As the pace of change accelerates, organizations are swiftly moving from experimenting with AI to transforming on an enterprise scale. Leaders are focusing on achieving measurable outcomes, quicker time to value, and repeatability across their businesses. However, many face a common challenge: the issue is no longer about deciding whether to invest in AI, but rather how to scale its adoption and deliver consistent, enterprise-wide impact.
Over the past year, it has become evident that organizations are not questioning the importance of AI. Instead, they are seeking to understand how to integrate it into their workflows to ensure it delivers meaningful results. This is where many are encountering obstacles. The challenge has shifted from experimentation to execution.
Intelligence and trust as the foundation
At Microsoft, the belief is that successful AI transformation relies on two key elements: intelligence and trust. Organizations must leverage their unique work intelligence—comprising data, workflows, and expertise—and apply it through AI in flexible, secure, and governed ways. This requires a platform that supports model diversity and continuous innovation while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance, and reliability.
Equally important is embedding AI into the daily workflow—how people collaborate, make decisions, and operate. For this to scale, systems must be transparent, secure, and accountable. This is where real enterprise value is created, and where many organizations need a clearer path forward.
Achieving impact at scale involves more than deploying new tools. It requires a trusted foundation that integrates data, security, privacy, and governance, along with a new model for delivering AI into the business. Microsoft and EY are strengthening their alliance to help organizations transition from AI ambition to measurable business outcomes more swiftly.
From pilots to production
There is an abundance of AI pilots in the market today. However, pilots alone do not transform businesses. Organizations now need the ability to scale AI across the enterprise, integrate it into core workflows, and deliver sustained, repeatable impact. EY brings this experience to the table.
As one of the first global organizations to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale, EY began with an initial rollout to 150,000 of its employees, quickly illustrating the potential when AI is embedded into everyday work. The results were significant and measurable: a 15% productivity gain reinvested into client delivery and continuous learning, 94% monthly adoption, 85% weekly usage, and 63% of enabled employees using Copilot three or more days per week. Additionally, 81% of employees reported time savings, with 84% redirecting that time to higher-value work and 73% improving quality of output.
The impact extends beyond individual productivity into agentic AI in core business operations: finance operations modernized with intelligent agents, driving 95% faster lead times and more than a 37% reduction in operational costs; a multi-agent AI framework was deployed across 130,000 Assurance professionals and 160,000 audit engagements; and tax workflows were transformed through document automation, reducing manual effort by up to 90%.
With these results, EY is now expanding Copilot through Microsoft 365 E7 to over 400,000 of its employees worldwide, moving from early success to true enterprise scale. This represents what enterprise-scale transformation looks like—not isolated wins, but sustained impact across the organization. It also explains why EY serves as Customer Zero, applying Microsoft AI technologies internally to validate solutions before offering them to clients.
Investing in what actually drives outcomes
Building on this foundation, Microsoft and EY are jointly investing over $1 billion in a new initiative designed to help organizations transition from isolated AI use cases to enterprise-scale transformation. This initiative combines Microsoft’s AI platforms, such as Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Foundry, Fabric, and security, with EY’s deep industry capabilities and transformation leadership.
What sets this initiative apart is not just what is offered, but how it is delivered. At its core is a shared focus on helping organizations become Frontier Firms, where AI is seamlessly integrated across the enterprise rather than being an additional layer. In a Frontier Firm, data, workflows, and decision-making are interconnected, with AI becoming an integral part of how work is performed, enhancing human expertise with intelligent systems.
Reaching this level requires more than investment; it demands execution. This is where the approach of Microsoft and EY is fundamentally different. They cooperate as an integrated transformation engine, co-developing, co-engineering, and co-delivering solutions aligned with real business priorities.
A key component of this model is Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), who work alongside EY transformation teams directly within customer environments. Together, these teams co-create solutions based on business needs, accelerate deployment across complex systems, and remain engaged from initial use case through full-scale adoption.
This integrated model bridges the gap between strategy and execution, reducing friction across the technology stack and creating a direct path from pilot to production at enterprise scale. It also ensures that intelligence and trust advance together, embedding AI across data, applications, and infrastructure in ways that can be governed, secured, and continuously optimized. Importantly, it establishes a repeatable blueprint that organizations can use to scale AI adoption across functions, industries, and geographies.
Why this matters now
Organizations are under increasing pressure to move faster, going beyond experimentation to deliver AI across the enterprise. What they need is not just technology but a clear path to execution grounded in both intelligence and trust. AI is not simply about working faster; it’s about enabling people and organizations to achieve more, focusing on insight, creativity, and higher-value decision-making.
Microsoft’s collaboration with EY demonstrates what is possible when AI is deployed with purpose at scale. Together, they are sharing these learnings with customers worldwide, assisting them in accelerating transformation, unlocking efficiencies, and creating new opportunities for growth. Microsoft and EY are committed to helping organizations turn AI ambition into enterprise impact.
Learn more in the official announcement.
