Transformation is the predominant word in any discussion about AI’s impact on business. Agentic AI is driving change at increasing pace and compelling organisations to rethink the way they work. To realise its full potential, companies need a commitment to experimentation, learning, trust – and people. That’s just as true for Microsoft as for any other business.
Lloyd Adams joined Microsoft as corporate vice president and chief operating officer for global enterprise sales in 2025, on the cusp of the agentic AI era. He brings three decades of experience in enterprise software – and he is unmistakably energised by the task ahead.
How does your career path add value to your current role?
My path into technology was unconventional. I studied history as an undergraduate and later earned a master’s degree in marketing. The history degree taught me something I’ve relied on throughout my career: every era is shaped by people making consequential decisions under uncertainty. That is just as true in business and technology today, which is why I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of technology, strategy and customer outcomes.
Before joining Microsoft, I spent almost 27 years at SAP – in presales, inside sales, marketing, as a regional marketing lead in Asia, and as president of the North America business. The common thread through it all was the mission-critical core of a business: the systems that run finance, supply chain and operations. When those are the stakes, customers are not looking for a vendor. They are looking for a trusted partner: someone they can rely on in both good times and difficult ones.
That is the lens I bring to Microsoft. AI is not an IT project; it is a business transformation agenda. It starts in the boardroom and extends through the C-suite into every part of the organisation. I have spent my career helping leaders navigate those conversations, and I bring both the relationships and the business perspective to focus on where technology creates real value.
I have also approached my role at Microsoft with a beginner’s mindset: eager to learn, but willing to challenge assumptions when needed. That combination of curiosity, humility and constructive impatience is where I believe I can contribute most.
As Microsoft begins a new financial year, how does the company’s approach to working with customers position it in the emerging AI market?
Anyone on my team will tell you I am competitive about the numbers. But growth is the output. The input is customer obsession. Get the second one right and the first one tends to follow.
Microsoft is genuinely differentiated by the breadth of the stack. We can bring a customer everything from Azure at the foundation, to Copilot, which I describe as the socket that carries the power of AI across every line of business, to Dynamics, to the security fabric that makes all of it safe to run. Very few companies can span that end to end, and in the AI era that integration matters enormously.
Access to AI will not be the advantage for long, because in time everyone will have access. The advantage is trust, and it shows up as a persistent thought partner rather than a transactional one. Too often in our industry the vendor appears at renewal and disappears in between. Our job is to be present, proactive and useful all year round. That is how you earn the right to grow.
Microsoft holds a strong position, but there is no room for complacency. We are deliberately raising both our technical and competitive intensity. We intend to compete with the urgency, focus and customer obsession this moment demands.
What have you learned about Microsoft’s partner community in the past year, and how do you see the partner model evolving?
The biggest thing I have learned, or really re-learned, is that the ecosystem is the multiplier. No single company, not even one of Microsoft’s size, delivers transformation on its own. Our partners bring industry expertise, implementation experience, specialised capabilities and a level of customer intimacy that extends our reach far beyond what we could achieve on our own.
Having spent most of my career at SAP, which is one of Microsoft’s most important partners, I’ve seen first-hand how interconnected these ecosystems really are. I’ve learnt that the strongest partnerships are built on trust and mutual success. Technology shifts, market conditions change and strategies evolve, but relationships endure when there is a genuine commitment to creating value together. I often tell our teams to make the tent as big as possible. The more inclusive the ecosystem, the stronger it becomes.
We’re now entering one of the most interesting periods in the history of partner-led innovation. Agentic AI is changing the dynamic in real time. Partners are no longer simply helping customers deploy technology; they are building their own intellectual property, creating industry-specific agents and co-innovating with us on the platform itself. That moves the relationship from implementation to innovation.
That’s where the greatest opportunity lies. The winners will be the companies that bring together the right ecosystem of capabilities to solve customer problems faster and create business outcomes that none of us could deliver alone.
Lloyd Adams spent nearly 27 years at SAP before joining Microsoft (Photo: Microsoft)
What best-practice models do you recommend for business leaders struggling to navigate their AI journey?
First, demystify it. Many leaders freeze because they assume they need to be technical to lead on AI. They do not. At its heart, AI is about rethinking and reimagining how work gets done, and that is a leadership exercise, not an engineering one. Some of the best AI leaders I meet could not write a line of code.
Second, start with the business outcome, not the technology. Choose a high-value problem and be ruthless about the metric: how does the needle move? I push my own teams hard on this. It is not especially interesting to say that 12,000 people now use a tool; what is interesting is the outcome those people produced. Anchor every initiative to a number the business genuinely cares about.
Third – and this separates the leaders from the laggards – redesign the work rather than bolting AI onto it. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index report makes the point sharply: the organisations pulling ahead, which we call frontier firms, are rearchitecting their workflows around AI agents instead of layering a new tool on top of an old process. Two-thirds of AI users already tell us they are spending more time on high-value work; frontier firms are the ones capturing that systematically rather than by accident.
Finally, keep it business-led and treat the organisation as a learning system. The strongest examples I see are finance, supply chain or marketing owning the use case, with IT in genuine service to it. Start focused, measure honestly, learn quickly, then scale what works.
How does Microsoft view agentic AI and its impact on workforce productivity?
A key theme of our 2026 Work Trend Index is that AI lifts the ceiling on individual potential. So much of the public conversation about AI has been about replacement, but what the data shows is expansion. In that Work Trend Index, well over half of AI users say they are producing work they simply could not have done a year ago. Among the most advanced users, the ones we call frontier professionals, that figure climbs to 80 per cent.
Agentic AI is the accelerant behind that. As agents take on more of the execution, people’s own agency expands. They move up the value chain to judgement, creativity, relationships and the distinctly human work that machines do not do. The ceiling on what one talented person can accomplish rises dramatically.
What strikes me in the research is how intentional the best users are. A genuinely new skill is emerging: being a good boss of your agents. It means deciding deliberately what to hand to AI and what to keep human-led. Tellingly, many of the most advanced users also choose to complete certain tasks without AI, precisely to keep their own skills sharp. That is wisdom, not resistance.
All of it rewards a beginner’s mindset and a commitment to continuous learning. In this environment, the advantage goes to the most curious. AI lifts the ceiling, but there is still a person standing beneath it, and keeping them at the centre is the entire point.
How will the landscape evolve for Microsoft, its partners and customers as the year progresses?
We are at an inflection point, not just for Microsoft, but for every organisation. The pace of change is accelerating and the companies that move first and learn fastest will create separation. Those that wait for certainty may find the market has moved on without them.
The first shift we’ll see is the mainstream adoption of agents. Many organisations have been experimenting with AI, and in the year ahead we’ll move beyond pilots and proofs of concept towards business processes redesigned around human-agent collaboration.
The second shift is that the conversation will move from access to AI to impact from AI. The differentiator will be how effectively organisations redesign work, empower people and build new operating models around these technologies. That’s not primarily a technology challenge; it’s a leadership challenge.
Most importantly, AI brings an opportunity to lift the ceiling on human potential. The greatest value won’t come from replacing work. It will come from freeing people to spend more time on judgement, creativity, problem-solving and the uniquely human capabilities that drive innovation and growth.
My third prediction is that trust becomes the defining currency of the AI era. As AI becomes embedded in mission-critical workflows and business processes, organisations will place an even greater premium on security, governance, compliance and responsible AI. Trust will be the foundation everything else is built upon.
For Microsoft, our partners and our customers, this creates an enormous opportunity. The ecosystem becomes even more important and the organisations that win will combine technology, trust and partnership to create outcomes that none of us could achieve independently.
We’re competing in one of the most important technology shifts of our generation. Success will be determined by our ability to stay focused on customers, earn their trust every day and help them realise the full potential of this new era. I’m optimistic about where we’re headed and even more excited about what we’ll accomplish together.
Read all this and more, including news, interviews, case studies and insight from industry experts, in the Autumn 2026 issue of Technology Record. To get content like this on a regular basis, subscribe to the print edition or free digital edition of the quarterly Technology Record magazine.