Inside Microsoft: Being Customer Zero in an AI-powered world

The rate of change in IT is accelerating at a blistering pace. AI-powered capabilities like Microsoft 365 Copilot have enabled a new era of employee productivity. Today, agentic capabilities are supercharging IT like never before. As IT leaders, we are living in extraordinary times.

But change can be destabilizing, even during normal times for the most confident and sure-footed IT teams. That’s why our commitment at Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—to act as Customer Zero for our company and our customers has never been more important.

“We need to shepherd the company through this era of AI disruption. We’re working to transform all of Microsoft into an AI-first workplace, sharing our insights with customers so they can follow our lead.”

Matt Hempey, partner product manager, Microsoft Digital

If we can navigate this era of generational change, powered by AI with confidence, and provide a clear blueprint for our customers to follow, we will truly live up to Microsoft’s mission to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

“We need to shepherd the company through this era of AI disruption,” says Matt Hempey, partner product manager in Microsoft Digital. “We’re working to transform all of Microsoft into an AI-first workplace, sharing our insights with customers so they can follow our lead.”

Like the advent of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, AI is having a transformative effect on information technology—and the risks and opportunities are potentially even greater than those earlier breakthroughs. In Microsoft Digital, our role as Customer Zero has become more critical than ever. We serve as Microsoft’s first and best customer for each of our groundbreaking technologies, ensuring that they’re enterprise and world-ready.

An evolving approach

Being Customer Zero means a deep partnership between our IT organization and our company’s product engineering teams to envision the right experiences, co-develop innovative products, and both listen to and act on the insights we gather from our employees and customers. We work closely together to stay grounded in the way our employees use our products every day, so your employees can benefit from our experiences and takeaways.

“In Microsoft Digital, we’re well aware that the only constant is change. But the last 12 months have shown that our old models are no match for the wave of change we’re seeing at Microsoft. We have to adapt our approach.”

Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

But just like changes in the tech industry caused Microsoft to embrace an agile approach to software development, the advent of AI compels us to reimagine our role as Customer Zero. Since the first version of this article was published three years ago, our approach in Microsoft Digital has changed. Today, our focus is on helping our employees to harness the transformative power of AI to reimagine the world of work.

Customer Zero evolution

“In Microsoft Digital, we’re well aware that the only constant is change,” says Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “But the last 12 months have shown that our old models are no match for the wave of change we’re seeing at Microsoft. We have to adapt our approach.”

Our philosophy has shifted from envisioning new experiences to a wholesale reimagining of the workplace. We’re moving beyond deploying, governing, and building solutions to a world where we empower our employees to define and deploy agentic capabilities that dramatically increase their productivity.

While we still deploy, govern, and operate our productivity tenants in secure and compliant ways, we also focus on defining guardrails that enable our employees to maximize their productivity and creativity. And we continue to be the voice of the organization’s own digital transformation, with an intentional focus on how AI is helping us transform our enterprise from the inside out.

Envisioning the future

When we began our Customer Zero journey, our charter was to envision transformative employee experiences. With advances in AI and the advent of Microsoft 365 Copilot, our ambition has moved beyond experiences to consider entire workflows, as well as the agentic workplace of the future. Here are some of our plans:

• We engage with our employees and customers around the world to better understand their needs, then work with product engineering to co-develop AI-powered solutions.
• We anticipate and address product requirements that our large enterprise customers will have as they pursue agentic workflows, based on our experience reimagining business, operational, and technological processes at Microsoft.
• We leverage our insights gained from managing a vast array of IT services at Microsoft—including network, infrastructure, devices, and end-user services—to design and build new AI-powered capabilities, then ensure they meet the needs of our employees.
• We evaluate and improve our processes using continuous improvement techniques to ensure they’re ready for an agentic future.

{Learn more about Microsoft Digital’s IT journey and how it’s enabled AI transformation at Microsoft.}

Empowering our employees

While Microsoft Digital still builds, deploys, and drives adoption of new employee capabilities, our posture has shifted from employee enablement to employee empowerment. Some examples of how we’re empowering our employees include:

• Within our productivity tenants, we create whatever digital assets and containers they need to be productive. That could be a new SharePoint site, Teams group, Power BI workspace, agent, or even an Azure subscription. The key is that the new tool or asset is in our tenant, which means its lifecycle can be securely managed, enabling productivity while also helping to cut down on shadow IT.
• Our employees can create agents using Agent Builder in SharePoint or Copilot Studio. These AI-powered agents are helping our teams achieve new levels of productivity, and future capabilities are only going to accelerate that trend.
• We’ve nurtured and empowered a Copilot champions community at Microsoft that stands at nearly 10,000 employees. These enthusiastic champions are helping to shape the future of AI at the company, as they build new AI-powered experiences while sharing their knowledge and excitement with their peers. Their expertise and passion augment our ability to drive change in the enterprise, with role-based champions helping to supercharge AI-powered transformation across Microsoft.

{Learn how we’re driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot with our Champs community.}

Defining the guardrails

In an era of agentic transformation, simply deploying, operating, and managing our services is no longer enough. To support employee empowerment, we need to define appropriate guardrails to maintain a secure and compliant environment while also enabling innovation. We do that by:

• Applying controls to ensure that users and apps don’t gain access to privileged information.
• Keeping employees from creating agents that violate company policies.
• Balancing between the freedom for employees to share their creations and the need to prevent agent sprawl.
• Delineating which agents are authoritative and safe for enterprise functions.
• Maintaining an inventory of agents to provide lifecycle management.

These guardrails keep our environment safe and secure while simultaneously allowing our employees to define the future of AI-powered productivity.

{Discover how we’re governing AI here at Microsoft.}

Creating the AI-powered IT blueprint

Transformation with AI is hard work, but thankfully our Microsoft Digital team is actively working to share insights from our own transformational experience. We do that in person, through our global network of Experience Centers. We do it virtually, through hundreds of virtual customer engagements each year. And we do it right here on Inside Track, where we share detailed guides, stories, and other artifacts designed to accelerate your own AI-powered digital transformation.

Our commitment is to not only share our IT blueprint, but also to listen to our customers so we can amplify your insights to improve Microsoft enterprise products and services.

“In our Customer Zero capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring AI-powered experiences to life. Everything we do as Customer Zero helps Microsoft serve as the showcase for AI-powered digital transformation.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Digital

Customer Zero: A mentality and a promise

Microsoft Digital continues to evolve, and our approach as Customer Zero is key to that evolution. We obsess over applications of AI to ensure that our employees are the most productive in the world. As a customer, you can have even greater confidence in our AI-powered solutions since we’ve already deployed and tested them at a global enterprise scale.

“We’ve become an increasingly strategic contributor to Microsoft’s product offerings, especially in this era of AI,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “In our Customer Zero capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring AI-powered experiences to life. Everything we do as Customer Zero helps Microsoft serve as the showcase for AI-powered digital transformation.”

The next chapter of our Customer Zero journey is the most exciting yet. As we continue to learn, we’ll share more stories from the front lines of AI-powered digital transformation here on Inside Track.