Microsoft and consulting giant EY plan to invest more than $1 billion over the next five years to accelerate the use of AI by their clients.
The global project will see the companies, which have worked together for 29 years, deploy Microsoft engineers and EY professionals to provide industry-specific AI systems for enterprises.
The program is designed to help organizations that had already passed experimentation stage with AI and wanted to “move faster from AI ambition to measurable business outcomes,” Deb Cupp, executive vice president of Microsoft Global Enterprise, said in a blog post.
The overriding idea, she continued, is to help organizations become “frontier firms,” where AI is embedded across the enterprise, and not simply “layered on top.”
Initially, the initiative will focus on developing services and systems across finance, tax, risk, HR and supply chains in a number of sectors, including financial services, energy, retail, government and healthcare.
EY dubbed the initiative “Client Zero,” with its own teams developing ways of working with Microsoft technologies.
Among the examples of this was the deployment of Microsoft Copilot to 150,000 EY staff, resulting in a claimed 15% increase in productivity that delivered enhanced client delivery and enabled further learning.
EY is now scaling Copilot using Microsoft’s 365 E7 Frontier Suite, a platform created to help AI work across entire businesses, to its 400,000-plus staff around the world.
Other examples include modernizing finance operations with Microsoft Power Platform with integrated agents in Copilot Studio, resulting in cost and time savings, and introducing Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence on EY’s tax platform, automating data extraction from documents. This reduced manual workloads by 90%, according to the companies.
