Microsoft, EY to spend $1 billion on helping customers buy agentic AI
Microsoft and EY will spend $1 billion on helping their customers adopt AI over the next five years. The billion will support assisting clients with pioneering AI projects and capability building, said EY’s global Microsoft alliance leader, Paul Clark. Clients will be able to access those resources based on their specific needs, he said. “We’re intentionally building the EY forward deployed engineer (FDE) capability through close collaboration and training with Microsoft, while maintaining integrated EY-Microsoft teams in the field,” he said in an email. “Clients will continue to experience this as one combined team, bringing together engineering depth and transformation expertise.” EY has acted as “client zero” in this initiative, embedding AI in all facets of its organization while it validated ways of working with Microsoft’s technologies. After an initial trial of Microsoft Copilot with 150,000 users, it is now rolling it out through Microsoft 365 E7 to all 400,000 staff. Its combi