As the pace of change accelerates, organizations are moving quickly from AI experimentation to enterprise-scale transformation. Leaders are prioritizing measurable outcomes, faster time to value and repeatability across the business. But many are encountering the same reality: the challenge is no longer deciding whether to invest in AI — it’s scaling adoption and delivering consistent, enterprise-wide impact. Over the past year, one thing has become clear. Organizations aren’t asking if AI matters. They’re asking how to make it real — how to embed it into the way work gets done and ensure it drives meaningful results. That’s where many are getting stuck. Because the barrier is no longer experimentation. It’s execution. Intelligence and trust as the foundation At Microsoft, we believe successful AI Transformation depends on two foundational elements: intelligence and trust. Organizations need to harness their own work intelligence — the data, workflows and expertise that make their business unique — and apply it through AI in ways that are flexible, secure and governed. That requires a platform that supports model diversity and continuous innovation, without compromising enterprise-grade security, compliance and reliability. Just as importantly, AI must be embedded into the flow of work — how people collaborate, make decisions and operate day to day. For that to scale, systems must be transparent, secure and accountable. This is where real enterprise value is created — and where many organizations need a clearer path forward. Achieving impact at scale requires more than deploying new tools. It requires a trusted foundation — integrating data, security, privacy and governance — and a new model for delivering AI into the business. That’s why Microsoft and EY are deepening our alliance — to help organizations move faster from AI ambition to measurable business outcomes. From pilots to production There is no shortage of AI pilots in today’s market. But pilots don’t transform businesses. What organizations need now is the ability to scale AI across the enterprise, integrate it into core workflows and deliver sustained, repeatable impact. EY brings that experience. As one of the first global organizations to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale, EY began with an initial rollout to 150,000 of its people, quickly demonstrating what’s possible when AI is embedded into everyday work. The results were significant and measurable: A 15% productivity gain, reinvested into client delivery and continuous learning 94% monthly adoption and 85% weekly usage 63% of enabled employees using Copilot three or more days per week 81% of employees reporting time savings, with 84% redirecting that time to higher-value work and 73% improving quality of output The impact goes beyond individual productivity into agentic AI in core business operations: Finance operations modernized with intelligent agents, driving 95% faster lead times and more than 37% reduction in operational costs A multi-agent AI framework was deployed across 130,000 Assurance professionals and 160,000 audit engagements Tax workflows were transformed through document automation, reducing manual effort by up to 90% With these results, EY is now expanding Copilot through Microsoft 365 E7 to more than 400,000 of its people worldwide, moving from early success to true enterprise scale. This is what enterprise-scale transformation looks like — not isolated wins, but sustained impact across the organization. It’s also why EY serves as Customer Zero — applying Microsoft AI technologies internally to prove what works before bringing those solutions to clients. Investing in what actually drives outcomes Building on this foundation, Microsoft and EY are jointly investing more than $1 billion in a new initiative designed to help organizations move from isolated AI use cases to enterprise-scale transformation. This effort brings together Microsoft’s AI platforms, including Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Foundry, Fabric and security — and EY’s deep industry capabilities and transformation leadership. But what differentiates this initiative isn’t just what we bring. It’s how we deliver it. At its core is a shared focus on helping organizations become Frontier Firms — where AI is embedded across the enterprise, not layered on top. In a Frontier Firm, data, workflows and decision-making are connected end to end. AI becomes part of how work happens, and human expertise is amplified by intelligent systems. Reaching this level requires more than investment. It requires execution. A new model for execution at scale This is where our approach is fundamentally different. Microsoft and EY are cooperating as an integrated transformation engine — co-developing, co-engineering and co-delivering solutions aligned to real business priorities. A key part of this model is Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), who work side by side with EY transformation teams directly within customer environments. Together, these teams: Co-create solutions grounded in business needs Accelerate deployment across complex systems Stay engaged from initial use case through full-scale adoption This integrated model closes the gap between strategy and execution. It reduces friction across the technology stack and creates a direct path from pilot to production — at enterprise scale. It also ensures that intelligence and trust advance together, embedding AI across data, applications and infrastructure in ways that can be governed, secured and continuously optimized. Importantly, it establishes a repeatable blueprint — one that organizations can use to scale AI adoption across functions, industries and geographies. Why this matters now Organizations are under pressure to move faster — to go beyond experimentation and deliver AI across the enterprise. What they need is not just technology, but a clear path to execution — grounded in both intelligence and trust. AI is not simply about doing work faster. It’s about enabling people and organizations to do more — focusing on insight, creativity and higher-value decision-making. Our work with EY demonstrates what’s possible when AI is deployed with purpose at scale. Together, we are bringing those learnings to customers around the world — helping them accelerate transformation, unlock efficiencies and create new opportunities for growth. Microsoft and EY are committed to helping organizations turn AI ambition into enterprise impact. Learn more in the official announcement. The post From AI pilots to enterprise impact: Why execution is the new differentiator appeared

Spend time with any software engineering team right now and you’ll see something worth paying attention to. Over the last few years, the way software gets built has moved through four distinct patterns of human-agent collaboration — and the same patterns are beginning to show up across other functions of the firm. Author: You’re producing the work, calling on AI to help as needed — a line of code, a sentence, a chart. Editor: You set the intent and AI creates the first draft for you to edit and approve. Director: You create a spec and hand off entire tasks for AI to execute in the background. Orchestrator: You design a system where multiple agents run in parallel across a workflow, flagging exceptions and escalations to you. Every business leader knows the world is changing, but far fewer have a clear picture of what to do about it. These four patterns are the place to start. The real work ahead for leaders is redesigning their firm’s operating model around the collaboration patterns. As agent use increases, human involvement doesn’t disappear — it changes shape. What declines is the amount of tactical, step-by-step execution work humans do themselves. And what rises is the need for humans to set direction, define standards and evaluate outcomes. Ultimately, the goal is not to move every task and business process to the fourth pattern. Instead, it’s up to leaders to help their organizations develop clarity around matching workstreams to the right collaboration pattern. That’s the shape of the Frontier Firm: defined by how deliberately leaders design work across functions, matching the level of human involvement to the outcome. What the data shows Our 2026 Work Trend Index research reinforces this shift across roles and industries. We analyzed trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals and surveyed 20,000 workers using AI across 10 countries. We also spoke with leading experts in AI, work and organizational psychology to help us unpack the insights from the data and understand where all this is going. The conclusion is consistent: the constraint is no longer what people can do, it is how work is structured around them. AI lifts individual potential. A privacy-preserving analysis of more than 100,000 chats in Microsoft 365 Copilot shows that 49% of all conversations support cognitive work — helping workers analyze information, solve problems, evaluate and think creatively. This shift is already visible in output, with 58% of AI users saying they’re producing work they couldn’t have a year ago, rising to 80% among Frontier Professionals, the most advanced AI users in our research. Additionally, when AI users were asked which human skills are most important as AI takes on more work, they said two topped the list: quality control of AI output (50%) and critical thinking — that is, analyzing information objectively and making a reasoned judgment (46%). The Transformation Paradox. We are seeing a pressure point emerge within the organization where the pull to perform collides with the push to transform. 65% of AI users surveyed fear falling behind if they don’t use AI to adapt quickly, yet 45% say it feels safer to focus on current goals than to redesign work with AI. And only 13% of workers say they’re rewarded for reinvention of work with AI even if results aren’t met. The same forces accelerating AI adoption are holding it back. Every organization is a learning system. Our results show that organizational factors like culture, manager support and talent practices account for more than 2X the AI impact of individual factors like mindset and behavior (67% vs. 32%). Specifically, the findings underscore the importance of an AI-ready environment: a culture that treats AI as a strategic advantage and encourages experimentation, managers who model and incentivize AI use and talent practices that build skills and create space to apply them. The real question isn’t whether people have the right skills, it’s whether the organization is built to unlock them. The firms that build a new operating model today won’t just move faster in the short term. They’ll build something more durable, setting themselves up to create value in ways that we can’t yet conceive of: an organization that learns faster than its competitors, compounds its own intelligence and gets harder to catch with every cycle. For deeper analysis, see the 2026 Work Trend Index Report. Enabling the Frontier Firm with Copilot Cowork — now mobile, extensible and enterprise-ready None of an organization’s system scales without infrastructure that brings people and agents into the same flow of work with connected data and the ability to manage and govern it all. Microsoft 365 Copilot is built for exactly that. Today, we’re expanding Copilot Cowork with new capabilities for Frontier customers to help organizations move from isolated AI tasks to coordinated, multistep work. Cowork enables people to define outcomes and delegate work across apps, business systems and data, with execution that stays directed and controlled throughout. This update introduces Copilot Cowork Mobile for iOS and Android, along with a growing plugin ecosystem for Cowork, bringing more of an organization’s tools and data into these experiences. This includes native plugins across Microsoft services like Dynamics 365 and Fabric, and partner integrations available in the coming weeks like LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), Miro, monday.com, S&P Global Energy and more. Organizations can also build custom plugins to turn their own workflows and expertise into reusable, scalable processes. Additionally, a first wave of federated Copilot connectors in Researcher and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is generally available today from partners like HubSpot, LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), Moody’s, Notion and more. Together, these updates extend Copilot Cowork from a task-based assistant into an extensible platform that helps orchestrate work across Microsoft and third-party systems. With management and governance through Microsoft Agent 365, organizations can deploy and scale agents across core business functions like sales, service and operations. For more on these product innovations: Microsoft 365 blog. AI is no longer an experiment. It is an execution challenge. Employees

As our customers progress toward becoming Frontier Firms, they are using AI not only to optimize how work gets done, but to reinvent their business on the promise of growth. Organizations can now unlock creativity, accelerate innovation and democratize intelligence by bringing Copilots and agents directly into the tools people love and use every day. As adoption continues to scale, business value is no longer measured solely by time saved or productivity gained, but in how effectively organizations translate their unique IQ into decisions that drive measurable impact across core business processes. The two most important elements in any AI solution are Intelligence + Trust. At Microsoft, we are focused on providing a platform for both through Microsoft IQ and Agent 365, respectively, so customers can harness the power of AI, have it amplify their unique differentiation and do so in a model diverse, open and heterogeneous manner. Microsoft IQ brings context to your data and provides faster, more accurate, more trusted experiences across modalities of chat, artifact creation and augmentation, and agent development; all while safeguarding your assets and protecting your intellectual property. Agent 365 provides observability, governance and security across all the agents you build — whether on Microsoft’s platform or third-party environments — so you can trust the outcomes you achieve with AI and ensure ROI for the same. With intelligence embedded into daily work, organizations are activating human ambition — engaging customers more effectively, reshaping business processes and accelerating innovation without adding operational complexity — turning gains into competitive advantage. Trust makes this durable, allowing organizations to scale securely with AI. The shift to becoming Frontier can be seen in our recent partnerships, with BMW Group selecting Microsoft for its large-scale deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot across its global workforce and Accenture rolling out Copilot to more than 740,000 employees. Frontier Transformation — built on a foundation of Intelligence + Trust — is how organizations are enabling AI for growth; moving from aspiration to outcome with confidence, driving measurable business gains and maintaining the rigor required to operate AI responsibly. Across industries, our customers and partners are putting AI to work to reveal new sources of innovation and business value. I am pleased to highlight additional stories from this past quarter. With millions of customer queries overwhelming its support channels, Air India was facing rising costs, slower response times and growing frustration for customers and employees. Within six months, internal development teams built an agentic AI solution using Azure OpenAI and in Foundry models. AI.g handles 40,000 customer queries daily and since launching has saved the company millions of dollars. The agent has resolved more than 13 million conversations with a 97% success rate, allowing employees to focus on contributing at a higher level — solving complex cases that require nuanced human judgement and problem-solving skills. Air India is the first airline worldwide to deploy generative AI for customer service at scale. As the second largest school district in Florida, Broward County Public Schools serve approximately 235,000 students across 235 schools and 25,000 employees. Although the district had extensive data, it lacked the real-time insights required to support its students — while simultaneously facing a $90-million budget shortfall. Rather than slowing innovation, the district used financial pressure as a catalyst to modernize systems and rethink how work was done. By deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot, educators and staff reclaimed six to seven hours weekly — time redirected to students for direct interaction, coaching and feedback. The district also equipped students with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Copilot Studio to provide faster access to learning resources and foster more equitable learning — providing support for students with disabilities, English language learners and those needing additional academic assistance. The district’s adoption of Copilot — the largest K-12 deployment globally — is also expected to generate $40 to $50 million in savings over five years. Cemex is one of the world’s largest building materials companies, operating more than 50 cement plants and over 1,000 ready mix plants across four continents. To accelerate execution at scale, Cemex built LUCA Bot — an AI agent built in Microsoft Foundry with Azure OpenAI — giving approximately 100 senior business leaders visibility into company-wide performance across more than 120 KPIs. The self-service tool processes 400 to 500 queries per month with high accuracy, delivering real-time, conversational insights across global sales, plant operations and financial performance. By compressing decision cycles from days to seconds, the company shifted from reactive to real-time decision-making — allowing leaders to recognize demand signals faster, improve operational efficiency and drive business outcomes across its multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Cybersecurity startup ContraForce is democratizing enterprise-grade protection for managed service providers by operationalizing Microsoft’s security — Microsoft Sentinel, Defender XDR, Entra ID and Azure OpenAI in Foundry models — into a turnkey, AI-driven platform. Built for environments where traditional tools were too complex and costly for most providers to operate efficiently, the solution automates more than 90% of incident response, reducing cost per incident and enabling 24/7 protection. Providers can onboard more customers, deliver higher-quality security services and scale operations without adding headcount — transforming security delivery into a growth engine. Analysts can manage significantly more volume with incidents resolving in minutes and teams freed to focus on more strategic advisory work. As global professional services firm KPMG expanded its Digital Gateway platform to support secure, global engagement with clients and professionals, its data environment grew increasingly fragmented and complex — spanning multiple tools and systems that slowed collaboration and increased operational effort. The company established Microsoft Fabric as its strategic data platform; unifying its data engineering, storage, analytics, reporting and global security policies into a single, trusted environment and pacing adoption as it matured in enterprise governance. Client data onboarding times were 87% faster — from sixteen hours to two — and operational IT efforts were reduced by 25%. With a governed, real-time data foundation, KPMG is accelerating insights; enabling faster, more confident decisions and freeing teams to provide consistent, high-quality client value

Amended Agreement Provides Long-Term Clarity The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies. Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly. The greater predictability in the amended agreement strengthens our joint ability to build and operate AI platforms at scale while providing both companies the flexibility to pursue new opportunities. The agreement spells out:    Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider.  Microsoft will continue to have a license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032. Microsoft’s license will now be non-exclusive.   Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI.  Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap.   Microsoft continues to participate directly in OpenAI’s growth as a major shareholder.   While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we’re doing together remains ambitious. From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next-generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we’re excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world. The post The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog. ​Amended Agreement Provides Long-Term Clarity The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies. Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly. The greater predictability in the… The post The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.  Featured, The Official Microsoft Blog, AI The Official Microsoft Blog

Today, I am pleased to announce that Azure Local now scales to support deployments of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment, allowing organizations to run much larger workloads locally across large-footprint datacenters, industrial environments and edge locations while maintaining control within their sovereign boundary. Organizations operating national infrastructure, regulated workloads or mission-critical services are navigating a fundamental shift in how cloud infrastructure must be deployed and managed. As digital sovereignty postures evolve and regulatory requirements tighten across regions, infrastructure strategies are increasingly shaped by the need to maintain jurisdictional control over data, operations and dependencies. At the same time, AI and data-intensive applications are moving closer to where data is generated, requiring infrastructure that can scale to support larger deployment footprints while maintaining operational control, compliance and data residency requirements within sovereign environments. Azure Local is the foundation for Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud, allowing organizations to run cloud-consistent infrastructure on hardware they own and operate within their sovereign boundary. It supports deployments across connected, intermittently connected or fully disconnected environments. With Azure Local disconnected operations, customers retain the ability to apply policy enforcement, role-based access control, auditing and compliance configuration locally, allowing them control over how infrastructure is configured, secured and updated regardless of public cloud connectivity. Scaling Sovereign Private Cloud Sovereign Private Cloud deployments must scale to support not only larger workloads, but also the operational requirements of national infrastructure and regulated industries. Azure Local allows organizations to grow deployments from hundreds up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign boundary, allowing infrastructure to expand alongside demand without requiring architectural redesign. As deployment footprints grow, resiliency becomes essential to maintaining continuous operations for mission critical services. Expanded fault domains and infrastructure pools help prevent hardware failures from resulting in service outages, ensuring critical workloads remain operational across environments with varying levels of cloud connectivity. At these larger scale points, organizations can run data-intensive AI inference and analytics workloads entirely within their own environment. With support for high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure, sensitive models and operational data remain within customer-controlled infrastructure, while access management, auditing and compliance controls are maintained within the sovereign deployment. Built for challenging workloads  Increased deployment scale unlocks new workload placement opportunities, from large sovereign private cloud deployments to distributed AI workloads, allowing organizations to run more data intensive and latency sensitive applications entirely within their sovereign boundary. AT&T, one of the world’s largest telecommunications operators, is deploying Azure Local to run mission-critical infrastructure on hardware they own in their environment. The goal: full operational control while running at the scale the business demands. “Azure Local provides the infrastructure foundation we need to run critical operations at scale, while ensuring control and governance across our environment. The consistency of the Azure operating model, delivered on our own infrastructure, is key as we continue to modernize while delivering reliable services to our customers.” — Sherry McCaughan, Vice President – Mobility Core Services, AT&T Kadaster, the Netherlands’ official land registry and mapping agency, is running Azure Local to keep sovereign control over some of the country’s most sensitive public data. “As a government agency responsible for some of the Netherlands’ most sensitive data, we need infrastructure that gives us full control over where our data lives and how it’s governed. Azure Local has been a consistent foundation for that — and as our workloads grow in scale and complexity, the platform has grown with us.” — Maarten van der Tol, General Manager, Kadaster FiberCop, Italy’s most advanced and extensive digital network operator is deploying Azure Local across its edge locations to bring sovereign cloud and AI services to organizations throughout the country. Fabio Veronese, Chief Information & Technology Officer commented: “FiberCop is better positioned than any other player on the Italian market to drive innovation and deliver cloud as well as AI services at national scale. Azure Local supports our mission to drive Italy’s digital future and brings Microsoft’s cloud capabilities to edge workloads across the country while keeping data sovereignty and compliance where they matter most.” The infrastructure behind Sovereign Private Cloud Azure Local is available today with validated compute and enterprise storage platforms from partners including DataON, Dell Technologies, Everpure, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Lenovo and NetApp, allowing organizations to integrate existing Storage Area Networks (SAN) and preserve prior investments while allowing compute and storage resources to scale independently within their sovereign environment. At the silicon level, Intel®  Xeon® 6 processors provide the compute foundation for the platform. Built for the density and performance demands of modern enterprise workloads, Xeon 6 also brings built-in AI acceleration with Intel® AMX, meaning organizations running inference or generative AI workloads within their sovereign environment do not need to introduce separate, specialized infrastructure to do so. Together, Azure Local, validated compute and enterprise storage platforms, accelerated computing platforms and underlying silicon can provide a datacenter-scale stack that supports sovereign infrastructure deployments while helping ensure data, models and execution remain within customer-controlled environments. Sovereign infrastructure built for your requirements Azure Local was built to meet customers where their requirements are whether that means strict data residency, disconnected operations, regulated workloads or AI running close to where data is generated. As these requirements evolve across regulated industries and governments worldwide, Sovereign Private Cloud deployments can expand from a single node at the edge to large enterprise-scale datacenter environments, running on hardware organizations own and operate, with consistent lifecycle management through Azure. Resources: Learn more about Azure Local Explore Microsoft’s Sovereign Cloud Read the Tech Community blog Visit the Azure Local solution catalog Douglas Phillips leads global engineering efforts for Microsoft’s specialized, sovereign and private clouds. He is responsible for Microsoft’s global strategy, products and operations that bring Microsoft’s industry-leading solutions, including Azure, our adaptive cloud portfolio and Microsoft 365 collaboration suite, to customers with additional sovereignty, security, edge and compliance requirements. The post Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud scales to thousands of nodes with Azure Local appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog. ​Today, I am pleased to announce that Azure Local now scales to support deployments of up

AI has moved quickly from experimentation to production. Customers want measurable business outcomes, along with security, governance and responsible AI built in from day one. Microsoft partners are a meaningful differentiator to deliver these objectives. They turn ideas into deployable solutions by prioritizing the highest value use cases, building the right data and security foundations and establishing adoption and measurement capabilities so customers can run AI reliably in production. Frontier Transformation is where AI becomes a repeatable, governed capability embedded into the flow of work, business processes and customer engagement. Customers are quickly moving from targeted pilots to operating AI at scale with a foundation built upon identity, data protection, compliance, monitoring and change management. As organizations expand from custom agents to agent-led processes, unified governance is essential so leaders can manage risk, track performance and scale with confidence. Two essentials: Intelligence and Trust Frontier Transformation depends on two essential elements: intelligence and trust. Customers want solutions grounded in their unique work intelligence, including their data, business context and operational realities. They also expect trust by design, with AI artifacts observable, managed and secured across the technology stack so they can deploy responsibly and scale with confidence. A success framework for Frontier Transformation Microsoft has developed a powerful framework for success as partners enable AI transformation for customers across all segments, industries and geographies: Enriching employee experiences: enabling businesses to empower employees with world-class tools and capabilities to activate a thriving, productive workforce Reinventing customer engagement: applying AI and agentic solutions to break through with customers, accelerate revenue growth, become more efficient at customer acquisition and deliver more personalized solutions Reshaping business processes: redesigning workflows across the business, enhanced by AI and agentic capability Bending the curve on innovation: AI acceleration is a powerful catalyst for business transformation and for addressing society’s biggest challenges — curing disease, addressing climate change and famine and other meaningful advancements The “what” matters, and so does the “how.” Organizations that scale successfully put AI where people already work, enable innovation close to the business challenge and build observability at every layer so leaders can measure quality, govern risk and manage AI like a production system. More than 90% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft 365 Copilot, reflecting how quickly AI is becoming part of everyday work.(1) IDC predicts 1.3 billion agents in circulation by 2028(2) and 80% of the Fortune 500 are already using Microsoft agents, led by operationally complex industries like manufacturing, financial services and retail.(3) As customers move from piloting AI to agents embedded in their flow of work, governance and security need to scale with them. Microsoft’s approach is straightforward: Copilot drives action in the flow of work, agents orchestrate workflows across systems and Microsoft Agent 365 provides a unified control plane designed to govern and secure agents at scale, with the same tools businesses use for employee administration, such as Microsoft admin center, Defender, Entra and Purview. Partners are creating impact right now in three areas. First, agentic workflows that remove operational friction and orchestrate end-to-end work across operations, finance, supply chain and service. Second, Customer Zero maturity. Partners who adopt Copilot and agents internally build credibility and move faster because they have meaningful, real-world experiences that they translate into their go-to-market plans. Third, security as the foundation. There is no AI at scale without secure identity, protected data and strong governance. Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365: The Frontier Suite In March, Microsoft introduced Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot and announced Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, with general availability of Microsoft 365 E7 and Microsoft Agent 365 on May 1, 2026. Microsoft 365 E7 brings together Microsoft 365 E5 for secure productivity, Entra Suite for identity and access control, Microsoft 365 Copilot for AI in the flow of work and Agent 365 as the control plane to govern and scale agents. It is grounded in shared intelligence from Work IQ, the layer that brings together signals from the Microsoft 365 environment, including content, context and activity, so AI can operate with the right business grounding and policy awareness. Microsoft Agent 365 provides a unified control plane for agents, enabling IT, security and business teams to observe, govern and secure agents across the organization. This applies to any agents an organization uses, whether they are built on Microsoft AI platforms, delivered by ecosystem partners or introduced through other technology stacks. It also applies the same security and compliance capabilities teams already rely on, including Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra and Microsoft Purview. Some customer scenarios require custom agents. Microsoft Agent Factory is designed to accelerate the move from experimentation to execution. The Microsoft Agent Factory Pre-purchase Plan (P3) adds licensing flexibility across Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Fabric and GitHub, with tiered discounts intended to support broader adoption rather than isolated pilots. It also enables inclusion of tailored, role-based skilling at no additional cost to the customer, reducing adoption friction and increasing delivered value. The opportunity for partners is end-to-end, and this is where the partner’s strategy really matters. Shifting from transaction-first to outcome-first, partners who iterate quickly, establish clear guardrails and build an operating rhythm for adoption move customers from interest to impact. Over time, every organization will employ people who can direct and govern agents as part of daily work. Partners can make that capability real through packaged offers, change management and managed operations. Publishing those packaged offers in the Microsoft Marketplace adds a scalable route to market, improving discoverability and enabling a more repeatable buy-and-deploy motion as customers expand agent usage. Partner success: What governed scale looks like in practice “AI is at the forefront of everything we do. Through our ‘learn, use, create’ methodology and our AI Academy, we really support partners with learning paths.” — Nicole Clark, Global Alliance Manager, Arrow Electronics Partners are embracing Frontier Transformation by modernizing foundations, driving adoption, designing security into delivery and building agents that automate repeatable work and orchestrate business processes. Cognizant treated legacy automation as a platform

Today is the day. Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI is officially available! At a time when technology dominates the headlines, the conversation I see most often on LinkedIn is deeply human: what does AI mean for my job and my career? And that makes sense. Careers once felt more predictable. Titles defined what you did. Progress looked like a ladder. That model has been evolving for years, but AI is accelerating the shift. The most important truth about this moment is that the outcome isn’t written yet. The new world of work is being assembled right now, task by task, policy by policy, business by business. It will reflect the choices of the people who show up to build it. That’s why Aneesh Raman and I wrote this book. Open to Work is a practical guide informed by what we see across the global labor market and insight into the tools millions of people use every day. It’s for every person asking what comes next for their job, their career, their company or their community. With help from experts and everyday LinkedIn members, it shows you how to engage with AI before you have to, how to adapt by focusing on what you can control and how to become irreplaceable by leaning into what makes you uniquely you. And those ideas don’t just apply to individuals, they guide how we as Microsoft and LinkedIn are building for this moment. At the intersection of how work gets done and how careers get built, our shared goal is to connect people to opportunity and turn the tools they use every day into a canvas for human and AI collaboration at scale. Done right, that’s how AI expands opportunity and helps people build confidence and momentum in their careers. We’ve always believed technology should serve people. AI should help humans. Not the other way around. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when we all decide to make it true. If you want to go deeper on Open to Work, listen to my conversation with Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith on his Tools and Weapons podcast. Open to Work is available now at linkedin.com/opentowork. Ryan Roslansky is the CEO of LinkedIn and Executive Vice President of Microsoft Office, where he leads engineering for products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Copilot. Through these roles, Ryan is shaping where work goes next to unleash greater economic opportunity for the global workforce. The post Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog. ​Today is the day. Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI is officially available! At a time when technology dominates the headlines, the conversation I see most often on LinkedIn is deeply human: what does AI mean for my job and my career? And that makes sense. Careers once felt… The post Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.  Featured, The Official Microsoft Blog, AI, LinkedIn, Work Trend Index The Official Microsoft Blog

Microsoft combines accelerated computing with cloud scale engineering to bring advanced AI capabilities to our customers. For years, we’ve worked with NVIDIA to integrate hardware, software and infrastructure to power many of today’s most important AI breakthroughs. What’s new at NVIDIA GTC Expanded Microsoft Foundry capabilities to build, deploy and operate production-ready AI agents on NVIDIA accelerators and open NVIDIA Nemotron models New Azure AI infrastructure optimized for inference-heavy, reasoning-based workloads, including the first hyperscale cloud to power on next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems Deeper integration across Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and open frameworks to support Physical AI systems from simulation to real‑world operations From Frontier models to production-ready agents At the foundation of this system is Microsoft Foundry: serving as the operating system for building, deploying and operating AI at enterprise scale. Foundry builds on Azure to bring together models, tools, data and observability into a single system designed for production agents. Today we’re expanding those capabilities across Foundry Agent Service and NVIDIA Nemotron models. The next-generation Foundry Agent Service and Observability in Foundry Control Plane are now generally available, enabling organizations to build and operate AI agents at production scale. Foundry Agent Service allows teams to quickly develop agents that reason, plan and act across tools, data and workflows. Once created, Foundry Control Plane provides the developer end-to-end visibility into agent behavior, unlocking both developer productivity as well as enterprise trust. Companies such as Corvus Energy are already using Foundry to replace manual inspection workflows with agent-driven operational intelligence across their global fleet. We are further simplifying the path from prototype to production with the availability of Voice Live API integration with Foundry Agent Service, in public preview, which enables developers to build voice-first, multimodal, real-time agentic experiences. This pairs with the general availability of a refreshed Microsoft Foundry portal and expanded integrations for Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS and Zenity, delivering deeper builder experiences and runtime security across the entire agent lifecycle. NVIDIA Nemotron models are also now available through Microsoft Foundry, joining the widest selection of models on any cloud, including the latest reasoning, frontier and open models. This bolsters our recent partnership announcement bringing Fireworks AI to Microsoft Foundry, enabling customers to fine-tune open-weight models like NVIDIA Nemotron into low-latency assets that can be distributed to the edge. Scaling AI infrastructure for the world’s most demanding workloads Inference AI workloads are reshaping cost, performance and system design requirements. To operationalize agentic AI at scale, customers need purpose-built infrastructure for inference‑heavy, reasoning‑based workloads that can be deployed and operated consistently across global and regulated environments. Microsoft’s AI infrastructure approach is engineered to seamlessly bring next-generation NVIDIA systems into Azure datacenters that are designed for power, cooling networking and rapid generational upgrades. This allows our customers to move with speed and agility and stay at the leading edge from generation to generation. In less than a year, we’ve deployed hundreds of thousands of liquid-cooled Grace Blackwell GPUs across our global datacenter footprint, and now we are excited to be the first hyperscale cloud to power on NVIDIA’s newest Vera Rubin NVL72 in our labs. Over the next few months, Vera Rubin NVL72 will be rolled out into our modern, liquid-cooled Azure datacenters. Microsoft’s infrastructure innovation with NVIDIA also extends to sovereign and regulated environments to give customers control of both where AI runs and how it evolves over time. Recently, we announced Foundry Local support for modern infrastructure and large AI models, and today we now have initial support for NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform on Azure Local, extending accelerated AI capabilities to customer-controlled environments. This approach allows organizations to plan for next-generation AI workloads, including reasoning-based and agentic systems, while maintaining Azure-consistent operations, governance and security through our unified software layer with Azure Arc and Foundry Local. YouTube Video Click here to load media Bringing AI into the physical world As AI moves beyond digital experiences, Microsoft and NVIDIA are collaborating to support the next wave of Physical AI. At GTC, this work centers on NVIDIA Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, with Microsoft Foundry as the platform for hosting and operating Physical AI systems on Azure at cloud scale. By integrating this blueprint with Azure services as part of a Physical AI Toolchain, Microsoft enables developers to build, train and operate physical AI and robotics workflows that connect physical assets, simulation and cloud training environments into repeatable, enterprise-grade pipelines. To support, we are introducing a public Azure Physical AI Toolchain GitHub repository integrated with the Nvidia Physical AI Data Factory and with core Azure services. To further the impact of AI in real‑world, physical environments, today Microsoft and NVIDIA are deepening the integration between Microsoft Fabric and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, connecting live operational data with physically accurate digital twins and simulation. This allows organizations to see what’s happening across their physical systems, understand it in real time and use AI to decide what to do next. In practice, customers in manufacturing and operations and beyond are using this approach to move beyond dashboards and alerts to coordinated, AI‑driven action across machines, facilities and workflows. From innovation to impact Microsoft is delivering reliable, production‑scale AI by bringing together its global AI infrastructure, platforms and real‑world systems with the latest innovation from NVIDIA. For customers, this means the ability to operate intelligence continuously, running inference-heavy, reasoning-based and physical AI workloads with the performance, security and governance required for real businesses and regulated industries. Whether powering always-on agents, scaling next-generation AI infrastructure or deploying intelligent systems in factories, energy facilities and sovereign environments, Microsoft and Nvidia are helping customers move faster from insight to action. Yina Arenas leads product strategy and execution for Microsoft Foundry, overseeing the end–to–end AI product portfolio, infrastructure, developer experiences and foundation model integration across OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek and others. She delivers an enterprise ready, production grade AI platform trusted by global customers for secure, reliable and scalable AI. The post Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC: New solutions for Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI infrastructure and Physical AI

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, and Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI, shared the below communications with Microsoft employees this morning. SATYA NADELLA MESSAGE I want to share two org changes we’re making to our Copilot org and superintelligence effort. It’s clear a new era of productivity is emerging as AI experiences rapidly evolve from answering questions and suggesting code, to executing multi-step tasks with clear user control points. You see this in our announcements over the last couple of weeks, like Copilot Tasks and Copilot Cowork, agentic capabilities in Office, and Agent 365. As these experiences connect more naturally across agents, apps, and workflows, we have an opportunity to help customers spend more time on higher-value work and reduce manual coordination, while providing people with more agency and empowerment and organizations with the governance and security controls they need. To that end, we are bringing the Copilot system across commercial and consumer together as one unified effort. This will span four connected pillars: Copilot experience, Copilot platform, Microsoft 365 apps, and AI models. This is how we move from a collection of great products to a truly integrated system, one that is simpler and more powerful for customers. Jacob Andreou will lead the Copilot experience across consumer and commercial, driving design, product, growth, and engineering, as EVP, Copilot, reporting to me. As CVP of Product and Growth at Microsoft AI, Jacob has accelerated our user-focused AI-first product making and growth framework. Prior to that, he was SVP at Snap, where he helped scale the company from its early days. Progress at the AI model layer is more critical than ever to our success as a company over the next decade and is foundational to everything we build above it. We are doubling down on our superintelligence mission with the talent and compute to build models that have real product impact, in terms of evals, COGS reduction, as well as advancing the frontier when it comes to meeting enterprise needs and achieving the next set of research breakthroughs. Mustafa Suleyman and I have been working towards this plan for some time, and he will continue to lead this high ambition work, reporting to me. Mustafa is uniquely qualified to drive this forward, with his deep focus and commitment to advancing the frontiers of model science, while also ensuring that human control, agency, and economic opportunity remain at the center of these advancements. Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna will lead M365 apps and the Copilot platform. Together, Jacob, Ryan, Charles, Perry, and Mustafa make up the Copilot LT and over the next few weeks they’ll work to align the teams. Our org boundaries will simply reflect system architecture and product shape such that we can deliver more coherent and competitive experiences that continue to evolve with model capabilities. And I am looking forward to how together we apply all of this to empower people, organizations, and the world. MUSTAFA SULEYMAN MESSAGE Subject: A new structure for Microsoft AI Technology and the future of our industry will be defined by two things: frontier models, and the products through which they are experienced. For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we best tackle these huge challenges, and today I’m excited to be evolving our structure at Microsoft AI, ensuring we’re positioned to succeed in both. I came to Microsoft with an overriding mission: to create Superintelligence that delivers a transformative, positive impact for millions of people. This requires us to build frontier models, at scale, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Everything else follows from this. It’s the foundation for our future as a company. With our ambitious, long-term frontier scale compute roadmap locked, we now have everything we need to build truly SOTA models. As you will have just heard from Satya, the next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization to enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years. These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company. They’ll also enable us to deliver the COGS efficiencies necessary to be able to serve AI workloads at the immense scale required in the coming years. Achieving all this will be a huge challenge, and I’m committing everything we have – and I have personally – to make it happen. To that end, I’ve been working hard with other leaders in the background for a while now to define a strategy to unify Copilot by bringing together the Consumer and Commercial efforts as one. We all know this makes sense. Every user – whether at home or at work – will be able to enjoy the full benefit of what we are all building. Today, we’re combining these organizations into a single, unified Copilot org. Jacob has demonstrated himself to be an outstanding leader for the product experience and clearly has the product instincts, the operational range, and the conviction to make Copilot a great success. Jacob will retain a dotted line to me, and I’ll stay directly involved in much of the day-to-day operation of MAI, attending Meetups, MMMs, LT, and supporting Jacob to drive all areas of product strategy. To ensure that the models we build and the products we ship are mutually reinforcing, we are establishing a Copilot Leadership Team that includes me, Jacob, Charles Lamanna, Perry Clarke, and Ryan Roslansky. This will enable us to focus our brand strategy, our product roadmap, our models and our core infrastructure as one to deliver the best experiences possible for all our users. Thank you for everything you’ve done over the last few years. I know how hard everyone has been pushing and the sacrifices many of you have made to help the company adapt to this new era. We really do have an incredible opportunity to redefine Microsoft for this agentic revolution. Mustafa’s mail

Rajesh Jha, Executive Vice President, Experiences + Devices, and Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communications with Microsoft employees this morning. RAJESH JHA MESSAGE  Subject: Organizing for the future and my transition Dear Team, After 35+ years at Microsoft, I am moving into retirement. I will transition out on July 1st and then stay in an advisory role. Satya and I have been working on succession for some time. I am incredibly confident and excited about the future with Perry Clarke, Charles Lamanna, Pavan Davuluri, and Ryan Roslansky as EVP direct reports to Satya. I am also excited to announce the promotions of Jeff Teper to EVP, and Sumit Chauhan and Kirk Koenigsbauer to President. Please join me in congratulating these leaders on this well-deserved recognition. We’re announcing these top-level changes today, and between now and June, my leadership team and I will work together to finalize the full cascade of details needed in this kind of transition. This includes aligning operating rhythms, decision ownership, and details on the future org structure, all so we’ll be fully aligned and ready to run at the start of FY27. Our intent in taking this approach is to minimize changes and not lose the great momentum we have. Our priorities around SFI, QEI, and Copilot remain unchanged – let’s keep the intensity here. I want to add that working with you all over the years, in the service of customers, has been an incredible privilege for me. I am deeply grateful. Best regards, Rajesh SATYA NADELLA MESSAGE Rajesh has been a constant throughout my entire life at Microsoft. From our earliest days working together, I have admired his unwavering commitment to his team, to our customers, to the products we build, and to the company. I have always been struck by his operational rigor, his ability to make the hard strategic calls, lead through the grind, and emerge stronger on the other side. That, to me, is what true leadership looks like. When I think about the pantheon of leaders who have truly shaped this company, Rajesh stands firmly among them. He embodies the commitment that helped build and transform Microsoft into the company it is today, and it is on the strength of that foundation that we will continue to move forward.  And as we look to the future, the opportunity ahead is expansive. We have the depth of talent, the product ethos, and a clear sense of purpose as a company to ensure our technology advancements accrue to our mission of empowerment. Rajesh – I am deeply grateful for all you have done for Microsoft and our customers and for all you have taught me personally. On behalf of all of us – Thank You. Satya   The post Microsoft announces Experiences + Devices leadership changes appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog. ​Rajesh Jha, Executive Vice President, Experiences + Devices, and Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communications with Microsoft employees this morning. RAJESH JHA MESSAGE  Subject: Organizing for the future and my transition Dear Team, After 35+ years at Microsoft, I am moving into retirement. I will transition out on July 1st and then stay in an… The post Microsoft announces Experiences + Devices leadership changes appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.  Featured, The Official Microsoft Blog The Official Microsoft Blog

Today Microsoft is announcing: Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot Expanded model diversity with Claude and next-gen OpenAI models available today General availability of Agent 365 on May 1 for $15 per user General availability of the new Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite on May 1 for $99 per user Frontier Transformation is a holistic reimagining of business, aligning AI with human ambition to achieve an organization’s highest aspirations. It is the next evolution of AI Transformation — not only do we need to deliver efficiency and productivity, but we need to democratize intelligence and do more for humanity. Companies do not want or need more AI experimentation. They need AI that delivers real business outcomes and growth. In my daily conversations with customers and partners, they typically question what the most important components of an AI solution are. Is it the model? Is it silicon? At Microsoft, we believe the two most essential elements of Frontier Transformation are Intelligence + Trust. Organizations need to harness their own unique work intelligence as they build agents and solutions; and all AI artifacts across their technology stack must be observed, managed and secured to ensure they are delivering value responsibly.  Intelligence that shows up in real work  I often say that zero-shot artifact creation is nothing more than a parlor trick. Models can reason over data, produce draft documents, presentations and spreadsheets, but they do not understand work. Real differentiation comes from intelligence — deep work context, embedded in the tools people already use. AI should amplify your intelligence but do so in a manner that protects your differentiation and unique value. Work IQ amplifies an individual’s IQ by tapping into your organization’s IQ. It is the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to know how you work, with whom you work, and the content upon which you collaborate. That is why Copilot is faster, more accurate and more trusted than solutions built on models and connectors alone. This month, we are unleashing Work IQ with our next generation of agentic experiences in Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Employees will have an enhanced chat experience in Copilot with the ability to create and augment artifacts, and the power to build their own agents within the canvas they work in every day. Microsoft 365 Copilot is model diverse by design. Rather than betting on a single model, we built a system that makes every model useful at work. Customers get the choice, performance and flexibility in an open, heterogenous environment.  Copilot leverages leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic, operating openly across clouds and data services without locking customers in. Claude is now available in mainline chat in Copilot via the Frontier program, alongside the latest generation of OpenAI models. Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 3 is not just a singular release of new capabilities but rather a commitment to continuous innovation. We will bring frontier capabilities with enterprise promises for our customers in an open and model diverse manner. Another great example of this is Copilot Cowork, which is in research preview. Built in close collaboration with Anthropic, we are bringing the technology that powers Claude Cowork into Microsoft 365 Copilot to enable long-running, multi-step work that unfolds over time.  Click here to learn about our Wave 3 news in more detail. These announcements come as our customers across industries are already seeing the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft recently delivered its strongest quarter yet with Copilot, with paid seats growing more than 160% year over year and daily active usage up ten times, as customers increasingly make Copilot a core part of everyday work. Expansion is also accelerating as the number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale — more than 35,000 seats — tripled year over year. Just last week, Mercedes Benz announced a global rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot, following recent investments from NASA, Fiserv, ING, the University of Kentucky, the University of Manchester, the U.S. Department of the Interior and Westpac. This is in addition to the 90 percent of the Fortune 500 who now use Copilot. Trust: from agent experimentation and sprawl to enterprise control  The speed of agent development and proliferation tells us customers see value, but without guardrails the pace of adoption turns into blind spots, diminished ROI and real security risk. As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, trust is nonnegotiable. IDC predicts 1.3B agents in circulation by 2028, and 80% of the Fortune 500 are already using Microsoft agents, led by operationally complex industries like manufacturing, financial services and retail. That is why I am excited to announce the May 1 general availability of Microsoft Agent 365, the control-plane for AI agents. Priced at $15 per user, Agent 365 gives IT and security leaders a single place to observe, govern, manage and secure agents across the organization — using the same infrastructure, applications and protections they rely on to manage people today. We are seeing tremendous momentum with our preview customers. In just two months, tens of millions of agents have appeared in the Agent 365 Registry. We have tens of thousands of customers that are already adopting Agent 365 to securely govern and scale AI agents across enterprise workflows. At Microsoft, we are also using Agent 365 as Customer Zero and the early signals are clear. We now have visibility into more than 500,000 agents across the company with the most widely used focused on research, coding, sales intelligence, customer triage and HR self-service. That adoption is translating into real work. Over the past 28 days alone, agents have been generating more than 65,000 responses every day for employees. This is evidence that we are not simply experimenting, we are embedding agents in the flow of everyday work and empowering human ambition. Introducing the Frontier Suite To meet this demand, I am thrilled to announce we are bringing Intelligence + Trust together with Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite. Microsoft 365 E7 unifies Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 into a single solution powered by Work IQ and integrated with the apps and security stack customers already rely on. It includes Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced Defender, Intune and Purview