Alice Chambers |
Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft, revealed the framework for AI transformation success during Microsoft’s AI Tour London keynote, which took place on 5 March 2025.
“Today, we have customers coming to us with no fewer than a hundred ideas for AI and their business,” he said. “If they paid an advisory firm, they have 400 big ideas on what can be done with generative AI. This shows the need for a strong foundation for thinking about how to apply these technologies to drive real-world outcomes.”
According to Althoff, there are four pillars for AI transformation: enriching employee experiences, reinventing customer engagement, reshaping business processes and bending the curve on innovation.
“Is the scenario being brough forward helping to drive outcomes in the business?”, Althoff asked the audience. “Or is it simply ‘technology for technology’s sake’? “Enriching employee experience is fundamental. People need to be excited to come and work for your company. You can make your organisation more effective and efficient with AI.”
Althoff referenced Microsoft’s own deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot across 65,000 of its employees.
“It was a big trade-off for me because the technology infrastructure [the GPUs that power the AI infrastructure for Microsoft 365] was a massive opportunity cost so deciding to invest in my people rather than sell it out to customers was a business decision,” he said. “So, as a result, I track it religiously.”
Microsoft’s own top quartile of Copilot users generate 10 per cent more pipeline and 23 per cent faster close rates, and have nine per cent more revenue per head.
“Those aren’t massive percentages but when you multiply them across 65,000 people in a $200 billion business, it’s pretty awesome. The stuff pays for itself. So measuring the outcomes is critical for success.”
Microsoft has also deployed AI agents to better engage with customers, most notably in its customer support call centres.
“We handle over 75 million incidents a year,” said Althoff. “We have approximately 15,000 employees that work in our call centres. The operation costs about $4 billion annually to run.”
However, Copilot provides full-case management and helps employees to solve problems for customers “faster and more efficiently than ever before,” said Althoff. “We are saving over $500 million this fiscal year alone. On top of that, customer and employee satisfaction is going up.”
Althoff then defined a ‘business process’ as an “artefact of human workflow that takes something from point A to point B”. He referred to the appointment of Pamela Maynard as Microsoft’s chief AI transformation officer as helping to put AI to work on behalf of the company to reshape its business processes.
“We’re going to continue to grow revenue without adding any incremental headcount in the next three years,” said Althoff. “So, AI transformation pays for itself if you stay focused on how it helps business processes.”
The key message from the keynote, and across sessions throughout the day at the Microsoft AI Tour London, was that every single industry has the opportunity to “bend the curve” with AI.
To achieve this companies should “put commercial-available assets [like Copilot] to assistance before you hone in on a specific large language model… once you’ve pushed these assets to their limits, then start thinking about what you can uniquely do with differentiated AI solutions with the best data platforms on the market so that your processes get maximum yield for your business.”