Powering Frontier Partnerships | PKEY02

We treated ourselves as Customer Zero. We licensed all of our organization in the U.K., so we have 1,600 people.

So for us, 'being Frontier' means how do we become deeply rooted in being AI native in every aspect of that, helping craft the strategy, helping execute it, and helping bring those solutions to life?

It's been one of the biggest pivots for our organization. We're not training somebody on how to do their job differently using technology. We're actually training people on how to think about their job differently.

Being Customer Zero is huge for us. We've adopted Copilot for every single employee. We've started to leverage agents. It's only making us more efficient, making us better at doing our jobs.

It's an incredible moment to lead, and it's an incredible moment to learn.

Skilling is important. We have sort of dedicated people managers and learning internally. We carry all, I think, 17 specializations.

The pace of change has just gone on a curve. So before, you could learn something, and those skills would be relevant for five, six, seven years; now you're having to reskill almost on a yearly basis, and possibly that's accelerating even more.

What really excites me is the potential for where agents are going to take us, and we're only at the beginning of that journey, and I'm really excited to see where it goes.

Welcome to 'Powering Frontier Partnerships.' Please welcome Microsoft Chief Partner Officer and CVP, Global Channel Partner Sales, Nicole Dezen.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Microsoft Ignite. On behalf of all of us at Microsoft, thank you so much for the absolutely outstanding work you do across industries, geographies, and customer segments. Microsoft succeeds when our partners succeed. We are all so incredibly proud of what we've all built together, and incredibly confident in our shared opportunity ahead. This morning, we heard so many powerful stories about Frontier Firms leading transformation. These are organizations that harness the power of AI to reinvent work. They're combining human ambition with Copilots and agents to unlock value and to lead with purpose. Microsoft's partners play such a crucial role in activating this capability to deliver meaningful value to customers. So today, we're going to focus on how we are investing to enable partners to become Frontier Firms, to create new and differentiated business opportunities. So, you're going to hear from customers and partners. Nick Parker is going to host a conversation about enterprise customer demand, and Ralph Haupter will host a conversation about the market opportunity with small and medium enterprises. We're going to bring together all of the new innovation that Judson spoke about this morning, and then, we're going to talk about how the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program is accelerating your journey to Frontier. This is your launch pad to innovation, growth, and impact. But first, I want to talk about how partners are accelerating Frontier Firm transformation, all starting with how you embrace AI internally. The foundation for partner success starts with becoming Customer Zero. These are partners that don't just sell AI; you embrace it, internalize it, and operationalize it throughout the organization. This is what creates real world expertise, insights, and credibility that truly resonate with customers. So today, we're going to hear from partners that are leading Frontier Firms. These are companies that are enhancing their own employee productivity, reimagining customer engagement and business processes, all powered by agents, Copilots, Foundry, and so much more. First, I'm really excited to welcome back Judson Althoff to talk about our partner opportunity ahead.

Hi, Judson.

I'm great. Thank you.

Thanks for being back here.

Thank you so much. You and I spend a lot of time talking about partners, so what a perfect spot.

You spoke so much about Frontier Transformation this morning. I'd love to hear how you think about our partners' role in that.

Thank you. So many amazing product announcements. You touched on Customer Zero. Can you talk a little bit more about why you think this is so important for our partners?

Thank you for --

That's exactly right. So, one of the things that was really exciting this morning is hearing all of the new innovation, and there's a ton of market differentiation for Microsoft. We know that our partners also want the ability to differentiate themselves in the market, so can you talk a little bit about the partner opportunity there?

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Judson, for sharing your insights about the partner opportunity, how partners can accelerate Frontier Transformation and deliver all of this amazing capability to our shared customers.

And President of Worldwide Sales and Solutions, Nick Parker.

Hello, everybody, and good afternoon from San Francisco. It's great to be here at Ignite, and what a phenomenal keynote from Judson and the team earlier on today. It was tremendous to see the end-to-end innovation and investments that Microsoft is making for you, our partners and our customers, to enable you on your Frontier transformation journeys powered by AI. The opportunity is clear. We see market growth across both of our customer segments and Microsoft's growth faster. When we think of customer momentum and the demand that we're seeing across all of our customer segments, these are some of the key metrics that I look at every day, side by side with the customer conversations that the team has across industries and geographies across the world from over 150 million Copilot users. Now, that, of course, is across GitHub Copilot, M365 Copilot, and Copilot Chat to that compounding effect of all of our customers building agents, connecting agents to data, bringing new intelligence to every process to every company, we see that incredible momentum of agents. And so, for you, our partners, building your business on that agent capability, you start to understand that incredible growth here driven by the statistics on the slide. But then, when you think of our investments across Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ, and, of course, Agent 365, and now Agent Factory, you see that opportunity only gets greater. AI is the center of all of our data capabilities that you see, and the growth across Fabric and Foundry even further reinforces that business opportunity for all of you and, of course, all of the capabilities that Microsoft brings you for trust and security in the enterprise. In fact, when I think about the differentiation that we offer that's unique, you take the end-to-end platform, the broadest platform available for you; you then look at the extensibility and the business models that you, our partners, can build on that; and then, of course, underpinned by the global sales and marketing capability that Nicole will take you through later, and the investments we make in our partner community, that's why we are the unparalleled partner for you to seize the opportunity in this AI journey. But, frankly, it's more than just the data you see here as the incredible demand and momentum we're seeing across our platforms. It's the stories; it's the customer discussions that we see every single day. It's the unique stories from any industry, from any geography, of how customers are solving new opportunities, reducing risk, or creating new business models from AI. And I'm happy to share to you today three of our most celebrated partners and customers who not only are Frontier companies themselves, but they're also driving the Frontier transformation in their industries. And this is not just happening at their company level; it's happening with them as leaders who are pushing the frontiers of their own companies. And so, please join me in welcoming Emily, Chris, and Raj to the stage. Thank you.

So, maybe we'll start with the icebreaker questions. We've all worked together a little bit before, so I think you kind of know where I'm going with this one. But, really, maybe, start a little bit with where you are in your AI journey, and we'll kind of go left to right. So, we'll start with you, Emily, of where you are in your AI journey and how you got there.

Thanks, Nick, and thank you for having me. It's an incredible event. So, for LSEG, AI is core to how we're thinking about the whole business and from the way that we solve problems, but actually, to something very core to the value we serve to our customers. We have an extraordinary breadth of data, over 33 petabytes, but it doesn't mean it's always been accessible. And so, what we see with AI is an opportunity to really unlock that data, and with the advent of MCP, or Model Context Protocol, together with some of the fantastic work we're doing around agents, we're starting to see people being able to build with trusted data in a way that they've never been able to achieve before. And when we think about the decades' worth of trusted data that we have built and what that can unlock, from building new signals, insights, managing risk better, you see the transformative impact that really starts to happen. So, what we're seeing is this democratization around accessibility of our data now.

And not only that, but it's building new business models for LSEG.

Absolutely. It's really changing the way that people think about data. In the past, you saw people with, frankly, very fragile ways that they used data, very narrow. And now, you're able to see these orthogonal relationships and information that were never even present before.

Yeah, it's superb. Chris.

Nick, thanks. Great to be here. I haven't been this close to the court before. I think we're two years into this, and to set the context, Kantar is a global leader in marketing and data analytics. We serve 96 of the top 100 advertisers, including lots of local champions as well. We have 17,000 people around the world serving thousands of clients in 80 countries. So, the change for generative AI for us, when we're data and knowledge workers, is profound, so it's a big change in our company. And I attended an event two years ago with Satya, who spoke and said that what is happening and going to happen in the future is going to be massive. I completely believed in that. So, we set up three pillars to drive the company for our overall transformation, and the advice that Satya back then said keep it simple and drive your organization. The first was Equip the Teams, the second was Transform the Core, and the third was Innovate the Offer. So, on Equip the Teams, we've given everyone the tools and applications, AI tools, so Copilot. I got asked the question, is AI going to take my job? I said no, but someone who uses AI will take your job. So, all of our teams have the latest tools and technologies of AI, so Equip the Teams. That included moving everything to the cloud as well. The second, in Transform the Core, we are changing and replatforming our whole business. So, we are -- from an end-to-end point of view of how we start our market research and data right to the end of how it goes to a client is totally changing with the help of Microsoft. And then thirdly, Innovate the Offer. We're moving in a very fast paced environment. When I started my career at Procter & Gamble 30 years ago, it took six weeks to test an advert. When I joined Kantar four and a half years ago, it took us two days. We could test an advert anywhere in the world. Today, we can do it with AI. We can do it in 90 seconds. Last month, we tested 2,500 Coca Cola ads in two days. They were previous ads, and we predicted how successful they'd be in the market, and we were 90% correct. So, it's changing fast, and that is the way that we're approaching it.

We talk about durable change because business processes or markets will change forever, both of you are seeing that. And so, when we start to think of these going into production scale rather than being use cases that are proven out, I mean, you're both at global scale. I mean, that phenomenal example, there's no way we would ever go back to testing ads the same way.

We presented to the CMO of Coke. We said 2,500 ads, we did it in day, day and a half, blew his mind. And the accuracy of these models, as well, is phenomenal, and that's all working with Microsoft and, of course, your tools and applications, Nick.

And that's market making edge.

Yeah.

Raj, great to see you here. Where are you in your AI journey? You have a unique perspective with, obviously, creating your company, as well as where you are, but maybe share a little.

Thank you for having me here, first of all, Nick. It's very interesting, some of the products that you guys have launched. We've been at this for a decade. We've been working with large enterprises, deploying different types of AI use cases, high volume, you know, in regulated industries, very complex logic, complex business rules that need to be applied prior to generating, right? So, in that world, the three use cases that everybody talks about, what we call 'AI for service' was the most prevalent, which is touching the customer, the AI agent representing the brand of that company to the customer, and in the process trying to automate that, also helping human agents with AI to make them more efficient. Then came AI for work, which sort of has its roots in enterprise search, but what we're seeing now is the focus is shifting from enterprise search to more employee workflows, workflows that they can create themselves, like Emily said, democratization of building agents on their own and then sharing it with each other. And then, the area that I think has the biggest value, ultimately, is what Chris talked about, which is process. How do you automate process? So, when I look across all the customers we serve, I think one of the things that we're finding is that as models change, as new concepts come about, the first thing is education. That is at different levels, whether it's in the business side or the IT side, and therefore, there are these one off projects that get some success, but are not part of an overall strategy. The overall strategy is coming together, and as that comes together, the tooling, the frameworks, the platforms that need to be used to pull that overall strategy together is what is coming to light, and we've been at the forefront of this. We've been a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader all along, and as these agent networks start to come together, some of the things that Microsoft has released like AI Foundry, Copilot, and how we fit into that ecosystem is very interesting because the goal is the same. The means to the end is where I think things are changing right now, but there are very large deployments. I mean, we have a customer, retail pharmacy, where we automate, like, a billion calls and chats per year. They signed our contract March 31st. Half their volume was live by June 30th. The rest of it was live in six months. So, speed, I think, is a very critical element. You can't do these things for 12 months, 24 months. You need something significant with measurable ROI quick, and for that, you need the tools, you need the frameworks where you're not building, you're using no code tools. There's not enough AI talent out there to do it all, so I think the ecosystem of Microsoft with partners like us is going to bring that to the forefront. And particularly, Foundry and Copilot and the IQ products are going to be a critical element of that.