Microsoft launches $2.5bn business to help customers achieve AI ROI

Microsoft has announced a new operating business intended to help customers deploy AI and realise return on investment with the technology, backed by a $2.5 billion investment.

Microsoft Frontier Company will provide customers with assistance deploying AI models from Microsoft and third-party providers, which the company said will help organisations make the most of their AI investment and tailor deployment of the technology to their specific needs.

Services will also include help with AI observability, management, governance, and security post deployment, as well as the emerging discipline of FinOps to track the cost of AI in detail.

6,000 Microsoft employees will be embedded with customers through the company, including Microsoft forward-deployed engineers, consultants, and sector-specific salespeople.

It has committed these employees to “co-design, co-innovate, deploy and continuously improve AI systems at scale based on measurable business outcome”.

Rodrigo Kede Lima, who has served as president for Microsoft Asia since 2024, has been named as the firm’s new president.

Central to the new business is a promise to leverage organisational data to improve ROI while protecting the intellectual property of its customers. This includes a commitment by Microsoft not to train AI models based on customer data or organisational practices. Yesterday, Palantir chief executive Alex Karp suggested that leading AI companies were betraying users’ trust by training models on data that they were aware was confidential.

Microsoft said that AI deployment is a business-by-business process as every organisation has different IT environments, budgets, risk profiles, and goals.

The firm has committed to supporting a wide range of models and approaches to AI, run through the Microsoft IQ platform.

This includes Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Fabric, GitHub Copilot, and its agentic AI offering Agent 365, underpinned by Microsoft Azure.

“Customers shouldn’t be locked into a single model any more than they should be locked into a single technology vendor,” said Judson Althoff, chief executive for Microsoft Commercial Business.

“Microsoft’s platform gives organizations the flexibility to run the right model for each scenario – whether it comes from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, open source or a specialised model tuned for a specific industry – without ceding control to any one of them.”

The new business unit will also work with Microsoft’s established systems integration partners such as Accenture, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, and PwC, the firm said.

As an example of the work the unit will do, Althoff pointed to Microsoft’s partnership with London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) which he said is already showing results. Finance professionals at LSEG are now able to use AI to quickly get answers about their structured and unstructured financial data, he added.

Initial Microsoft Frontier Company clients also include packaged goods company Unilever and pharma giant Novo Nordisk.