Professional services organisation EY and tech giant Microsoft have committed to a joint investment of more than $1 billion over the next five years. The initiative is designed to help businesses scale artificial intelligence (AI) across their operations and transition from isolated experimental pilots to broad, enterprise-wide execution.
Under the new agreement, integrated teams consisting of EY industry professionals and Microsoft “forward deployed engineers” will work directly with corporate clients. This deployment will utilise Microsoft’s specialised AI-native engineering approach to accelerate adoption across change management delivery models. The joint services will initially target core business functions such as finance, tax, risk management, human resources, and supply chain logistics. These solutions will be tailored for specific sectors, primarily focusing on financial services, industrials and energy, consumer and retail, government, and healthcare.
The collaboration relies heavily on data and operational feedback from EY’s internal adoption of Microsoft technologies. EY was one of the first organisations to adopt Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, and is currently scaling Copilot across its global workforce of more than 400,000 people to embed agentic AI capabilities enterprise-wide. EY claims that the initial deployment of Copilot to 150,000 users recorded a boost in productivity, which the firm reinvested into client delivery and learning.
Beyond the initial Copilot rollout, EY has integrated various AI systems into its own business units to validate their performance. The modernisation of its finance operations using the Microsoft Power Platform and intelligent agents via Copilot Studio resulted in 95% faster lead times and a 37% reduction in operational costs.
In its assurance division, a new multi-agent framework integrated with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft Fabric was embedded into the EY Canvas platform, encompassing the workflows of 130,000 professionals across 160,000 audit engagements. Additionally, early adoption of Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence on its Global Tax Platform reduced manual workloads by up to 90% by automatically extracting essential data from documents, the company stated.
The initiative aims to address a broader market challenge where organisations have struggled to move past early-stage generative AI experimentation to achieve measurable performance gains across multiple departments. The offering will feature a fully integrated operational structure, utilising shared governance, aligned commercial models, and mutual accountability across both corporations.
“With access to a single, integrated team, clients will have at their disposal both Microsoft’s market-leading engineering depth, alongside EY teams’ deep industry knowledge and change management capabilities. By combining people and innovation in this next phase of the alliance, clients will be empowered to realise the transformative power of agentic AI within the enterprise,” Janet Truncale, EY Global Chair and CEO, said in a statement.
“Our initiative combines Microsoft’s trusted AI platform and engineering teams with EY’s industry capabilities and experience as Client Zero, applying these technologies across their own organisation, to help customers move beyond pilots to enterprise execution, enhancing decision-making and delivering measurable impact,” Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s Commercial Business, added.
