Writing on the Microsoft blog, Rodrigo Kede Lima, President of Microsoft Frontier Company, says the question he now hears from executives is no longer whether AI works but how to turn it into something that changes how a business operates. According to Lima, Microsoft Frontier Company was created to answer that question and has so far engaged on nearly 500 projects with more than 200 customers across 28 countries.

He names 3M, Alaska Airlines, BMW, Core42, KT, Land O'Lakes, London Stock Exchange Group, Mastercard, McKesson, Northern Trust, Novo Nordisk, Publicis Groupe, Saint-Gobain, Siemens and Unilever as customers working alongside Microsoft's Forward Deployed Engineering teams. He adds that most customers whose initial projects have been completed have come back for more, producing hundreds of follow-on engagements.

Lima argues that the technology itself is ready and that what slows AI adoption is everything surrounding it: identifying where AI delivers the most value, building trust and governance, redesigning operating models and helping people work differently.

Customer deployments

Unilever is working with Microsoft engineers to bring AI into its factories. At its Pondicherry plant — described as Unilever's largest Home Care Liquids factory in South Asia and a 2026 World Economic Forum Lighthouse site — a digital twin built on NVIDIA Omniverse and hosted on Azure simulates the factory environment with integrated live data, helping anticipate problems before they happen, monitor performance in real time and guide operators through fixes.

3M is collaborating with Microsoft engineers to help its Global Business Services team automate customer order management. The companies are building an AI agent-driven workflow for credit checks, delinquency assessments and system updates, with human-in-the-loop controls and a custom monitoring dashboard for real-time visibility and approvals. The solution is expected to significantly reduce manual effort, improve speed and consistency and accelerate cash flow while enabling scalable, auditable operations.

Publicis Groupe is co-building agentic processes with Microsoft engineers, grounded in Microsoft IQ so agents can work with the business context, data and knowledge behind its operations. The processes use reinforcement learning, drawing on real-world outcomes and human feedback to improve agent performance over time. The work builds on Publicis' rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot to all 114,000 of its employees.

Northern Trust wanted to speed up onboarding to its Asset Servicing Front Office Solutions platform, which took about two and a half weeks per client. Microsoft engineers worked with Northern Trust's experts to build an AI-powered onboarding agent inside the Excel and SharePoint tools analysts already use. Data preparation time fell 83%, from two and a half weeks to three days, with a 96.5% first pass quality score in testing, while analysts remain in control.

KT, one of South Korea's largest telecommunications providers, co-built AIO-Net with Microsoft engineers working from KT's offices. The continuously learning AI agent platform, informed by KT's operating procedures and veteran network experts, now detects network issues in two to three minutes, down from more than ten, while keeping people in control of decisions and actions.

Saint-Gobain, the 360-year-old construction materials company, is using AI to help reduce the carbon footprint of cement. Microsoft engineers used Microsoft Discovery to gather 62,000 patents and 44,000 research abstracts into a knowledge base in hours — work Saint-Gobain estimates would have taken researchers a year. In about six weeks, the team identified new hypotheses for cement additives that scientists are now testing in the lab.

The stated pattern

Lima describes a common pattern across these engagements: start with value rather than technology, redesign the process rather than just the task, build in fast cycles with the customer's teams, and put security, governance and cost management in place from day one so scaling does not stall.

He cites new research from IDC showing that while 66% of organizations report substantial or transformative results from AI, only 48% are scaling or seeing consistent value across their organizations, and 71% expect AI spending to increase by at least 10% in the next year. The IDC infographic referenced is sponsored by Microsoft (The Real Business Value of AI, IDC #US54985026-IG, November 2026).

Lima says Microsoft Frontier Company was deliberately designed to be flat and fast, with one front door for customers, and that it leads an operating business of 6,000 industry and engineering experts. He closes by arguing that the real test of the unit's work is what customers can do afterward: run, govern and improve their own AI systems on their own terms.