, data, and other information used to run our global multinational, it has become the launching point for many of our AI-powered experiences.

AI is only as effective as the quality of the data it can access, which is why we’ve prioritized governance best practices as we make this transition. With these new tools, we’ve had to overcome new challenges.  For example, in the early days of AI, the discovery of previously well-buried personal data is becoming a common occurrence.

“Security through obscurity is dead,” Snyder says. “It’s the double-edged sword of semantic search.”

Prioritizing good governance helps ensure agentic AI only has access to the data it’s permitted to use, avoiding accidental oversharing and related hallucinations.

As an AI-driven Frontier Firm, we’re empowering our non-technical users and engineering and development teams alike to begin building custom AI agents to drive innovation at Microsoft. Our teams can now use agents in SharePoint for tasks like creating applications, knowledge depositories, and sites, saving huge amounts of time and effort.

Many of these agents will eventually be available in Azure DevOps and GitHub, so we’re focused on helping SharePoint site owners put the appropriate data ownership and permissions in place to effectively manage and govern the data for use by agentic AI.

After 25 years, SharePoint remains a core part of IT operations across Microsoft. We look forward to growing alongside it as it continues to evolve and improve.

Key takeaways

These insights can help you mature and transform how you use SharePoint at your company:

• Self-service and good governance go together. Without solid guardrails for your SharePoint instance, your organization could contend with information sprawl and internal friction between departments.
• Cloud migration is a golden opportunity. Before you migrate from on-premises IT to the cloud, take the time to clean your data to avoid carrying technical debt and outdated information into the future.
• Out-of-the-box capabilities are your friend. Customization is useful, but too much of it can be unwieldy and expensive to maintain.
• Make data hygiene a priority. Poorly governed data can undermine users’ trust in AI, expose sensitive information, and delay widespread adoption.

Try it out

Explore how Microsoft SharePoint can help your team collaborate more effectively and be ready for the agentic AI future.

Related links

• Read how we keep our content fresh, findable, and governed with AI-powered SharePoint at Microsoft.
• Learn about how we’re handling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance issues internally in this guide.
• Discover ways to use SharePoint agents to surface knowledge and improve how employees find answers.
• Explore how we’re supercharging SharePoint sites with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The post 25 Years of SharePoint at Microsoft: Our lessons learned as Customer Zero appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we’ve put that potential into action by building the Employee Self-Service Agent, a centralized “front door” for employee support inquiries on all things Microsoft. Whether the question is related to an IT, human resources (HR), or campus services-related challenge, this agentic solution delivers geographically relevant, role-specific content on demand.

Our agent was rolled out in stages to our global workforce, as we continually added topic categories, features, and geographic availability. It eventually reached our entire workforce—more than 300,000 employees and vendors in 103 countries and regions—before being publicly released last November.

Our team in Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—played a pivotal role in our global rollout, working closely with the product team and providing valuable feedback throughout development. It’s all part of our Customer Zero philosophy here at the company.

The agent proved its value early, piloting in large, primarily English-speaking regions—including Canada, India, the UK, and the US—and reaching more than half of our global workforce. But we wanted to raise the bar, so we turned to the rest of Europe.

The next chapter in the rollout was the Europe North region, which brought in 21 countries that are home to a wide variety of languages, cultures, country-specific HR policies, and nuanced IT support requirements.

“For the Employee Self‑Service Agent to work in Europe North, we had to listen locally to understand each country’s realities and respect those differences, rather than forcing a single global approach.”

Allan Hvass, director, Employee Experience in Europe North, Microsoft Digital

However, early deployments in smaller markets in the region revealed that when local content for a specific geography was missing, the agent sometimes defaulted to policies related to the US or other unrelated countries. Sensitive HR scenarios and strict country-level rules increased the complexity and resulting challenges.

Our team in Microsoft Digital met the challenge by working through front‑end field adoption and back‑end product updates to successfully land the Employee Self-Service Agent in Europe North’s small and midsize countries. This included adapting the product to distinct local realities in each country.

“For the Employee Self‑Service Agent to work in Europe North, we had to listen locally to understand each country’s realities and respect those differences, rather than forcing a single global approach,” says Allan Hvass, director for Employee Experience in the Europe North region of Microsoft Digital.

Mobilizing field representatives

To help with the tricky aspects of driving local adoption of  the Employee Self-Service Agent, our team in Microsoft Digital formed an adoption advisory team. The team included leadership representatives from all major countries and business divisions.

The group established on‑the‑ground field representatives to create better communications channels with the Europe North countries. This helped us learn what was and wasn’t working locally while we extended support for neighboring countries and kept excitement around the agent alive.

“I encouraged my colleagues to use the agent, and then to tell customers about their experience,” Rusen says. “A story grounded in real use is much more powerful and authentic than any slide deck.”

Daniel Rusen, sales enablement and operations leader, Europe North

Because the team had already been communicating about the agent internally, including hosting all-hands meetings to spark early usage, we were able to collect thousands of instances of employee feedback. Key themes surfaced, including policy accuracy by country, quality of language, and IT support variance by market.

Daniel Rusen, a sales enablement and operations leader for Europe North, served as one of the field representatives. He helped the advisory team close the loop between the field and the core project by highlighting the language and local relevancy issues that were reported. He also became an evangelist for the agent, encouraging other sales executives to use the tool and experience it first-hand.

“I encouraged my colleagues to use the agent, and then to tell customers about their experience,” Rusen says. “A story grounded in real use is much more powerful and authentic than any slide deck.”

Driving adoption with contextual experiences

To support the rollout of the Employee Self-Service Agent across Europe North, we designed an adoption approach aligned with regional priorities and local ways of working.

We focused on making the value of the agent immediately tangible. Through Microsoft Viva Engage communications, we connected the agent directly to Europe North business goals and highlighted the most relevant, high-impact scenarios—helping employees quickly recognize when the agent was the right “front door” for their support needs.

“Adoption is not about pushing a tool, it’s about helping people recognize, in their own context, when it truly makes their day easier. By focusing on relevant scenarios, simple communication, and hands-on experiences, we made the Employee Self-Service Agent useful from the start.”

Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager, Employee Experience in Europe North, Microsoft Digital

To avoid overwhelming users, we prioritized simple, focused communication formats. For example, an Advent calendar campaign combined the agent with Copilot capabilities, enabling employees to discover one practical, actionable use case at a time.

In parallel, we hosted targeted readiness sessions to demonstrate key end-to-end scenarios and share practical tips and best practices. This ensured employees not only understood the value of the agent, but also felt confident using it from day one—creating a strong and positive first experience.

“Adoption is not about pushing a tool, it’s about helping people recognize, in their own context, when it truly makes their day easier,” says Edith Dubuisson, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “By focusing on relevant scenarios, simple communication, and hands-on experiences, we made the Employee Self-Service Agent useful from the start.”

Fine-tuning the agent

Built in Copilot Studio, the Employee Self-Service Agent works on global, regional, and area levels to make sure that users receive the content that corresponds to their geographical location and preferred language.

The Microsoft Global Support Services group manages the agent capability and improvements, driven by a strong partnership with internal engineering teams. The team triaged feedback and partnered with the product group to tag accurate policies and knowledge by country, and to tune agent behavior and guardrails for localized content. They prioritized quick fixes and high-impact content gaps.

Updating the Employee Self-Service Agent to fix content mismatches in Europe North wasn’t about tweaking the AI in isolation. Instead, we needed to overhaul the content that the agent relies on.

“Instead of treating mismatches as failures alone, we used them as signals to improve the underlying content—revising articles, correcting categorization, and closing gaps in coverage. Over time, this combination of tightly scoped data sources, country-level tagging, and ongoing content curation turned the agent into a far more reliable assistant.”

David Finney, director, IT Service Management, Microsoft Digital

The team “grounded” the agent in a set of trusted, IT-approved sources: About 250,000 vetted knowledge base articles and 15-20 different internal SharePoint sites containing policies, guidelines, how-to articles, and related information.

Then they tackled regional nuances, one of the biggest drivers of content mismatches (when a user gets a reply based on content that doesn’t match their country or region). The team tagged content by geography (such as UK-only or Romania-only), so the agent would be fed the correct information for that geographic area.

The process of fixing mismatches also yielded insights.

David Finney, a director of IT Service Management in Microsoft Digital, frames the process as a clear lesson: AI is only as good as the content behind it, so the real work is often on the back end.

“Instead of treating mismatches as failures alone, we used them as signals to improve the underlying content—revising articles, correcting categorization, and closing gaps in coverage,” Finney says. “Over time, this combination of tightly scoped data sources, country‑level tagging, and ongoing content curation turned the agent into a far more reliable assistant.”

Impact and results

The Global Support team added a continuous feedback loop to keep the agent’s content aligned with reality. Users can flag low-quality and inaccurate answers directly through the agent interface. That data flows to a dedicated knowledge management team, creating an efficient pipeline for feedback to inform back‑end fixes and product improvements.

“We’re measuring success by a reduction in tickets, but that’s based on the user having a better experience using the Employee Self-Service Agent versus calling our global help desk and talking to a person. We can only be truly successful if we are creating a better experience for our users.”

Anders Jepsen, director, Field IT Management, Microsoft Digital

Today, the Employee Self-Service Agent’s metrics are moving in the right direction.

The team is optimistic as the Global Support Services data shows agent activity steadily increasing after it officially went live last October, as shown in the following image. At the same time, usage of Legacy Bot (an existing digital support chatbot) decreased, along with support interactions via phone, email, and web.

This data suggests the agent is meeting its ultimate goal: To provide users with an improved support experience, including better first‑touch answers that build employee confidence and yield faster issue resolution. This reduces escalation to human-run support channels and decreases the volume of tickets our employees have to create.

“We’re measuring success by a reduction in tickets, but that’s based on the user having a better experience using the Employee Self-Service Agent versus calling our global help desk and talking to a person,” says Anders Jepsen, a director of Field IT Management in Microsoft Digital. “We can only be truly successful if we are creating a better experience for our users.”

What’s next for self-service support

Our experience deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent in Europe North has allowed us to create a playbook for other small and midsize countries in similar situations, including dealing with multiple languages and specific regional policies.

“Our long-term ambition is to reduce our human-led support tickets by 40 percent. In some areas, like Europe North, we are already taking a significant step toward that.”

Trent Berghofer, general manager, Microsoft Digital Modern Support

The agent now serves as both a self-service tool and the first contact point for employee questions. It doesn’t completely remove humans from support, because if that first point of contact doesn’t resolve the IT issue, a team of humans is available to help.

In the end, the fewer support tickets that are opened, the more time employees can have back for higher-value tasks.

“Our long-term ambition is to reduce our human-led support tickets by 40 percent,” says Trent Berghofer, a general manager in Microsoft Digital Modern Support. “In some areas, like Europe North, we are already taking a significant step toward that.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is a great example of using the power of AI to increase employee productivity and efficiency, as they access highly curated support through the tool on demand. It fits in with our company’s overall strategic efforts to evolve into an AI-driven Frontier Firm.

“The agent brings IT, HR, and facilities together in one place,” Dubuisson says. “It’s not just a Q&A bot. It gives you information, guides you, and even holds your hand through troubleshooting. The agent tells you what to do and can even do it for you. It standardizes, simplifies, and still lets you chat with someone or get a call back when you need it.”

Key takeaways

Here are steps organizations can take today to implement an AI-powered employee support hub:

• Evaluate your employee support systems. Assess whether employees have a single, trusted “front door” for support issues, or if your organization’s support is still fragmented across different tools.
• Audit local policy coverage in your AI solutions. Identify where tools may be defaulting to global or geographically incorrect content–especially in regions with multiple countries or languages–to validate accuracy and boost trust.
• Pilot localized AI support efforts in a diversified region. Engage regional HR, IT, and field adoption teams early on to make sure that AI experiences reflect real, country-specific employee needs.

Try it out

Learn all about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Related links

• Check out our in-depth guide to deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• See how we’re accelerating support services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read about how the agent improves campus and facilities-related support at Microsoft.
• Explore Microsoft Learn content about the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Watch a Microsoft Ignite Session about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

The post Transforming IT support across Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent 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.

As a group program manager in Microsoft Digital, she oversees strategic areas of our license management, key third-party software, and suppliers for our AI models. She is also helping lead our organization into the AI era, all while quietly building a reputation as a sought-after mentor in the IT space. Her approach is rigorous, direct, and deeply human.

Hovhannisyan came to the United States from Armenia as a graduate student in 1997 with no family and no financial safety net. She credits the experience with instilling her with the tenacity, grit, and self-advocacy that define her career.

Building a career from the ground up

Hovhannisyan’s path to Microsoft began at Texas Tech University, where she earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering. She graduated in 1999 just as the software industry began to boom, and she was hired directly into a support engineer role at Microsoft.

“You have to self-advocate, perform at the highest level, and line up mentors to help drive your career forward. That is the recipe.”

Anahit Hovhannisyan, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

For her first seven years at Microsoft, Hovhannisyan remained in that same role by necessity. As a foreign national awaiting her green card, switching jobs would have reset the immigration process. She used that time to broaden her technical expertise across multiple disciplines within the developer support space.

“You have to self-advocate, perform at the highest level, and line up mentors to drive your career forward,” Hovhannisyan says. “That is the recipe.”

After she received her green card, Hovhannisyan moved through a series of field-based roles in the Microsoft Dallas office. In 2013, she relocated her family to the Seattle area for an IT-specific role at Microsoft headquarters.

IT was new territory for her, but her appetite for calculated risk is something she now sees as central to her identity as a leader.

From one partnership to an enterprise function

Within Microsoft Digital, Hovhannisyan is best known as the general contractor and product management lead for the company’s long-term strategic relationship with ServiceNow. Over the past few years, her team delivered solutions on the Service Now platform that helped multiple organizations within Microsoft with Service Desk, Help Desk, and operational needs.

“My previous mentor always said, ‘What got you here won’t get you there.’ Things change at a rapid pace. Learn, adapt, and pivot—those are the three things that have moved my career forward, and they matter more than ever in the AI era.”

Anahit Hovhannisyan, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

More recently, Hovhannisyan’s responsibilities expanded to include managing a portfolio of 18 third-party software suppliers, in addition to the Service Now product ownership

Today, her team is both building and deploying AI agents; contributing to IntelliLicense, an AI-powered software licensing platform; and rolling out ServiceNow’s NowAssist to drive AI-powered case summarization across the business. Microsoft Digital was an early adopter of these capabilities, and Hovhannisyan’s organization now shares what it learned with external customers seeking to understand how enterprise IT can evolve.

“My previous mentor always said, ‘What got you here won’t get you there,'” Hovhannisyan says. “Things change at a rapid pace. Learn, adapt, and pivot—those are the three things that have moved my career forward, and they matter more than ever in the AI era.”

A mentor who makes the path visible

The importance of building the right network of support is a theme that runs through Hovhannisyan’s career, and she’s precise about who that network should include. She distinguishes between a mentor, a coach, and a sponsor, insisting all three are essential.

“A mentor gives direction and shares experience. A coach asks open-ended questions and helps you find your own answers. A sponsor advocates for you behind closed doors,” Hovhannisyan says. “All three are absolute must-haves.”

“Anahit helped me understand how to build a strategy, gain visibility beyond my core group, and develop relationships with people who will be in rooms I’m not in.”

Katina Reece, principal technical program manager, Infrastructure, Network and Tenant group at Microsoft

Katina Reece, a principal technical program manager in the Infrastructure, Network and Tenant group at Microsoft, has been working with Hovhannisyan as a mentee for nearly eight years. When they met, Reece had been at Microsoft for three years and was watching colleagues advance around her. Hovhannisyan helped her reframe her obstacles, showing her that visibility, relationship-building, and strategic positioning were just as important as performing well at her job.

“Anahit helped me understand how to build a strategy, gain visibility beyond my core group, and develop relationships with people who will be in rooms I’m not in,” Reece says.

“Anahit is very thoughtful about understanding what gives people energy and finding the right places to leverage those strengths. The strongest leaders recognize that different people bring different talents, and Anahit does that well.”

Dawn Lee, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

For Dawn Lee, a principal product manager who has worked directly with Hovhannisyan for more than two years, the impact has been just as concrete.

“Anahit is very thoughtful about understanding what gives people energy and finding the right places to leverage those strengths,” Lee says. “The strongest leaders recognize that different people bring different talents, and Anahit does that well.”

Why IT is the place to be

Hovhannisyan pushes back on the perception that IT is a less exciting path than working on products.

“IT is an amazing place to learn fast,” Hovhannisyan says. “You have a broader purview across multiple product groups, your knowledge grows dramatically, and you have more opportunity to observe and adapt your career than you would in a narrower role.”

“If I, as a foreign student with nothing, could make that kind of progress, I feel like everybody can do it. The keys are tenacity, grit, and self-advocacy. If you don’t have a mentor, get one. If you don’t have a sponsor, find one. These are not optional.”

Anahit Hovhannisyan, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

Looking ahead, Hovhannisyan aspires to eventually lead both program management and software engineering functions within Microsoft Digital.

She continues to mentor a wide network of over 20 employees across the company, understanding that the path she navigated from immigrant student to senior leader is one worth sharing.

“If I, as a foreign student with nothing, could make that kind of progress, I feel like everybody can do it,” Hovhannisyan says. “The keys are tenacity, grit, and self-advocacy. If you don’t have a mentor, get one. If you don’t have a sponsor, find one. These are not optional.”

Meanwhile, she’ll keep showing up the way she always has: Advocating for her team, coaching the next generation, and doing the consequential work that makes the whole enterprise run.

Key takeaways

Here’s what you can learn from Anahit Hovhannisyan’s career:

• Build your support network intentionally. A mentor shares experience and direction; a coach asks the questions that help you find your own path, and a sponsor advocates you when you’re not in the room. Seek out all three.
• Self-advocacy is a career skill. Performing well is the baseline. Actively communicating your aspirations to leadership, courting feedback, and ensuring the right people know your goals is what moves the dial.
• Lead change by helping people understand “What’s in it for me?” When driving organizational change, paint a clear vision, answer what team members gain from it, then back your words with visible action so trust builds over time.
• Good mentors see what mentees can’t yet see in themselves. Spotting someone’s potential before they recognize it—and giving them a specific opportunity to prove it—is one of the most high-impact things a mentor or leader can do.

Try it out

Learn more about working in IT at Microsoft by reading our Inside Track blog.

Related links

• Who else works in Microsoft Digital? Read about Olutunde Makinde, a senior service engineer.
• Considering a career at Microsoft? See current openings in the Microsoft Careers portal.
• Read about a day in the life of a Microsoft employee using Copilot.
• Discover how Microsoft employees use the Total Rewards Portal to understand their value.
• Learn how Microsoft HR is using Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower our employees.
• Find out how the Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft empowers employees.
• Connect with regional employees more effectively at Microsoft with Viva Amplify.

The post Building from the inside: Anahit Hovhannisyan’s impact on IT at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Or, as we sometimes like to call them: Our fantastic four!

• Analyzers
• Collaborators
• Innovators
• Planners

Everyone has a work style. Find the one that matches yours, and we’ll show you the Microsoft 365 apps and Copilot features that best complement it—helping you get more done every day. 

The challenge of modern work: Focus

Let’s be real: Work today is a lot.

We’re switching between apps, juggling priorities, sitting through “quick syncs” that aren’t, and trying to protect a shred of focus time before the next <bloop> from Teams throws you off again.

Focus feels like a fantasy.

The numbers don’t lie, and they do explain a lot. Data from the most recent Microsoft Work Trend Index report shows that:

• Most of us get interrupted an average of 275 times a day.
• Nearly 2 out of 3 people say we don’t have the time or energy for meaningful work.
• We get an average of 58 off-hours messages a week.
• 60% of meetings are totally ad-hoc. 

And here’s the kicker: The same study showed a whopping 68% of us say we’d gladly hand off as much work as possible to AI. And that’s where Microsoft 365 Copilot comes in!

Finding and embracing your work style

Here’s the good news: You’ve got a distinct work style: instincts, strengths, and quirks that guide how you get things done.

What if you’re not sure what work style best describes you exactly? Well, that’s where Copilot comes in handy! Here’s a sample prompt that you can copy into Copilot and find out where you land on the work style continuum:

“What’s my work style? Let’s find out. Analyze my full work patterns across all channels—emails, Teams chats, documents, and meetings—and match me to one of our fantastic four work styles that follow. Choose the dominant work style that shows up most clearly in my patterns, tone, and behavior. The four work styles are:

• Analyzer: Data-driven, focused on insights and logic, makes decisions based on facts.

• Planner: Structured, detail-oriented, thrives on process and minimizing chaos.

• Collaborator: Empathetic, people-focused, team-oriented, facilitates communication.

• Innovator: Visionary, idea-oriented, brings bold energy to innovation and content creation.”

When you know your work style, you can use Copilot in the way that makes the most sense for you. That’s true no matter whether your current task involves planning ahead, jumping into team brainstorming, making sense of the data, or coming up with bold ideas.

(Note: It may be helpful to think of these categories as describing your primary work style. We all have many talents and different characteristics, and you might find yourself occasionally adopting aspects of other work styles, depending on the context and the type of work you are doing.)

How Copilot can help

Check out this list of the four major types of work styles, along with the ways in which you can use Copilot to help excel in your role and become a work superhero.

1. The Analyzer

Detail lover. Data decoder. Insight seeker.
Motto: “In data we trust.”

What you and Copilot can do:

Microsoft 365 app highlights

• Excel: Ask Copilot to analyze trends, flag outliers, or write formulas. Prompt: “Analyze this spreadsheet and highlight trends.”
• Word: Summarize research docs, compare documents, or outline decisions. Prompt: “Summarize this 10-page document into 5 key takeaways.”
• PowerPoint: Turn analysis into visual storytelling. Prompt: “Turn this data into a visual-heavy presentation for leadership.”
• Outlook: Let Copilot summarize long threads or extract action items. Prompt: “Pull all emails from (client/project) and summarize findings.”
• Teams: Enable Facilitator in meetings to get notes, action items, and a chat summary without asking. Skip to the key insights in a recap. Prompt: “Summarize key takeaways from the data discussion in this thread.”
• Viva Engage: Ask Copilot to tell you what’s trending across the company. 

Copilot features you’ll love

• General search: Get additional context when searching for people, files, and resources.
• Search your Outlook folders: Ask Copilot to check specific email folders to surface the data hiding there.
• Voice chat: Ask follow-ups out loud, because faster answers = faster decisions; just select the microphone in the composer. Remember that you can also have Copilot read the answer aloud by selecting the speaker icon at the end of the response.
• Notebooks: Select the Notebook tab and add your resources there to create your own searchable insight vault. 
• Memory: Context = clarity. Copilot can track what matters, so your questions hit harder, faster, and with less repetition. Select the memory feature in your Copilot settings. 

2. The Collaborator

Connector. Team player. Chaos coordinator.
Motto: “Teamwork makes the dream work.”

What you and Copilot can do:

Microsoft 365 app highlights

• Teams: Here are some features you can take advantage of:
  • Enable Facilitator in meetings to have it compile all the details automatically. Take it further by selecting the chat in Teams and tapping the Copilot icon at top right. Then prompt Copilot: “Summarize this conversation and suggest a next step.” 
  • No time to listen to a meeting recording? Check out the Audio Recap feature to get an engaging audio summary in the style of your choice.
• Outlook: Prioritize the topics and people you want. Select the Copilot icon from the ribbon and choose Prioritize in the dropdown list.
• PowerPoint: Copilot helps turn everyone’s updates into one polished deck. Prompt: “Turn these brainstorm notes into a presentation for team review.”
• Word: Reference a meeting transcript from Teams and hand it off to Copilot to start the draft. Prompt: “Summarize these meeting notes into a proposal draft.”
• Excel: Do you use shared workbooks? Copilot can help interpret them and suggest next steps. Prompt: “Highlight changes from the latest version and comment on flagged data.”
• Whiteboard: After your team brainstorming session, use Copilot to summarize the info. Export this to Loop so the team is all on the same page—literally.
• Viva Engage: Ask Copilot to give you the latest updates from communities that you follow. 

Copilot features you’ll love

• Referencing people in Copilot Chat: Get the skinny on teammates without asking them IRL. Just type “/[name]” for all the latest updates.
• Schedule with Copilot in Outlook: Use the Schedule with Copilot button in the ribbon to find a meeting time and schedule your meeting with ease. Or, you can schedule a meeting right in Copilot Chat!
• Voice chat: Talk it out instead of typing it out. Just select the microphone or the vertical lines in the composer.
• Search: Search for people or track down that shared doc or Teams thread from last week’s brainstorm.
• Notebooks: Document work and decisions and add a Loop to keep the collaboration alive. Select the Notebook tab in Copilot Chat to get started. 
• Pages: Create shareable pages for generating, organizing, and refining content in real time. Select the Edit in Pages icon at the bottom of your prompt responses. 
• Memory and personalization: Names, roles, team quirks—it’s all here. Copilot can remember who prefers slides over spreadsheets. Find the Memory feature in your Copilot settings. 

3. The Innovator

Idea generator. Vision-caster. Creative problem-solver.
Motto: “The blank page doesn’t scare me.”

What you and Copilot can do:

Microsoft 365 app highlights

• PowerPoint: Start from scratch or import a Word doc and let Copilot build out slides with visual flair. In PowerPoint, select New, then choose Create with Copilot to get going.
• Word: Draft an idea, rewrite it in a new tone, or punch up your intro. Prompt: “Write a first draft of a creative brief for this new idea.”
• Teams: Share a concept from the meeting notes and ask Copilot to summarize or expand on it. Prompt: “Summarize this brainstorm session and turn into a list of next-step ideas.”
• Excel: Create visual dashboards or ask Copilot to simplify data for storytelling. Prompt: “What’s the story behind this data?”
• Outlook: Reframe your emails in a different tone. Go from “per my last email” to “let’s sync!” When composing a message, select the Copilot icon on the left. Choose from different tones, get coaching on your writing style, and more.
• SharePoint: Build beautiful pages with layout suggestions and smart content generation. In SharePoint, create a new page and choose Create with Copilot to start designing. 
• Viva Engage: Use Copilot in the Viva Engage composer to turn your ideas into a polished Engage post. (Note: Access may depend on which Copilot license you have.)

Copilot features you’ll love

• Create: Turn blank screens into bold starts. With Copilot, custom images, videos, and documents are just a few clicks away.
• Voice chat: Your best ideas don’t wait for a keyboard. Just select the microphone or vertical lines in the composer to get started dictating your thoughts.
• Search: Instantly find the details about that idea you had last week
• Scheduled prompts: Nudge your muse with ideas exactly when you need them. When you create a prompt, just hover over it and choose the clock icon to schedule a time for it to pop up for you in the future.
• Referencing people in chat: Loop others into your creative drafts and builds.
• Memory: That random spark of genius from three meetings ago? Copilot can recall it for you, because it remembers everything. Find the memory feature in your Copilot settings. 

4. The Planner

Structure-first. Deadline-driven. The master of the plan behind the plan.
Motto: “I’ve never met a checklist I didn’t love.”

What you and Copilot can do:

Microsoft 365 app highlights

• Outlook: Summarize long threads, pull out key actions, and draft follow-up plans. Just select the Summarize button at the top of an email. Use Prepare with Copilot in the new Outlook to set yourself up for success.
• Planner: Turn a goal into a structured task list with due dates and owners.
• Word: Draft templates for recurring processes, reports, or meeting agendas.
• Excel: Analyze project timelines or compare team capacity over time.
• Teams: Keep track of action items in chats and meetings, and ask Copilot turns them into tasks. Enable Facilitator in Teams to draft agendas for you. 
• SharePoint: Build team hubs with agents that surface what matters most. In SharePoint, create a new page and select Create with Copilot to start designing. 

Copilot features you’ll love

• Pages: We love it when a plan comes together. Create shareable pages for your projects. Select the Edit in Pages icon at the bottom of your prompt responses. 
• Voice chat: Rattle off your to-do list and watch Copilot keep up.
• Scheduled prompts: Trigger reminders and next steps right when you need them. When you send a prompt, hover over it to select the clock icon to schedule.
• Search: Find files, plans, or past decisions without opening 10 tabs. 
• Referencing people in chat: Assign tasks or gather input from others by typing the forward slash (/) and entering the name. 
• Notebooks: Store recurring process docs, SOPs, or onboarding checklists. Select the Notebook tab in Copilot Chat and go. 
• Create: Create forms, documents, and more to put your plans into action.
• Memory: Copilot can keep track of your project goals, recurring tasks, and who owns what.

Your work style, transformed

Whether you’re a Planner trying to make a schedule out of spaghetti, a Collaborator trying to decode feedback in a 17-reply email thread, an Analyzer wading through data, or an Innovator with five big ideas and zero time to pitch them, you and Copilot have got this. It helps you turn the mess into momentum.

And be sure to share what you’ve learned with your coworkers. The more your team can harness the power of Copilot in their work, the more you can all achieve together.

Key takeaways

Here are some important insights as you consider how understanding your work style can help you and your team get the most out of tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot:

• Everyone has a work style—and knowing yours is a force multiplier. Whether you’re an Analyzer, Collaborator, Innovator, or Planner, understanding how you naturally work helps you get more value from Copilot.
• Copilot adapts to you, not the other way around. Whether you’re digging into data, aligning a team, generating ideas, or building structured plans, Copilot meets you where you are and amplifies your strengths.
• Less busywork, more impact. Copilot helps offload repetitive tasks like summarizing emails, drafting documents, recapping meetings, and organizing notes—freeing time for higher‑value work.
• Better insights, faster decisions. From turning spreadsheets into stories to surfacing action items and trends, Copilot converts information overload into clear next steps.
• Workflows improve across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Deep integration with apps like Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Loop, and Viva means Copilot supports end-to-end work—not just isolated tasks.
• Teams win when individuals work smarter. When everyone uses Copilot in a way that fits their work style, collaboration improves, alignment gets easier, and momentum builds.

Try it out

Learn more about how you can embrace your work style and supercharge your productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Related links

• Learn how to pick the right Copilot for the job.
• Read about a day in the life of a Microsoft employee using Copilot.
• Jump into action with the Copilot prompt gallery (sign-in required).
• Explore how Copilot and agents are combining to fuel the Frontier Firm.
• Discover how we’re powering AI value at Microsoft with Copilot extensibility.

The post Our fantastic four: Embracing your work style with Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Inside Track Blog.