Building the system for AI at work

To our customers,

There’s no shortage of sound and fury in AI right now. New models, record benchmarks, louder claims every week. But underneath the noise, something real has happened: AI can now do genuine, economically valuable work. The big question for you today is how to put it to work safely, affordably, and at scale.

There’s no single product or playbook that gets you there. It’s a journey, and we want to be alongside you every step of the way. We do that in three ways:

Platform

The labs are in a constant game of leapfrog, and no model is best at everything. They’re trained differently, so they fail differently. In a market moving this fast, betting on one model, one lab, or one trend carries a risk you don’t have to take.

Our platform brings you the world’s leading models, from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. Then we take it further. We embed AI into the apps your people use every day. We integrate it with all of your data. We ground it in the context and intellectual property that set you apart from your competition. And we give you the most powerful tools for building agents, with one place to monitor, secure, and govern them across your organization.

An agent isn’t finished the day you deploy it—that’s just where it starts. The organizations pulling ahead decide what good work looks like, measure against it, and improve a little at a time until the agent outperforms anything they could have specified up front. We’re building those continuous improvement loops directly into the product, so you can compound small improvements into a real competitive advantage.

Business model

Leading a business in this era means managing AI costs. For twenty years, enterprise software carried a predictable price: a user subscription license (USL), a flat monthly fee per employee, no matter how much anyone used it. AI arrived on that same model, but agents don’t work that way. Two costs are emerging now, and the mistake I see most often is judging one by the other’s logic.

The first is that subscription: broad access at a predictable per-person price, where the intelligence underneath keeps improving while the price stays flat. The second is usage-based billing (UBB), tied to the work that gets done rather than the number of people doing it, because long-running jobs vary too much for a flat fee to absorb. That second cost isn’t overhead. It’s capital, invested to build capability, and it belongs to the business the way headcount does.

We make both predictable and easy to manage. The Copilot USL gives every employee a complete AI productivity experience: Chat, Copilot across your Microsoft 365 apps, ready-made agents like Researcher and Analyst, and the tools to build their own. UBB is charged in Copilot Credits, a shared currency that aggregates AI operations across the platform, so Copilot Cowork and other agentic capabilities draw on one meter. And we give you complete visibility into where spend is going, and the ability to set limits before the invoice arrives, not after.

Partnership

The hardest part of this isn’t the technology. It’s the change—rewiring how work gets done, and getting people to trust it. That’s where most efforts stall, and it’s not something you can buy.

We meet you where you are and help you craft and execute your plan. We invest in a long-term relationship, putting Forward Deployed Engineers alongside your teams. And we share what we’re learning—from our own transformation, from our research, and from the work we’re doing with organizations across industries. When you choose Microsoft, you’re not buying a tool. You’re gaining a partner with skin in the game.

We’re not the flashiest AI company out there. We’re purposefully understated, because the work that runs a company isn’t a demo, and it doesn’t reward hype. It rewards systems that show up every day and do the job. We build with the conviction that AI should expand human agency, not narrow it—giving your people better tools to do their best work and take on harder problems. Our job is to give you the platform, the economics, and the partnership to choose well, and to make AI matter where it matters most: in the work, and the people that move your business forward.

jS

Jared Spataro

Chief Marketing Officer, AI at Work

Microsoft