The rise of artificial intelligence is upon us, and it presents a critical question for IT leaders and practitioners: how will your organization respond? At Microsoft, that question spurred the creation of an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT arm. This CoE is serving as a guide, helping us navigate the AI revolution and determine the best internal deployment strategies.
Evaluating AI’s Potential
Our approach began with understanding what our employees hope to gain from AI. Next-generation AI is transformative, presenting a significant opportunity for Microsoft, as it does for all enterprises. The fundamental principle guiding our CoE is embracing this opportunity and facilitating its integration responsibly. We understand that successfully implementing AI isn’t merely about attaching AI features to existing systems; it requires fundamentally rethinking how we operate. We aim to use AI to amplify human ingenuity, deliver transformative experiences, and safeguard our people, business, and data. The CoE empowers our teams to contemplate how AI can enhance their work and to adapt their strategies accordingly.
To successfully navigate this AI revolution, we adopted a holistic approach, focusing on how each employee can achieve their full potential and how every team, department, and the entire organization can benefit from AI. “Getting AI right is about empowering your people to do their best work,” explains Rajamma Krishnamurthy, Principal Program Manager Architect in Microsoft Digital and one of the CoE’s leaders. “We’re off to a good start—now that we’re underway, we’re laser focused on making sure everything that we do empowers our employees be their best, most creative, selves while also protecting them and the company as well.”
Employee Needs and Leadership Vision of AI
Employee and leadership feedback is crucial in guiding our investments in AI. Employees have expressed the desire to simplify or remove tedious tasks, allowing them to focus on productive, creative work. They see AI as a tool to find information, summarize meetings, handle administrative tasks, and plan their day. The intention is to enhance their creative work and enable deeper and more insightful analytical work.
What Employees Want From AI
According to the Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index Annual Report, employees want AI to free up their time for more strategic and creative endeavors. Leaders, in turn, seek to empower employees, not replace them. They envision AI creating an environment that boosts productivity, improves well-being, reduces time spent on less valuable tasks, and enhances skills. “We want to empower employees to find time for more innovative and rewarding work,” Krishnamurthy says.
What Leaders Want From AI
The Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index Annual Report indicates that leaders see AI making their employees more productive, not replacing them. Amidst fears of potential job losses due to AI, the report found that business leaders are twice as likely to prioritize ‘increasing employee productivity’ over ‘reducing headcount’ when asked about the most valued aspect of AI in the workplace.
How Microsoft Leverages Its AI Center of Excellence
Our AI CoE is composed of experts across various fields within Microsoft, including data science, machine learning, business intelligence development, product development, experience design and research, accessibility, and program management. Operating under the AI 4 ALL (Accelerate, Learn, and Land) tagline, the team is responsible for planning, designing, implementing, and championing the internal use of AI within Microsoft. The CoE’s work is guided by four key pillars:
- Strategy: This team works with product and feature teams to define AI goals, business objectives, and priorities for implementations and investments.
- Architecture: They enable robust infrastructure, data services, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for all AI use cases.
- Roadmap: This team builds and manages implementation plans for AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and performance measurement.
- Culture: They foster collaboration, innovation, education, and responsible AI practices.
“These pillars are helping us stay focused on the right things,” Krishnamurthy says. “It’s about using AI to grow and nourish a culture of innovation and excellence across the company.”
Strategy
The Strategy team’s primary focus is to evaluate Microsoft’s AI initiatives and view AI not just as an addition or enhancement to pre-existing tools and processes but rather as a catalyst for transforming those tools and processes. We must be prepared to start from scratch to get the best results for our teams.
To fully realize AI’s potential, we’ve removed boundaries and re-evaluated every business process, reimagining how AI can enhance them. Our strategy, driven from the top, depends on executive sponsorship to ensure successful execution. Simultaneously, we encourage and value ideas from all levels of the organization, giving individuals across Microsoft the chance to contribute AI insights. We’re making quick progress, thanks to our digital transformation. David Finney, Director of IT Service Management, is enthusiastic about the CoE’s rapid achievements.
“The pace of AI technology is incredibly fast,” Finney says. “We’re moving into implementations quickly to capture value and stay relevant to developments in AI technology. At the same time, governance and control have to be at the forefront of our strategy and consider and respect responsible AI tenets in everything we do.”
Capturing Strategy with an Idea Pipeline
The central function of the Strategy team is to capture ideas and ongoing projects related to AI throughout Microsoft. Every employee is encouraged to contribute ideas on how AI can change our work, spanning from straightforward tasks to broader organizational policies. Our idea pipeline includes initiatives for the next fiscal year, like AI-powered career planning, intelligent help desk tools, fully automated issue detection and remediation, and AI-powered codebase migration.
One of the team’s most essential tasks is prioritizing this idea pipeline. Employees use a form to submit ideas with essential details. The Strategy team evaluates each idea, analyzing both business value and implementation effort.
- Business value: The potential for cost reduction, market opportunity, and user impact are factored into business value.
- Implementation effort: The team considers data gaps, solution complexity, and required resources. Low-effort ideas can result in quick wins.
Architecture
Our architecture pillar focuses on the readiness and design of the infrastructure and services that support AI at Microsoft. It also encompasses data readiness and the reusability of enterprise assets used for AI capabilities.
The CoE’s Architecture team manages these systems’ supporting infrastructure and ensures that our environment adheres to best practices for standards and governance. Architecture dependencies and interactions are critical to establishing sound architecture practices. When a product team is developing a service within the architecture, like storage, compute, or an API, decisions about design and architecture are influenced by the dependencies across these services.
The architecture we build is focused on open and liberal architecture standards.
“We ask questions,” says Faisal Nasir, a principal architect on the CoE Architecture team. He stresses the importance of continual self-examination. “What are the touch points? What is the impact? How do we achieve cost and performance balance? Where are we going to invest? Which of these services is going to get the capabilities? How are we organizing services? What platform-level capability will all services use, and what will be native to a particular area or service within a smaller group?”
Roadmap
The CoE Roadmap team focuses on our employee experience in the context of our AI solutions and ensures we achieve an optimal experience in and throughout AI projects. The user experience involves many considerations, including how employees interact with a service, ordinary use case scenarios, accessibility needs, etc. “AI isn’t a traditional product, so there isn’t a traditional path for user experience,” says Aria Fredman, a senior user experience researcher on the CoE Roadmap team. “We’re using AI to level the playing field for all Microsoft employees.”
Culture
Our company culture is helping us embrace this new chance with AI. It’s enabling us to empower our employees to learn the skills they need to lead us through this transformation and to help us build a vision for what we can do with it as a group. Our CoE Culture team focuses on two key areas of our AI implementation: responsibility and education. Culture moves into and influences the other pillars more than any other pillar. Culture underpins everything we do in the AI space.
“AI provides so many potential capabilities, but we must always ask, ‘are we using it in the right way?’” says Sengar, a software engineer on the CoE and in Microsoft Digital. “We’re building governance and guardrails around our systems to ensure we don’t misuse it. Our mandate to use AI responsibly underpins everything we do in this space.”
Conclusion
Microsoft’s AI CoE will provide the guidance and governance needed to foster innovation and encourage positive disruption in all lines of business.
“Whatever applications we produce, whatever experiences we create, whatever productivity and efficiency we want to bring to our employees, we always ask the question: ‘How will this contribute to their engagement and involvement and enable them to thrive within the company,’” Krishnamurthy says.
How to Start an AI Center of Excellence
- Use AI to transform your company.
- Boost employee creativity.
- Provide personalized information.
- Improve on-site and remote experiences.
- Improve infrastructure management, compliance monitoring, governance, and real estate and space planning.
- Give employees good guardrails.
- Encourage employee idea contributions
- Foster a culture of continuous learning.
- Explore new AI capabilities
