Microsoft Bets $2.5 Billion On Frontier AI Business
The new business will embed 6,000 industry and engineering experts with customers to build AI systems tied to measurable outcomes, while allowing enterprises to use models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and others.
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Image Credit- Chetan Jha/ MIT Sloan Management Review India
Microsoft Corp. has launched Microsoft Frontier Company, a new AI business backed by a $2.5 billion investment to help enterprise customers build, deploy and improve AI systems at scale.
The unit will embed 6,000 industry and engineering experts with customers to co-design AI systems tied to measurable business outcomes, Judson Althoff, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Commercial Business, said in a blog post on Thursday.
Rodrigo Kede Lima, a longtime Microsoft executive and most recently president of Microsoft Asia, will lead the business.
Microsoft said Frontier Company will go beyond traditional forward-deployed engineering by combining AI engineering, industry expertise, change management and continuous improvement.
The company will help customers choose and use different AI models, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, open-source providers and specialized industry models.
Althoff said customers should not be locked into a single AI model or vendor. The aim, he said, is to help companies use AI while protecting their own data, intellectual property, workflows and decision-making systems.
Microsoft said customer data and competitive knowledge will not be used to train models in ways that weaken what makes those customers distinct in their industries.
The new business will focus on end-to-end AI transformation, helping companies move from experiments to systems that deliver returns.
Microsoft said it is already working on such deployments with customers including London Stock Exchange Group, Land O’Lakes, Unilever and Novo Nordisk.
The company said it will also work with partners including Accenture, Capgemini, EY, KPMG and PwC to scale the offering.
