The $1 billion partnership, announced Thursday (May 21), will see Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) and EY industry professionals join forces to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) adoption.
“AI is quickly moving from experimentation to a core driver of business performance, and the companies pulling ahead are those scaling AI transformation,” Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, said in a news release.
“Our initiative combines Microsoft’s trusted AI platform and engineering teams with EY’s industry capabilities and experience as Client Zero — applying these technologies across their own organization — to help customers move beyond pilots to enterprise execution, enhancing decision-making and delivering measurable impact.”
In its role as “Client Zero,” EY deployed Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant to 150,000 users, seeing a 15% uptick in productivity “that was reinvested into client delivery and learning,” according to the release.
EY is also scaling Copilot using Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, to its more than 400,000 employees around the world, embedding agentic AI capabilities “across the enterprise to drive business impact,” the companies said.
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Microsoft and EY said the partnership will initially focus on finance, tax, risks, HR and supply chain work inside the financial services, industrial/energy, consumer/retail, government and healthcare sectors.
The partnership comes at a time when many American workers are receiving little to no training on how to use AI at work, as recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows.
The study, “Wage to Wallet™ Index – The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy,” found that 48% of U.S. workers in educated professional and higher-paying roles, typically salaried, “go to work each day and confront AI tools they’re not prepared to use effectively,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week.
This is happening at the same time that companies are rapidly embedding AI into their operations, per additional research from PYMNTS Intelligence.
Chitra Nawbatt, an advisor to venture capital and private equity-backed companies and a former Deutsche Bank executive, told PYMNTS she sees an increasing disconnect between what workers are being told about AI-fueled change and the factors that are currently leading to job cuts and career risk.
“In the context of a large company, the impact right now is microscopic,” she said. “A chatbot is not replacing the sales process. It’s not doing contract negotiation. All these companies have thousands of people and a maturation curve for every product, service line and function.”
