The agentic future: How we’re becoming an AI-first frontier firm at Microsoft

The rate of change for AI tools and technology continues to accelerate, and new opportunities to reimagine business processes and employees’ day-to-day work are emerging. Agents are the force driving this evolution forward.

Agents are specialized AI tools built to handle specific processes or solve business challenges. Within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re responsible for unlocking their potential internally at Microsoft.

“This is a generational opportunity. The pace of change is only increasing, and we’re committed to experimenting, learning, and leading the way to the deeper possibilities that agentic AI represents.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

As Customer Zero, we serve as the company’s first and best users of new technologies. It’s our role to confirm that they’re business-ready and establish best practices that others can follow.

We’re doing that by empowering our team here in Microsoft Digital to supercharge their work with AI agents. At the same time, we’re the custodians of the employee experience of employees at Microsoft, so we’re actively guiding deployment and adoption efforts for AI tools across the business.

“This is a generational opportunity,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “The pace of change is only increasing, and we’re committed to experimenting, learning, and leading the way to the deeper possibilities agents represent.”

By following our lead, you can chart your own course to the agentic future, where employees and agents work as teams to achieve more together.

Our vision for agents and the AI-first future of IT

A new organizational blueprint is emerging. It blends machine intelligence with human judgment to create systems that are AI-operated but human-led.

We call it becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm.

The path to the frontier is starting to reveal itself already. As organizations progress through different phases of AI maturity, they move from foundational Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities through escalating levels of agentic complexity.

First, humans operate with an assistant like Copilot. Then, human-agent teams work together. But the future lies in humans leading teams of digital workers: AI agents that perform core labor with relative autonomy.

Becoming a Frontier Firm

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

This progression reflects the levels of agentic complexity represented by simple retrieval agents, then knowledge and action agents, and finally workflow reinvention through agents that can perform fully autonomous actions to complete end-to-end business processes. The human-led, agent-operated teams that will drive Frontier Firms forward depend on this advanced stage of agentic maturity.

As the tools used to build agents rapidly mature, we’ve observed that teams can experience these patterns simultaneously. In this rapidly changing environment, it makes sense to think of these as processes that can be targeted to specific business outcomes.

Soon, Frontier Firms will have employees experiencing each of these patterns daily, leveraging the best pattern to complete the task at optimal quality and in the least amount of time. Every business challenge or opportunity is unique, so it makes sense to choose the right tool for the job.  

At Microsoft, we’ve been unlocking opportunities throughout this Frontier Firm curve. At the simpler end of the spectrum, we’re empowering our employees to create their own custom retrieval agents and boosting enterprise knowledge sharing using simple SharePoint agents.

“AI agents are an entirely new kind of tool that presents possibilities we’re only beginning to realize. We capture that potential through a disciplined, rigorous, repeatable process of continuous improvement.”

Tom Heath, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

We’re also creating more complex agents that affect processes at the team, division, or even company-wide level. They include our autonomous Employee Self-Service Agent designed to enable modern support on key HR IT, and real estate issues, delivering operational excellence through AIOps, and supporting engineers as they manage complex network environments.

In our role as Customer Zero for the company’s agentic solutions, we in Microsoft Digital work closely with Microsoft’s product groups to ensure that our internal usage insights are helping to shape our products to make them more effective for our customers. This is something we do, so our customers don’t have to.

They also ensure we implement these new tools safely and effectively. That’s important, because AI isn’t without its challenges.

We need to minimize risk by using AI responsibly and securely according to our Responsible AI Principles. We need to assuage AI hesitancy among employees and equip them with the skills they need to succeed. Most importantly, we need to use intentional continuous improvement practices to ensure we apply AI’s potential to processes that drive genuine value.

“AI agents are an entirely new kind of tool that presents possibilities we’re only beginning to realize,” says Tom Heath, senior business program manager for Microsoft Digital.  “We capture that potential through a disciplined, rigorous, repeatable process of continuous improvement.”

The opportunities are worth the effort.

As a company, we surveyed leaders working at Frontier Firms. We found that they’re more likely to say their company is thriving, they’re able to take on more work, and they’re more optimistic about future opportunities than the global average.

All those benefits depend on moving toward agentic maturity.

Lessons learned deploying agents at Microsoft

As Customer Zero, our team within Microsoft Digital is already making progress on agent-based workflows, and the patterns and strategies we’re using can help you on your own journey. Like other digital investments, deploying agents depends on the critical pillars of governance, implementation, change management, measurement, and support.

Culture is also a crucial factor.

AI transformation is about unlocking human potential, not replacing it. So, meeting human needs while reaping the benefits of more intelligent tools is paramount.

Agents’ disruptive potential makes getting these elements right even more important.

Governance and AI-ready data

Our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment acted as proving ground for governing AI and ensuring our data estate is ready for intelligent tools. We’ve applied our learnings from that experience to agents.

The first and most important lesson is ensuring you have a strong data hygiene foundation for employees to build and use agents. AI-ready data rests on five pillars: Unification, connection, quality and governance, accessibility to all, and the ability to accelerate time to value.

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build.”

Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager, Microsoft Digital

Agents offer powerful opportunities to enhance employee productivity, but they also introduce risks. For example, how do we keep privileged information where it belongs? How do we keep employees from building agents that violate company policies? And how can we balance the freedom to create agents with the need to prevent sprawl?

Our response has been a matrixed approach to governing agents, where we apply policies and procedures based on an array of attributes.

Examples of agentic attributes that require different governance policies

Fortunately, we have tools—many of which we built ourselves—that are helping us keep the company safe as we navigate our agentic transformation. We’re using them to establish and manage our data, keep our confidential information confidential, and protect our data from unauthorized access, misuse, or disclosures. Microsoft Purview is our primary vehicle for handling data governance.

Finally, rules and a lifecycle for agents are helping us combat sprawl and the risks associated with ownership, access, and identity. The enterprise lifecycle is the model for this work, and attestation is essential for accountability. These structures also include an agent catalog to track these tools and help determine what kinds of AI agents our employees can “hire” as digital workers to help them get their work done.

Structuring your implementation

Implementing AI tools and agents is largely about who, what, and how. For us, it comes down to creating policies that manage which employees can use or create certain agents and how we permit those agents to work within the company.

Our matrixed approach to agent creation

To land on these policies, we considered what out-of-the-box agents in Microsoft 365 can accomplish, what employees in non-engineering roles can safely and easily create for themselves using no-code or low-code tools, and what agents demand the greater experience of AI developers using pro-code applications. Options include simple agents created in Microsoft SharePoint agent builder or Copilot Studio experience lite, then more complex tools like Microsoft Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and more—each governed, protected, and overseen by its own policies and procedures.

With these policies in place, implementing agents at scale depends on determining the best opportunities for value.

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Through predetermined groups and rules, we can allow freedom and experimentation at different scales without putting our internal tenant at risk.”

At Microsoft, continuous improvement provides us with a mechanism for discovering which processes to optimize through agentic workflows, then implementing and tracking those changes. This framework helps us reimagine processes as deterministic state machines to enable digital colleagues that complete workflows on employees’ behalf.

Driving adoption through change management

Change doesn’t happen automatically, especially when a new technology fundamentally alters ways of working. At Microsoft, the message is clear: Regardless of your role, there’s an agent for every task.

We have a global change team operating according to Prosci’s ADKAR model combined with the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide. At the same time, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all adoption campaign, so we take efforts to tailor adoption to specific regions and internal organizations.

We’ve taken a multi-pronged approach to adoption, communications, community, and skilling that relies heavily on Microsoft Viva. Communications center on raising awareness, driving engagement, and encouraging feedback while tracking adoption.

Each Microsoft Viva app has a role to play, but Viva Engage has been the most impactful. It provides opportunities for organic connections that enhance employees’ knowledge and ability while providing opportunities to share successes and inspiration.

Adoption communications focus both on encouraging usage of ready-made agents and encouraging employees to create their own using the right tools for their level of technical capability. Campaigns include an ongoing “Agent of the month” series, spotlighting experimental agent releases, how-to content for agent builders, and promotional efforts for enterprise agents that occupy central places in business processes.

The Analyst and Researcher agents built into Copilot are ideal ways to introduce your employees to the power of agents, and “Agent Mode” in Word and Excel can make agentic workflows more intuitive through integration into the tools your employees are already using every day.

• Analyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning like a skilled data scientist to progress through problems iteratively, taking as many steps as necessary to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality answer.
• Researcher helps employees tackle multi-step research at work—delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy than previously possible. It combines OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities.
• Agent Mode in Microsoft Word and Excel transforms how users create documents or spreadsheets by enabling a more interactive and collaborative experience with AI. Instead of just generating responses to single prompts, Agent Mode allows users to engage in a multi-step process where they can guide the AI through various tasks, making document creation or data analysis more intuitive and efficient.

Building the AI habit takes time, but encouraging usage of these pre-built AI agents is the perfect way to accelerate your journey to the Frontier.

At every stage of our AI transformation so far, we’ve experienced the power of peer-led adoption efforts.

Our Copilot Champs Community, a team of AI enthusiasts, early adopters, and eager learners, has been incredibly effective both at providing examples of AI usage and supporting change management initiatives run by our Microsoft Digital organization.

Camp Copilot represented our first runaway success in grassroots, peer-led AI skilling. This three-week learning event gave our Copilot Champs an opportunity to showcase emerging best practices in a structured, gamified setting and reached thousands of employees. We’ve recently followed that with a Copilot Expo, which expanded on Camp Copilot with more learning around agents and a templatized format we deployed to different regions and divisions.

As we shift our focus from Copilot adoption to agentic innovation, we’re also evolving our community strategy.

Our Copilot Champs Community is still a vital source of leadership and guidance, but now we’ve augmented its role with the Builders Community, a new group tailored to sharing knowledge and inspiration around creating agents.

It’s also important to have mechanisms in place that guide employees as our company’s agentic maturity increases.

We are accelerating innovation through agent and automation templates that employees and teams are applying to their own scenarios. On top of those resources, our AI Center of Excellence and a dedicated continuous improvement function are helping our teams think through their opportunities, ensure they capture value, and maintain security.

Measuring impact to demonstrate value

Measuring the impact of AI tools has been a unique challenge, and we’re only at the beginning of our journey. That’s especially true for agents.

The Experience Insights dashboard for Microsoft 365 admin center helps our technology decision makers gather information about product usage, feedback, and employee views of help articles. Crucially, this tool allows people outside of our IT apparatus to gain limited, compliant access to adoption data, which supports more effective change management efforts within their scope.

We’ve also devised several measurement areas and key metrics we can track using the Microsoft Digital AI Value Framework. They include:

• Revenue impact: Direct contributions to revenue generation and business growth.
• Productivity and efficiency: Efficiency gains while completing tasks and processes without a reduction in quality.
• Security and risk management: Improvements in identifying, preventing, and managing security vulnerabilities and risks.
• Employee and customer experience: The impact of AI initiatives on employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity.
• Quality improvement: Enhancements in the quality of deliverables, services, and processes.
• Cost savings: Reduction in operational costs and resource allocation efficiencies.

As our company has dedicated more attention and resources to an AI and continuous improvement framework, these value drivers have become guiding lights for ideating and executing AI initiatives—and most importantly, tracking them. Methodologies like Bowler scorecards and monthly operating reviews align perfectly with our learn-it-all culture to help us measure and adjust AI projects to align them with our business goals more effectively.

Enabling effective support for agents

When you enter an unprecedented new phase of technology, anticipating the support employees need can be difficult. Our role as Customer Zero has been essential for making sure we have enough experience to properly understand the issues that arise from implementing agents.

Our employees in Microsoft Digital have been some of the company’s first movers on agentic AI initiatives. Through our initial experience, we’ve gradually built up our knowledge and widened access to equip support professionals with everything they need to enable employees.

Within Microsoft Digital, we established a solid support base by progressing through seven steps:

1. Preliminary access: We selected our initial support specialists, including people with different Microsoft 365 app focuses, support tiers, and service audiences.
2. Communication hub: We created a community space where our support team could connect and collaborate on issues and invited non-support professionals as needed.
3. Knowledge base: We created a collaborative document where we added learnings, which eventually evolved into our knowledge base for internal support.
4. Widening access: We hosted information sessions with the wider support team and extended access so all relevant support professionals could ramp up.
5. Rehearsal: Role-playing and shadowing sessions helped teams build practical knowledge and confidence.
6. Go-live support: We prepared our support resources and processes and pushed them live in advance of our deployment.
7. Tracking: A pre-determined tracking cadence for gathering data on incidents helps support teams identify trending issues and tickets.

Pushing the frontier forward with agentic AI

It’s clear that agents will be the major driving force behind modern workflows. The AI-first Frontier Firm will be the defining blueprint of this next era.

“The future of IT is increasingly about experimentation and adaptation to accelerating AI technologies. We take our role as Customer Zero seriously, and that means boldly experimenting with agentic AI and leading this next transformation for our company and our customers.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Knowing the future that awaits, our Microsoft Digital team will continue to explore, experiment, and share what we’ve learned. We want to discover pathways to greater human potential, powered by AI agents.

“The future of IT is increasingly about experimentation and adaptation to accelerating AI technologies,” Fielder says. “We take our role as Customer Zero seriously, and that means boldly experimenting with agentic AI and leading this next transformation for our company and our customers.”