microsoft product case study

Azure case studies and customer stories

See how organizations all over the world are optimizing their costs and gaining new capabilities on Azure

Organizations in all industries and of all sizes—from startups to Fortune 500—are putting Azure AI to work

Explore Azure customer success stories by industry

See how healthcare organizations are enhancing care by improving patient engagement, provider collaboration, and operations.

Financial services and banking

Discover how financial companies transform customer experience, build trust, and optimize risk management on Azure.

Manufacturing

Find new ways to drive business transformation and keep pace with customer needs by seeing how manufacturers are innovating on the cloud.

Explore Azure retail customers' innovations for creating tailored, multichannel experiences and optimizing supply chains.

Find out how governments of all sizes are serving citizens more effectively and securely—while managing costs.

Learn how game developers are using Azure to build, launch, and scale their games across platforms.

Contact Azure Sales

Start a chat session, call us, or have us call you—your choice.

Try Azure for free

Get popular services free for 12 months and 45+ other services free always—plus $200 credit to use in your first 30 days.

Microsoft customer stories

See how Microsoft tools help companies run their business.

This browser is no longer supported.

Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.

Case study in performance testing and optimization

• 3 contributors

A global corporate travel company wanted to transform its call center with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, but its solution was complex. It had many process flows that integrated with legacy systems, some with high transaction volumes. It needed to customize some functionality that wasn't available out of the box. And it expected its solution to support 4,000 users at scale. It had to plan carefully to deliver optimal performance.

The problem: No budget for performance testing

Company leadership decided that performance testing was out of scope because of budget constraints. They assumed that Microsoft would take care of the performance since Dynamics 365 is a cloud service.

But the project team knew better. They used the best practices from the Success by Design framework and their own experiences to show the risks of skipping performance testing. They warned about possible negative outcomes if they didn't consider performance:

• Users wouldn't adopt the system if it slowed down their work.
• Costs would be higher if they had to fix performance issues later.

The project architect explained to the company's stakeholders who owned what. Dynamics 365 is a cloud service, but factors like customizations, data volumes, and network latencies also affect how a solution performs.

The project team summarized their recommendations like this:

Review the application design and code for scalability.

Establish baselines and review the areas that need optimization, including network configurations.

Set a baseline for form load times to measure performance and align a new solution.

Make sure that integrated systems perform as expected.

Agree on realistic key performance indicators for the business.

Assess current end-to-end connectivity to determine network performance and latency.

Leadership agreed with the recommendations and asked the project steering committee to approve adding performance testing to the test cycle.

The solution: Performance testing and optimization

The company's architect worked with the implementation partner's architect to plan for performance testing. They:

• Defined the key criteria for testing, including integration scenarios.
• Assessed the concurrent user loads and peak usage.
• Examined the data volumes.
• Established the tools for testing.

Performance testing helped the team find several gaps before deploying the solution to production. They also:

• Optimized their network configuration.
• Identified sync calls that were blocking resources and changed the design accordingly.
• Applied basic patterns (such as retrieving only the required attributes) across their code components.

Performance testing ensured optimal performance and stakeholder alignment before the system was ready for users. For overall success and higher adoption, a performance plan is essential throughout an application's lifecycle.

Was this page helpful?

Additional resources

Monitor and manage your environmental sustainability with data and AI

Drive data transparency and insights to take action on your goals, using Microsoft Sustainability Manager. Make progress faster with powerful, new AI capabilities including Microsoft Copilot (Preview).

Accelerate your sustainability journey with the power of data

Step up sustainability progress and business growth with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Discover a growing set of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) capabilities from Microsoft and our global partners.

The Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business

Understand how to better collect, assess, and drive business value with ESG data. Plus, learn how your company's stage of ESG data readiness affects your planning, reporting, compliance, and capital allocation decisions.

Assess your impact

Make full use of your data investments to measure and monitor your environmental footprint.

Accelerate progress

Adopt data-driven solutions to reduce the environmental impact of your operations.

Transform your business

Reimagine your business systems and business models with innovative digital technologies.

Cloud-scale analytics to meet the future head on

Today’s organizations face growing pressures to improve their ESG performance while growing business. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability provides the foundation to collect, standardize, and report ESG data from across your operations and value chain—giving you the visibility and insights to drive progress.

Follow our progress: 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report

See how we’re standing strong in our commitments while accelerating innovation and partnership for people and the planet.

Build for the future with experienced solution providers

Explore off-the-shelf and custom Microsoft technology–based sustainability solutions that are designed to help you drive value while achieving your goals.

Sustainability in action

Harnessing powerful sustainability data to meet powerful goals

The plant-based ingredients provider Ingredion chose Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to replace manual data collection and make progress across 13 areas, including emissions, plastics, biodiversity, and human rights.

Addressing urgency and complexity through intelligent data

Energy giant bp is using Azure Synapse data analytics and IoT to track and manage carbon emissions toward becoming net zero by 2050 or sooner, and helping the world collectively achieve net zero.

Tackling risk and carbon footprint at sea and in port

LeeWay Marine used a Microsoft Azure mixed reality solution to augment its in-person support model—reducing risk, overhead, downtime, and overall carbon impact.

Sustainability for every industry—global case studies

Explore the many ways Microsoft customers are using technology to unify data intelligence, reduce operational and value-chain impacts, and invent bold new business models.

Start your sustainability journey

Find out how you can create efficiencies and build a more sustainable future using Microsoft cloud–based technology solutions.

Stay informed about Microsoft sustainability

Sign up to receive emails about Microsoft sustainability news, initiatives, and technology.

Follow Microsoft

• Business User
• IT Professional
• New Outlook for Windows
• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Adoption Score
• Microsoft Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Copilot for Sales (old)
• Microsoft Copilot for Service
• Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Microsoft Graph
• Microsoft Lists
• Microsoft Loop
• Microsoft Mesh
• New Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Search
• Classic Microsoft Teams
• New Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Teams Premium
• Microsoft Teams Phone
• Microsoft Security
• Microsoft Syntex
• Microsoft Viva
• Outlook mobile
• SharePoint Premium
• Champion Management Platform
• Extensibility Look Book Gallery
• Microsoft 365 Archive
• Microsoft 365 Backup
• Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways
• Microsoft Intelligent Document Processing
• Microsoft Teams App Templates
• New Employee Onboarding Solution Accelerator
• Partner Solution Gallery
• Sample Solution Gallery
• SharePoint eSignature
• SharePoint look book
• Accessibility
• Adoption guides
• Azure Adoption Framework
• Case Studies
• Employee experience
• FastTrack for Microsoft 365
• Guidance for virtual events
• How Microsoft does IT
• Leading in the era of AI
• Microsoft 365 Roadmap
• Meetings, webinars, and town halls in Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Copilot Scenario Library
• Modern Collaboration Architecture (MOCA)
• Mondays at Microsoft
• Podcasts & Shows
• Remote learning in education
• Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams upgrade
• Streamline end user training
• AI learning hub
• Become a Service Adoption Specialist
• Coffee in the Cloud tutorials
• Developer training
• End user training
• IT Pro training
• Microsoft 365 Champion Program
• Microsoft Community Learning
• Microsoft Learn
• Modern Work Customer Hub (Microsoft Copilot customer training) DEPRECATED
• Office Quick Start guides
• Microsoft Community
• Microsoft Community Tenant
• Microsoft Global Community Initiative
• Release notes
• Microsoft Copilot resources for education
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 for Small and Medium Business
• Microsoft Teams for Frontline workers
• Microsoft Teams for Small and Medium Business

Home / Microsoft Copilot Scenario Library / Marketing

Using Copilot in Marketing

It’s more important than ever to deliver creative, high-quality content that is authentic to your brand. At the same time, cross-functional campaigns are becoming more complex to manage across new surfaces.  Marketing teams must overcome the traditional communications gap between marketing and sales and marketing and product teams to develop a cohesive strategy for success.

Read how Softchoice is using Copilot to create marketing materials more that 60% faster – case study

Functional scenarios

Customer service .

• Boost field efficiency
• Communication logging
• Identify a root cause
• Managing Service Agents
• Respond to a customer complaint (Copilot for Service)
• Respond to a customer complaint (Microsoft 365 Copilot)
• Accounting document evaluation
• Amendment comparisons
• Automate financial query management
• Build a business case
• Collections coordination
• Contract accounting guidance
• Contract management
• Contract review
• Financial insights
• Launch a new accounting app
• Optimize your financial operations (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Procurement insight acceleration
• Update a guidance document

Human Resources 

• Analyze hiring practices
• Automate benefits query management​
• Candidate search
• Deliver insights to managers
• Improve onboarding and development processes (Copilot Studio)
• Improve onboarding and development processes (Microsoft 365 Copilot)
• Improve organizational health metrics
• Manage internal job transitions​
• Resolving employee issues
• Streamline benefits and compensation​ (Copilot Studio)
• Streamline benefits and compensation​ (Microsoft 365 Copilot)
• Streamline your recruiting process (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Update a policy document

Information Technology 

• Assisted device acquisition
• Build analytics within Fabric
• Conduct a security script analysis
• Conduct a vulnerability impact assessment
• Create a project plan
• Draft a product strategy document
• Evaluate and purchase a new IT solution
• General IT prompts (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Guidance on network upgrade script
• IT helpdesk chatbot
• Manage application installations
• Onboard and train new users
• Outage user communications
• Perform a security incident investigation
• Tech engagement health
• Update technology strategy
• Develop a compliance video (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Legal strategy development​
• Licensing agreement negotiation
• Quicker contract review (Copilot Studio)
• Quicker contract review (Microsoft 365 Copilot)
• Quicker legal guidance

Marketing 

• Campaign performance tracking​
• Collect and share product feedback​
• Content creation (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Create a new offering​
• Creating a marketing Bill of Materials (Copilot Studio)
• Creating a marketing Bill of Materials (Microsoft 365 Copilot)
• Product launch
• Streamline market research and strategy
• Targeted campaigns​

Marketing Communications 

• Authoring an internal comms post
• Conduct a media interview
• Drafting social media copy (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Prepare a blog post

Operations 

• Conduct a business review
• Create a change management plan
• Create a supplier RFP​
• Execute a project review​
• Simplify tasks for operations employees (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Accelerate customer research and sales preparation (Microsoft Copilot only)
• Create an unsolicited proposal​
• Create personalized offers​
• Improve customer meetings​
• Make a customized pitch (Copilot for Sales)
• Make a customized pitch (Microsoft 365 Copilot)
• Post-sale customer insights​
• Quicker customer response and CRM updates
• Respond to an RFP
• Targeted prospecting​

Looking for downloadable content?

Download our functional scenario kits, scenario guides, and day in the life guides to accelerate your Copilot implementation.

Microsoft Copilot opportunity to impact key functional area KPIs

Review our KPI overviews and view additional scenario details.

Agency spend

Copilot can help marketing teams rapidly generate creative content in house reducing reliance on outside agencies.​

KPI — Agency spend

How microsoft copilot can help bring work in house.

Improve quality of campaign content​

• Improve marketing content​
• Improve quality of proposals and RFP responses​
• Improve quality of emails and chats​

Inform market research ​

• Research company information and competitors ​
• Learn how to position the product​
• Recap survey results​
• Content Strategist
• Content Creator

Microsoft AI solutions

• Copilot for Microsoft 365

Cost per lead

Reducing the cost of marketing campaigns is a key benefit from Microsoft Copilot. Cost Per Lead (CPL) can be reduced with better campaign management and is a crucial metric used to measure and monitor the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. It represents the amount of money a business spends to generate a single new lead.

KPI — Cost per lead

How microsoft copilot can help manage marketing expenses.

Improve quality of campaign content

• Improve marketing content
• Improve quality of proposals and RFP responses
• Improve quality of emails and chats

Create pricing and promotional campaigns

• Use Copilot to research market conditions
• Use Copilot to compare sales across regions or other variables

Inform market research

• Research company information and competitors
• Learn how to position the product
• Recap survey results
• Account Executive
• Technical Sales
• SEO Specialist
• Product Teams
• Product Marketing

Leads generated

Lead generation is a critical aspect of marketing and paves the way toward gaining new customers.

KPI — Leads generated

How microsoft copilot can help with lead generation.

Inform market research 

Improve demand generation materials

• Draft blogs with Copilot
• Create engaging social content
• Improve quality of emails campaigns

Speed up internal communications

• Have Copilot assist with emails
• Draft email comms and announcements with Copilot

Save time on administrative activities

• Generate meeting notes and follow up items
• Marketing Lead
• Market Researcher
• Product Marketing Manager
• Digital Marketing Manager

Brand value

Brand value isn’t just about logos; it’s about shaping perceptions and building lasting relationships with your audience. A strong brand fuels demand generation.

KPI — Brand value

How microsoft copilot can impact brand value.

Draft marketing assets

• Improve marketing copy by having Copilot check for tone

Create pricing and promotions

Improve marketing materials

• Brand Manager
• Creative Director
• Graphic Designer
• Digital Marketing

Transform Marketing processes

Marketing roles

Share this page.

•  Share on Microsoft Teams
• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Share Podcast

Microsoft: A Case Study in Strategy Transformation

If you’re leading your team through big changes, this episode is for you.

• Apple Podcasts

In early 2015, Microsoft’s senior leaders were facing a set of difficult decisions. The firm had been struggling to innovate and grow as fast as its competitors. Now they were considering new opportunities that would yield higher growth but lower margins — like shifting away from perpetual licensing to focus on subscription sales.

Harvard Business School professor Fritz Foley studied this period of transformative change at Microsoft for a business case study he wrote. In this episode, he shares how Microsoft’s leaders analyzed different options and worked to get both investors and employees on board with new ideas about growth. He also explains how the company’s risk-averse culture evolved in order to execute such a huge transformation.

Key episode topics include: strategy, growth strategy, business models, corporate governance.  

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

• Listen to the original Cold Call episode: The Transformation of Microsoft (2018)
• Find more episodes of Cold Call
• Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy , case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business.

In early 2015, Microsoft’s senior leadership team was facing a set of difficult decisions. The firm had been struggling to innovate and grow as fast as its competitors. Now, they were considering new opportunities that would yield higher growth, but lower margins like shifting away from perpetual licensing to focus on subscription sales.

Today, we bring you a conversation with Harvard Business School professor Fritz Foley, who studied this period of transformative change at Microsoft for a business case study he wrote. In this episode, you’ll get a window into how Microsoft’s leaders analyzed different options and got both investors and employees on board with a different idea of growth. You’ll also learn how the company’s risk-averse culture had to evolve in order to execute such a huge transformation.

This episode originally aired on Cold Call in July 2018. Here it is.

BRIAN KENNY: Electronics enthusiasts in the 1970s looked forward to it every year: the January issue of Popular Electronics . That is because that issue was known for featuring the coolest up-and-coming products in the world of electronics. And when the January 1975 issue hit newsstands, it did not disappoint. The cover was adorned with the first available image of the Altair 8,800, the world’s first mini-computer kit. It may not have been the shot heard around the world, but many say that it was the spark that ignited the home computer revolution. That very magazine inspired a young Paul Allen and Bill Gates to turn their passion for computers into a business that subsequently became an empire.

Today, Microsoft Corporation is the third most valuable company in the world and the world’s largest software company. But after four decades of buffeting the headwinds of the very industry it helped to create, Microsoft is at a turning point and the way forward is not entirely clear. Today we’ll hear from Professor Fritz Foley about his case entitled “The Transformation of Microsoft.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call .

SPEAKER 1: So, we’re all sitting there in the classroom.

SPEAKER 2: Professor walks in.

SPEAKER 3: And they look up and you know it’s coming. The dreaded cold call.

BRIAN KENNY: Professor Fritz Foley’s Research focuses on corporate finance. He’s an expert on investment capital structure, working capital management, and a range of related topics, all of which probably factor into the case today. Fritz, thanks for joining us.

FRITZ FOLEY: Thanks so much for having me.

BRIAN KENNY: So, everybody pretty much knows who Microsoft is, and I think people will be really interested in getting a glimpse into where they were at this turning point in the company’s history. Still a very, very important company in the landscape of the technology industry and beyond. So, I think people will relate right away to this, but let me ask you, if you could start just by setting the stage for us. How does the case begin? Who’s the protagonist and what’s on her mind?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah, so the protagonist is Amy Hood, who is Microsoft’s CFO. She also was a student here at HBS at the time that I was in the PhD program. So, I’ve known her for some time and she’s facing a set of choices that really revolve around whether or not Microsoft should try to pursue increased margin or increased growth.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay. What prompted you to write the case? Your connection with Amy obviously is part of that, but why Microsoft and why now?

FRITZ FOLEY: I think I have been struck by the transformation that they are in the midst of. This is a company that… I mean, it’s hard to remember this. In the early two thousands, the stock price was stuck in the 20 to $30 a share range. And there was a group of people who were calling for the firm to be managed essentially for cash distributions and for increased margins. And then there were some growth opportunities that the company faced simultaneously. So, there was a real choice as to what direction to head. And I think this is a compelling choice that many other companies face. So, it’s a powerful example for me to highlight in course I teach about chief financial officers.

BRIAN KENNY: Microsoft was the first player on this stage really, but then Apple came along and I think many people look at these two as fierce competitors. But can you just talk about the difference between these two companies in terms of how they manage their financial strategy?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah, I can say a bit about that. So, at one level, they certainly are similar. They’re in tech space and in fact, many things that Microsoft was attracted to phones in particular, is something that Apple has excelled at. And I think that at the time of the case, they were quite different in the eyes of investors, I would say. I would say that investors still viewed Apple as having a lot of a growth emphasis of a commitment to innovating new products and solving problems that people weren’t even sure they had. Whereas Microsoft was the older, more established tech firm that I think, in the eyes of some, had become not a relic of the past, but less relevant when thinking about future innovations. And in some sense, the cases about how Microsoft tried to shed that view and become a relevant growth-oriented entity again.

BRIAN KENNY: And they’d certainly been criticized over the decades for not moving quickly enough to innovate and getting caught up in their own. And you think about IBM maybe as a company that faced similar criticisms getting caught up in just their size and the bureaucracy of the place. What did Microsoft’s business look like in 2012? Because that seemed to be the beginning of the turning point?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah. I mean, it was one where there was varying performance across divisions. There was interest by value activist investors given the large cash holdings that the firm had. Obviously, their market share when it came to the office suite of products and windows, those were quite high. And they were obviously very successful in continuing to provide versions of that to a whole variety of users. They had emerging cloud business, but it wasn’t clear that they would win in that space and had really struggled in other spaces.

In search, Bing never got traction relative to Google. In phones, they were really struggling in 2012 right before they tried to make more headway in phones by buying Nokia, which also subsequently didn’t work out as well as they had hoped. So, I think along a series of dimensions, they were really trying to get some traction, trying to get footing in new spaces. And there were a group of investors that actually felt like that wasn’t what they should do. That they should just focus on Office, focus on Windows, enjoy the high margins that came with their on-premises server and tool business offerings. So, they faced some really hard choices.

BRIAN KENNY: And they were also, in terms of just the organization itself up against some issues, what were some of the things they were encountering culturally at the time?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah. I mean, it’s a fascinating story from a cultural standpoint. It was an environment where there were high returns to showing that you were the smartest person in the room. Some of the stories that I have heard are a little jarring. I am not sure I would’ve survived in this environment. There were these very long mid-year reviews that took place and were incredibly demanding. It was an environment that was beginning to really emphasize the desire to be efficient, to be right, and in fairness to them, and Microsoft was coming from a culture or their culture came from a place where they were selling a product that couldn’t really fail. People had very high expectations for the performance of everything Microsoft provided them. And unlike today where there’s more room to update things through online updates, a lot of the software, it shipped and it had to be close to perfect when it shipped.

BRIAN KENNY: Actually, I can remember a time when the launch of a new Windows system was similar to the launch of a new iPhone. People were really excited to get the new system, but inevitably there were bugs and those were highly publicized, and so they fell under a lot of criticism. They were really operating under a microscope for a long time.

FRITZ FOLEY: For sure. And we’re keenly aware that time to fail in their products, which is a measure of how long it took for some product or process to break down, had to be very long. Otherwise, they would meet with a lot of customer dissatisfaction.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Okay. So, let’s move into the transformation phase for them. What was the fundamental shift they made in terms of changing or restructuring the organization?

FRITZ FOLEY: In my view, I think that they did a variety of things to adopt more of a growth orientation. And some of this dealt with their metrics. Some of it dealt with very explicit changes to the culture, and I think some of it also dealt with a realization that pursuing growth would enhance value much more than trying to increase margins and have large dividend payouts or larger dividend payouts to shareholders. So this was, I would say in the 2012, 2013 timeframe, we began to see pieces of this. And they also faced significant managerial changes at that time. That’s when Steve Ballmer retired and they needed to pick a new CEO and could have gone a variety of directions there. And by picking Satya Nadella, effectively we’re committing to more of a growth path.

BRIAN KENNY: Can you think of an example of a company that chose the margins path? And I mean, these are both potentially successful choices, but I would guess.

FRITZ FOLEY: For sure. And it’s a very hard trade-off to make. In teaching my MBA students and executive education students I’m always struck, when I ask them, “Would you sacrifice some margin for growth,” how hard that question can be and how many people don’t have much intuition for it. So, other companies did go the margin route.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Is it a situation where the margin choice is one that’s probably more comfortable and the returns are going to come sooner and the growth choice is a little riskier, and for a risk-averse culture probably harder to implement and you’re betting on the future? Is that fundamentally what the choice is?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah. I think that’s a really good way of putting it. Many people find it easier to see the benefits that come with cutting costs and looking for efficiencies and worry that what may come with growth could be elusive. And in some regards, I have heard senior finance managers say that they had to earn the permission to go after growth. They have to get the buy-in from a group of investors who feel as if the senior leadership team has credibility in pursuing growth.

BRIAN KENNY: So, here we have Microsoft, an enormous company, 130,000 or so employees, something like that, large by any measure about to pursue an option that is in many ways counter to the culture of the organization. How do you do that? How do you cascade this kind of a change through an organization of that size?

FRITZ FOLEY: On the cultural side, one thing that they did was very explicitly dropped a growth mindset culture. And Satya Nadella writes about this in his recent book, Refresh. The story is, for me, very compelling. It’s incredibly hard to get any organization to change its culture. Whenever I’ve been a part of an organization that tried to engage in a cultural shift, whatever the tagline was, quickly became the punchline for a set of office jokes.

BRIAN KENNY: I’ve been on the other side of that. I’m the guy who writes the punchlines most often.

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah. So, you know how hard this is. And I think that they were very wise in picking Kathleen Hogan who had led one of the divisions of Microsoft to head up the charge to describe and roll out this cultural change. They brought senior leaders on board, and ultimately, I think there was a lot of demand for it that many people who were working at Microsoft were innovative engineers and a very creative set of employees who wanted to pursue growth. And when given the choice to move away from review processes and given the opportunity to go to meetings where they didn’t feel like they had to be exactly right in making a point, but could stimulate the beginning of a discussion set of ideas that could lead to something that was new, people embraced that.

BRIAN KENNY: And here we are in the age of the millennial worker. Millennials don’t want to work for the old Microsoft for sure. And Microsoft is competing with the likes of Google and Apple and other firms that are definitely perceived as open and innovative, and they want people with energy and ideas. So, they have to adopt that same personality, I guess.

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah, I agree with that. I think there’s a new buzz about Microsoft, at least among my students, they’re much more intrigued by what it would mean to work there and what opportunities exist to do some things that would be truly novel and have a big impact on how people get work done.

BRIAN KENNY: So, let’s go back to our protagonists. Amy Hood in the case actually delves into her mindset a little bit. She’s getting ready to communicate these changes to the financial community. What are the kinds of things a CFO would have to think about? Because I can imagine the financial probably is more comfortable with the margin choice than the growth choice

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah, for sure. It’s fun for me to imagine her faced with this choice really of, okay, I can go this path of growth, but if I do this, I am going to have to go to my investors and say, our margins are going to go down for some period of time, and you’re not going to like that. But there’s going to be some upside and it will take some time for that upside to show up. So, I think she needed to find ways to communicate or signal what that upside would be and how big it might be to the investors so that she wouldn’t lose credibility with them and would have the permission essentially to pursue growth.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Now we hear it all the time about the emphasis on the short-term, short-termism in the financial community, and people want returns and they want them right away. In your experience, are you seeing a shift in the financial community, or are the analysts getting a little more comfortable with this notion of you can’t always go for the margins, you’ve got to find some sustainable growth in the long term?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah. It’s a great question. It’s one that troubles me or is something I think about our financial system generally. I happen to be probably more optimistic relative to many when it comes to how short-term-oriented, or really how financial markets aren’t as, as some might worry, or that concern about short-termism doesn’t resonate as much with me. I do think there is a big burden on senior finance teams to explain how value is created by thinking long-term and embracing growth opportunities. And in some sense, when I look at what Amy has been doing at Microsoft, I applaud her and her team for taking on that challenge. They quite explicitly set a target of a $20 billion run rate for their commercial cloud business, and once analysts had that number, they could begin to build off of it and get a feel for how much value could be created if Microsoft succeeded at pulling this off.

So, by having the courage to commit to that path and help analysts understand what the path meant, I think that they have been effective in pursuing it. More generally, I do worry that there are some analysts that simply take an earnings-per-share number and apply some current multiple and don’t think much about what the future will look like. I am hopeful that finance teams and organizations will play a role in educating analysts as to how they should think about the future, when growth opportunities do exist and are attractive.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that you’ve talked about this in class, and I’m just curious, do the MBA students come at this differently than the executive education students who have been in fiduciary roles and organizations already?

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah. That’s an interesting question. Let me reflect on that for a moment. I think the approach is fairly similar. I would say that some MBA students are probably less aware of the constraints that capital markets may put on senior management teams to pursue growth. They’re less aware of what an activist who wants cash now might push management to do, whereas executive education students tend to be keenly aware of those pressures. If anything, I find that MBA students, it’s a little bit harder for them to articulate what is the case for pursuing margin for Microsoft in 2012, 2013. Many executive education students are quick to come up with lists of things that could be done strategically financially in picking leadership.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, it’s interesting. And anybody who’s worked in an organization for any period of time, going back to that whole notion of how hard it is to change a culture, it’s pretty easy to think of reasons why not to pursue that path. So, I thought maybe some of the exec ed students might come at with those constraints already wrapped around themselves.

FRITZ FOLEY: Yeah, I agree.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Fritz, thanks for joining us today.

FRITZ FOLEY: Thanks very much for having me.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School Professor Fritz Foley in conversation with Brian Kenny on Cold Call . We’ll be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation about business strategy from Harvard Business Review.

If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review. And when you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, find it all at HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Ann Saini and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Adi Ignatius, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you, our listener. See you next week.

• Subscribe On:

Latest in this series

This article is about growth strategy.

• Corporate governance
• Business models

Partner Center

4 Lessons on Designing Responsible, Ethical Tech: Microsoft Case Study

• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
• Ethics Resources
• Ethics Blogs
• All About Ethics

Despite their best intentions, there’s often a gap in businesses between the desire to act ethically and following through on those good intentions.

This article is republished with permission by the World Economic Forum. It originally appeared on the World Economic Forum Blog , February 25, 2020. World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License , and in accordance with their  Terms of Use .

The article was written in collaboration with the Director of Technology Ethics,  Brian Green , with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and Daniel Lim, Fellow, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the World Economic Forum. Views are their own.

• Responsible innovation begins with culture change and the proper tools.
• Microsoft deployed everything from new sets of principles to role-playing exercises and employee performance goals to help develop AI that's more responsible and inclusive.
• Aligning workforces on responsible innovation goals can help track progress towards standardization within a company.

Despite their best intentions, there’s often a gap in businesses between the desire to act ethically and following through on those good intentions.

We call this the  intention-action gap . Closing this gap is key to ensuring technology is developed in a more responsible, inclusive manner.

To help close the intention-action gap, the World Economic Forum recently embarked on a project to unearth tools, processes, and lessons from organizations that have made progress in operationalizing ethics in technology. This project, studying Microsoft's journey to operationalize its responsible innovation practices among its more than 145,000 employees, considered the evolution of the company’s culture, the tools and processes it created, and the efficacy these of efforts.

Insights from this research were collected in a report titled   Responsible Use of Technology: The Microsoft Case Study  jointly authored by the World Economic Forum and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The top four lessons from this research are summarized below.

1. Responsible innovation begins with culture change.

When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he brought the "Growth Mindset" approach with him. This approach, developed by researcher Carol Dweck, considers how thinking influences human endeavours. With this mindset came an environment for introspection, innovation, and learning that allowed the company’s culture to more deeply consider the impacts of its technology on society.

This approach was put into practice after a tech and PR crisis. In 2016, Microsoft released an AI-powered chatbot on Twitter called "Tay," which was maliciously attacked to respond with inappropriate and denigrating comments. While another company may have sought blame or redirected the responsibility for this incident, Microsoft issued a public apology. The organization and its employees saw an opportunity to grow from this experience and operationalize ethics in AI at many company levels.

This effort led to the development of Microsoft's Responsible AI Principles, a set of foundational guideposts established in 2018. Microsoft operationalized these principles across the company by creating a governance structure borrowing from the hub-and-spoke model proven successful at integrating privacy, security and accessibility into its products in the past.

That hub includes three internal teams. They include:

• AI, Ethics, and Effects in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee - providing scientific and engineering advice and expertise on the enactment of the responsible AI principles;
• The Office of Responsible AI (ORA) - tasked with the policy governance, sensitive use and education functions; and
• The Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE) group - enabling engineers to implement responsible AI tools and systems.

Serving as spokes in this governance model are the Responsible AI Champs. These Champs, embedded throughout the company, are domain experts who advise, assist, and raise awareness on Microsoft's responsible AI approach.

Additionally, Microsoft also created the Responsible AI Standard, which outlines a set of steps that teams at the company must follow to support the design and development of responsible AI systems. These efforts provide an example of the sort of thoughtfully-designed governance model that must be in place to support culture change and to operationalize ethics in technology.

2. Tools and techniques ease implementation.

In any change management initiative, tools make it easier for individuals to modify their behaviour. This hold true for operationalizing ethics in technology as well.

As professions such as data science and machine learning (ML) are still in their infancy, tools make it easier for practitioners to explain data science models' performance, improve the fairness of algorithms, and identify ethical issues critical to operationalizing responsible AI.

Microsoft's technical tools such as InterpretML, Fairlearn, and Error Analysis represent significant contributions in this area. Specifically, InterpretML makes it easier for practitioners to better interpret and explain behaviours in a ML model. Meanwhile, Fairlearn helps data scientists assess and improve the fairness of machine learning models. Lastly, Error Analysis makes it easier for data scientists to identify cohorts with higher error rates than benchmarks and improve accuracy in their models. Each of these tools provide users with dashboards that make it easier visualize model performance.

However,  our research found  that tools that help teams to construe their work ethically are also key to helping to change behaviours. For Microsoft, these come in the form of Impact Assessments, the Envision AI Workshop, the Judgment Call game, and Community Jury. These tools help teams consider their products' potential consequences using checklists, role-playing exercises, and stakeholder engagement, respectively. With these tools in place, it’s easier for product teams to build greater empathy for stakeholders affected by their technology who are often underrepresented in the technology industry.

3. Alignment and measuring impact create accountability.

Many companies evaluate employee performance by how those staffers uphold their company’s values. For any company looking to operationalize ethics in technology, they must extend this practice to evaluating and measuring employee performance against the firm’s ethical technology principles.

Aligning Microsoft’s thousands of employees on responsible intelligence principles began with the Cognition team, a group that works on products enabled by augmented reality/virtual reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies.

Cognition team members met with their managers during their bi-annual goal setting and performance evaluation exercise to create a shared goal to implement responsible AI personalized to their role in the organization. This system, now being rolled out to other teams ,  enables Microsoft to create alignment and accountability around its responsible AI efforts while measuring each employee's impact.

4. Responsible products are better products.

Through responsible innovation, ‘better’ products can be developed – products of higher quality and that are inclusive and better poised to help the world.

To create these more accountable products, Microsoft's Principles for AI create top-level expectations. This toolkit helps set the path to implementation and the development of the products themselves. It also helps empower engineers to get into the details of responsible product development through various ML tools, workshops, and prompt conversations.

The impacts of these efforts are already visible in the features of some Microsoft products, such as  spatial analysis ,  speech consent , and  Custom Neural Voice,  which emphasise privacy, meaningful consent, and transparency, respectively. Without these value commitments embedded into concrete design processes – crossing the intention-action gap – these products might have been designed in a less responsible way.

These products are ultimately rooted in practical ethical thinking and action. In our research, when we compared Microsoft's implementation of responsible AI to the  Best Ethical Practices in Technology  published in 2018 by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, we discovered that Microsoft has implemented or has begun to implement most of these practices. For example, Microsoft's AI Principles directly connect to six of the collected best practices.

Looking ahead

These lessons show how one company operationalized responsible innovation. These principles, governance model, and tools can be adapted and applied to other technologies and organizations.

To be sure, change won’t happen overnight. A sea change is needed in corporate culture towards responsible innovation and ethical action. But we need this sea change not only in corporate culture, but in all of culture and society, as we learn how to use technologies for their best purposes. Recognizing that these problems exist is the first step to exploring how they can be solved.

As more sectors of our society digitally transform, more organizations will need to go through their journey to operationalize technology ethics. If corporations do not make these efforts to improve their cultures, processes, and products then we will not only fail to achieve the promise of technology to make a brighter future for all, but experience effects from technology that damage society and harm individuals.

The above efforts helped Microsoft to actualize their ideas and close the intention-action gap. They are now sharing these lessons in the hopes that others might find them useful and also share their own lessons from their own experiences. If more companies are willing to share their own experiences it will not only allow for mutual benefit, but also help to raise expectations of ethical thinking across more sectors, and hopefully lead to greater benefits across the globe.

Subscribe to Our Blogs

• Benison: The Practice of Ethical Leadership
• Center News
• Ethical Dilemmas in the Social Sector
• Internet Ethics: Views from Silicon Valley
• Internet Ethics: Views from Silicon Valley

New study validates the business value and opportunity of AI

Nov 2, 2023 | Alysa Taylor - Corporate Vice President, Azure & Industry, Microsoft

• Share on Facebook (opens new window)
• Share on Twitter (opens new window)
• Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)

As AI becomes more woven into society, its economic impact will be significant, and organizations are just starting to understand the extent o f what’s possible. F or companies to invest in AI though, it must make good business sense. Business leaders and decision makers need to understand the industry and line-of-business use cases that are best positioned to drive value within their organizations, what the return on investment will be, what time to value to expect, and how to get started. In short, they need help demystifying the business case for AI.    

To help companies understand the opportunities AI can unlock, Microsoft commissioned a study through IDC that provides unique insights into how AI is being used to drive economic impact for organizations. IDC surveyed over 2,000 business leaders and decision makers from around the world who are responsible for bringing AI transformation to life within their organizations. The study, which builds on the results from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index focused on workplace productivity, examines how companies are monetizing their AI investments, from generating new revenue streams to delivering differentiated customer experiences, to modernizing internal processes. Key findings from th is study show*:  

• 71% of respondents say their companies are already using AI  
• 92% of AI deployments are taking 12 months or less  
• Organizations are realizing a return on their AI investments within 14 months  
• For every $1 a company invests in AI, it is realizing an average return of $3.5X   
• 52% report that a lack of skilled workers is their biggest barrier to implement and scale AI    

The study illustrates that AI has demonstrable business value, and we are seeing this surface in core use cases within areas like employee experience, customer engagement and intern al business processes, and how AI can help bend the curve on innovation. With generative AI, that value gets exponentially greater, as we’ve seen in the past year with generative AI technologies from OpenAI such as ChatGPT.   

“IDC is projecting that generative AI will add nearly $10 trillion to global GDP over the next 10 years.** Calculating the value of new investments in GenAI requires building the business case by simulating potential cost and responsible value realization,” said Ritu Jyoti, Group Vice President AI and Automation for IDC.     

This wave of innovation has accelerated the pace of AI adoption in ways that are changing and augmenting how we work and live, and Microsoft customers are increasingly embracing AI opportunities for business transformation.  

Enrich employee experiences : E mployees in every industry are dealing with an increasing volume of digital debt and administrative burdens that slow down productivity and get in the way of meaningful work. To address this challenge, AI is being used to bring together unstructured data like social media, product details and customer engagement to better tailor communications, enable more intelligent insights and solve problems faster. Additionally, employees are using Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft 365 to augment their copywriting capabilities for things like presentations, website content, case studies, blogs, press releases, search engine optimization and digital art.   

Reinvent customer engagement : With the heavy competition for customer acquisitions and retention, organizations have struggled to keep pace with the increasing amount of customer signals, and to deliver personalized service to customers in real-time. To drive greater customer loyalty, organizations are applying the AI capabilities of Dynamics 365 in contact centers for real-time assistance and guidance on suggested responses. Employees are also using AI to summarize conversations, guide on next steps, and get coaching feedback. Azure-powered virtual assistants are being used to deliver all kinds of hyper-personalized experiences across different verticals like healthcare for processing claims and entertainment for sports fans. Salespeople are using Viva Sales to help nurture leads and close deals.  

Bend the curve on innovation: This is an exciting concept as companies in every industry look to regain an edge. Organizations can deploy AI to stay ahead of changing business dynamics, and to exceed customer expectations. By not having to modernize every underlying system to achieve these results, and by putting AI directly in the hands of developers with GitHub Copilot, organizations can operate with agility and accelerate innovation.  Teams can leverage AI to help scale production and speed to market while being able to focus on higher-value activities.   

IDC survey data confirms that businesses are eager to adopt AI technology, with 71% of survey respondents currently using AI tools in their organizations, and 22% planning to do so within the next 12 months. However, even with this momentum and positive outlook for what AI can help them achieve, organizations are facing challenges when it comes to implementation. A shortage of skilled employees is holding companies back from accelerating their AI-based innovations, with 52 percent of those surveyed reporting a lack of skilled workers needed to implement and scale AI initiatives across business functions as the top blocker.   

To help address the skilling gap, Microsoft has already engaged over 6 million people globally in learning activities in the last 12 months and has ambitions to provide skills to everyone using our AI technology. We have also empowered our ecosystem of more than 400,000 partners worldwide with the skills needed to implement AI technology responsibly and to deliver greater customer value.       

No matter where you are in your cloud and AI transformation journey, Microsoft can help. To learn more about how customers across industries are shaping their AI transformation with Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Cloud blog which shares real-world examples of business impact being driven by AI, as well as resources and skilling opportunities you can use to build your readiness to lead the era of AI.   

About the study The IDC study , commissioned by Microsoft, is based on results from 2,109 enterprise organizations totaling more than 13 million employees worldwide across 16 countries globally. Through the questionnaire, respondents were identified as the decision maker for AI within their organization.    

Source: *IDC Infographic, sponsored by Microsoft, The Business Opportunity of AI, IDC #US51315823, November 2023. **Generative Artificial Intelligence: A New Chapter for Enterprise Business Applications, IDC Perspective #US50471523, March 2023.  

• Check us out on RSS