Partner Blog | From Microsoft Build to AI implementation: Build the skills to lead Frontier Transformation
Microsoft Build showcased the next phase of AI transformation. Across AI platforms, agents, and secure development, one message came through: customers are moving from AI exploration to implementation. For partners, that shift creates a practical opportunity. Customers are looking for guidance on ways to design, deploy, manage, secure, and scale AI-powered solutions that create measurable business value. That takes skilled teams, repeatable delivery capabilities, and a clear path from learning to implementation. This month’s skilling updates focus on turning Build momentum into action. New Frontier Transformation Engineering resources, on-demand Frontier Transformation Summit content, upcoming certification preparation, Microskilling, and go-to-market assets give partners multiple ways to strengthen AI implementation capabilities and show customers they are ready to lead. Build Frontier Transformation Engineering capability Frontier Transformation describes the shift from AI pilots to embedded, governed operating models. It requires technical depth across agents, Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft IQ, security, governance, and business process transformation. The Frontier Transformation Engineer Badge is designed for technical professionals building this capability. It validates the skills needed to design and deliver AI agents across Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, and the broader Frontier stack. For partners, the badge signals readiness to move from AI vision to execution. To support that journey, all of the Frontier Transformation Engineer Summit sessions are now available on demand, giving your teams a chance to revisit key content or catch up on sessions they missed. Use the recordings to continue progressing toward badge attainment and prepare your teams for the AI implementation work customers are prioritizing now. Continue reading hereFrontier Transformation campaign in a box now available in Partner Marketing Center
AI transformation is moving beyond isolated experimentation to organization-wide initiatives and customers are looking for partners who can help them scale. Organizations scaling AI are seeing measurable gains across productivity, efficiency, and customer engagement. To support this shift, the Frontier Transformation campaign in a box provides a ready-to-launch, co-branded marketing campaign aligned to Microsoft AI solutions. This campaign is aligned with the Frontier Success framework and engages customers as they advance in their AI maturity, with messaging that connects AI capabilities to real business context while reinforcing trust, governance, and security. Available in Partner Marketing Center Pro, the Frontier Transformation campaign in a box empowers you to go market faster, support lead generation, and build pipeline. Partner Marketing Center Pro is available to partners who have purchased a partner benefits package, attained a Solutions Partner designation or are enrolled in ISV Success. Explore Frontier Transformation campaign in a box.Ability Summit 2026: Accessibility-first innovation and your next partner opportunity
Accessibility is increasingly both a business imperative and a meaningful commercial opportunity for partners. At this year’s Microsoft Ability Summit, leaders across technology, education, and advocacy reinforced a clear point: accessibility-first innovation is creating new demand across AI, collaboration, learning, and customer experience. For partners, accessibility represents a clear opportunity to grow customer value. Accessibility-first innovation is becoming a mainstream expectation, opening opportunities to build differentiated services and solutions across AI, collaboration, learning, compliance, and customer experience. Organizations are increasingly viewing accessibility as part of a broader shift in how they approach AI, employee experience, and customer engagement. For partners, that shift creates an opportunity to lead higher-value conversations around innovation, trust, and long-term business impact. I encourage you to read Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer Neil Barnett’s full recap of this year’s announcements and stories from the summit, including updates across AI, developer tools, Windows, devices, learning, Xbox, and inclusive packaging design. Why accessiblity matters for partners now Accessibility is becoming part of how customers evaluate experience quality, employee productivity, compliance expectations, and technology trust. Organizations are looking for technology that works consistently across real-world scenarios, roles, abilities, and environments. That expectation is accelerating as AI adoption grows. Accessibility is increasingly becoming part of how customers evaluate transformation readiness, technology trust, and the quality of the experiences they deliver across their organizations. A 2026 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Microsoft found that assistive technology is already part of everyday work and life. Consumers reported using assistive features across at least six activities in the past month, on average. The same study found that 63% of respondents reported some level of difficulty with daily tasks related to vision, hearing, learning and cognition, mobility, and/or mental health. It also found that 71% of respondents would use assistive tools more often if enhanced with AI capabilities, and 55% said they feel a stronger commitment to employers when companies prioritize assistive tools and features. For partners, this points to a broader opportunity. Accessibility-first design can expand participation, strengthen employee and customer experiences, and build greater trust in technology, making it an increasingly important part of long-term transformation strategy. Where partners can lead The opportunity for partners is to bring accessibility into the conversations that are already shaping customer priorities, including AI transformation and adoption, modern work, application innovation, employee experience, customer engagement, and compliance. As accessibility becomes more central to business and technology strategy, partners can differentiate by making it part of the broader value they bring to customers. Partners that bring accessibility-first innovation into these conversations can deepen trust, expand strategic relevance, and create more differentiated value over time. This opportunity spans organizations of every size. Across both SMB and enterprise customers, accessibility is increasingly part of how leaders think about growth, workforce experience, customer connection, and technology modernization, and the Microsoft partner ecosystem is well positioned to meet that need. Partner opportunities in Microsoft Marketplace Microsoft Marketplace offers a useful view into how partners are translating accessibility-first innovation into practical customer value. The examples below illustrate how that opportunity is taking shape across different business and technology scenarios. Level Access makes digital accessibility a streamlined, scalable part of everyday operations The Level Access platform supports a continuous approach to accessibility, embedded into design, development, governance, and training workflows. Unlike point tools or episodic audits, this integrated solution helps organizations accelerate remediation, reduce risk, and demonstrate progress over time. Organizations can extend the power of the Level Access platform through private offers with capabilities such as LevelDocs for accessible content creation and remediation in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; LevelCI for automated web accessibility testing within CI/CD pipelines; and Mobile Testing for native iOS and Android accessibility across physical and virtual devices. Retain Connector by Inclusively Many organizations have invested heavily in benefits, workplace accommodations, mental health resources, and employee support programs. But employees, especially those navigating disabilities or workplace barriers, often don't know what is available or how to access it. Retain Connector by Inclusively closes that gap directly inside the tools employees already use. Deployed within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 with no heavy integrations required, Retain acts as a workforce intelligence layer that lets employees describe their needs in plain language and get routed to the right benefits and resources through Inclusively's Success Enabler framework without needing to know what to search for or where to look. For employees who may feel hesitant to disclose a need or navigate a fragmented benefits landscape, the anonymous, conversational experience lowers the barrier to getting support. For HR and people leaders, Retain surfaces something equally valuable: real-time, aggregated insights into the benefits and barriers employees are actually experiencing. That intelligence helps organizations understand unmet demand, allocate benefits investments more effectively, and demonstrate a genuine commitment to inclusion not just in policy, but in practice. Creating differentiated value through accessibility offerings Taken together, these examples reinforce a broader point: accessibility is becoming an increasingly important part of how partners create differentiated value across both employee and customer experiences. Marketplace solutions can strengthen how partners bring accessibility-first innovation into customer conversations and platform experiences. The Microsoft Accessibility Partner Onboarding Guide also provides a useful foundation for partners looking to expand their accessibility focus on Microsoft platforms. The opportunity ahead for partners Accessibility is becoming an increasingly important part of the conversations customers are having around AI, modern work, security, application development, and industry transformation. The opportunity is not to treat accessibility as a separate conversation. It is to make accessibility part of how customers modernize, adopt AI, and build more trusted digital experiences. Ability Summit 2026 reinforced that accessibility-first innovation is shaping the future of AI, productivity, learning, collaboration, and end-customer experience. For partners, the opportunity is to turn that innovation into real customer impact. It is about building AI-powered experiences that are more trusted, more inclusive, and more effective for the people they serve. As Frontier Transformation accelerates AI adoption, partners are uniquely positioned to turn accessibility-first innovation into lasting business impact deepening customer relationships, expanding strategic relevance, and building stronger momentum as accessibility-first expectations continue to rise for our customers. Additional resources Read the Ability Summit 2026 blog by Neil Barnett, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. Explore the Forrester Consulting thought leadership paper commissioned by Microsoft, May 2026. Visit the Unique Unites Us accessibility hub. Watch for Ability Summit sessions to be available on demand in the coming weeks.Reminder: Become a sponsor of the Microsoft AI Tour
Make your mark on the 2026–2027 Microsoft AI Tour. This one‑day event series is traveling to 30+ cities in priority markets around the globe, and you have the opportunity to become a sponsor. Sponsors can accelerate pipeline through high-impact, in-person experiences that help customers make confident, informed technology solution decisions. Packages start at USD5,000. Review the sponsorship preview to learn more.Differentiate yourself for the AI era—earn your Frontier Transformation Engineer badge
Each session of the Frontier Transformation Engineer Summit is designed for you to build the skills to advance your Frontier Engineering journey and accelerate progress toward earning your Frontier Transformation Engineer badge. With this badge, you can validate that you have the expertise to deliver agentic AI solutions at the hypervelocity that customers expect, with the breadth of the Microsoft technology stack to support you. Here’s how you can keep building your AI capability: View the summit sessions on demand. Work toward earning the Frontier Transformation Engineer badge. Join us at MCAPS Start for Partners on July 22 to refresh your go-to-market approach for the next year.Partner Blog | Building AI-ready applications on open, enterprise-grade Azure platforms
Microsoft Build 2026 reinforced a practical reality for organizations moving from AI experimentation to production: AI is only as strong as the foundation it runs on. Customers need modern databases, governed data, secure infrastructure, and developer experiences that can carry performing AI-enabled applications at scale into production with confidence. The public preview announcements of Azure HorizonDB and Azure Linux, along with the general availability of Azure Container Linux, show how Microsoft is investing in open platforms, developer ecosystems, and enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure for AI-ready applications. These announcements also point to a broader shift: open source has become a strategic foundation for enterprise modernization, innovation, and strategic growth. These announcements give partners a straightforward way to connect customer AI goals to the open, secure, enterprise-ready platforms needed for production. They also create timely opportunities to engage customers on data modernization, AI-ready application development, secure infrastructure, and cloud-native operations. What was announced at Build 2026 Azure HorizonDB: A new standard for AI-native, enterprise PostgreSQL Azure HorizonDB enters public preview as a new PostgreSQL cloud database service engineered for performance, scale, and modern AI-powered application needs. For business leaders thinking about data strategy, this is significant. Organizations are under pressure to modernize legacy databases and support intelligent applications without sacrificing resilience, governance, or developer productivity. Azure HorizonDB is designed to address those priorities with a platform that can scale storage automatically for large enterprise workloads, scale compute across primary and replica nodes, and bring AI-native capabilities directly into the database layer. What stands out is that Azure HorizonDB gives enterprises a way to simplify architecture while also accelerating innovation. Features such as advanced filtered vector search, in-database AI model management, Microsoft Entra ID integration, and GitHub Copilot integration through the PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code position it as more than a database modernization story. Developers can use Microsoft 365 Copilot with live database context to generate schema-aware SQL, explore database structures, analyze and rewrite queries, and build against HorizonDB-specific capabilities without leaving Visual Studio Code. It is designed to bring together open-source PostgreSQL, enterprise security, AI readiness, and a more integrated developer experience in a single managed service. For business leaders, that can create a faster path from data estate modernization to measurable business outcomes. In Microsoft internal testing environments, Azure HorizonDB performed three times faster than self-managed PostgreSQL. For partners, the announcement creates an opportunity to engage customers in PostgreSQL modernization, intelligent application architecture, migration planning, performance optimization, and AI-enabled development. Azure Linux: Open-source infrastructure at enterprise scale The Azure Linux public preview announcement is meaningful for leaders focused on cloud efficiency, security, and platform consistency. Linux is already foundational to modern digital infrastructure, and two-thirds of customer cores in Azure run Linux. Now Azure Linux provides a first-party Linux distribution, purpose-built for Azure, and is available for Azure virtual machines (VMs), VM scale sets, and container images. We also announced Azure Container Linux (ACL), a secure, immutable container host designed to help platform teams run Kubernetes workloads at scale on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). By bringing Azure Linux forward as a more visible first-party platform choice, Microsoft is giving organizations a cloud-native operating system designed for modern workloads, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and AI infrastructure. This matters because infrastructure choices increasingly shape agility, security posture, and operating cost. Azure Linux reflects the Microsoft focus on secure-by-default design, consistent servicing, and tighter alignment between the operating system and the Azure platform. For enterprises, that can translate into simpler operations and a more predictable foundation for cloud-native applications. These announcements reinforce what the Microsoft partner ecosystem and customer usage have shown for years: open-source infrastructure is foundational to Microsoft cloud strategy, as more than 65% of customer cores in Azure run Linux. Continue reading blog herePatner Case Study | Pax8
From their early days of selling Microsoft licenses to becoming a leading cloud commerce marketplace, Pax8 has always centered their business on the Microsoft partner experience. And their future-focused, partner first approach is redefining what it means to be a modern Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). For Pax8, the next evolution of that role is the Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP)—a partner that moves beyond managing systems to orchestrating intelligence and delivering measurable business outcomes with AI. While Pax8 delivers critical value through the streamlined billing and provisioning of Microsoft licenses, they also know that real business transformation doesn’t happen just because you’ve purchased software—it happens because of everything that comes after the sale. That’s why they invested heavily in enablement, education, and professional services. And that’s why today, they’re successfully cultivating an ecosystem that drives meaningful, scalable growth for partners and customers alike. Grounded in their experience as a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, Pax8’s approach has changed the trajectories of organizations like Sourcepass, a US-based managed services provider (MSP). Together, Sourcepass and Pax8 are making enterprise-grade AI accessible to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)—but they’re going beyond traditional deployments. They’re delivering functional, agentic solutions designed to help customers realize value and support recurring service opportunities. Navigating AI adoption in the SMB reality SMBs are under constant pressure to do more with less, and the business outcomes they need the most—efficiency, strong security, scalable growth—are the exact outcomes AI can deliver. But with limited budgets, it’s hard for SMBs to justify the spend without clear proof of value—no matter how interested they might be. “SMBs hear about AI and want to be part of the wave,” said Elliott Eliason, Productivity Solution Consultant at Pax8, “but they don’t want to spend thousands without getting results back.” And once they’ve made an investment in AI, they likely lack the internal resources to operationalize it. That includes preparing data governance, validating security controls, and teaching teams new workflows. For a partner like Sourcepass, who primarily serves SMBs, this means their customers need trusted, strategic advisors who can guide them in turning AI’s potential into tangible outcomes. Continue reading here Explore all case studies or submit your own Subscribe to case studies tag to follow all new case study posts. Don't forget to follow this blog to receive email notifications of new stories!
From insight to action: how Adobe and Microsoft are helping marketers move faster with AI
Today’s marketing leaders are under pressure to do more than ever—deliver meaningful personalization, accelerate execution, and prove measurable business impact. At the same time, teams are navigating increasing complexity: fragmented data, disconnected tools, and insights that arrive too late to act on. AI can change this—but only when it’s embedded directly into how people already work. That’s why Microsoft and Adobe are deepening our partnership: bringing customer experience intelligence, AI-powered workflows, and enterprise-grade AI directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot—so teams can move from insight to alignment to execution in one continuous workflow. The result is faster decisions, more coordinated execution, and clearer business outcomes—without breaking flow or context. Bringing customer experience intelligence into the flow of work Marketing teams don’t struggle because they lack data. They struggle because insights live in one place, collaboration in another, and execution somewhere else entirely. That disconnect slows teams down and creates unnecessary friction between analysis and action. Together, Adobe and Microsoft are changing that dynamic by connecting Adobe’s customer experience capabilities with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Cowork—so insight, collaboration, and next-best action can happen where work already happens: in Copilot Chat and in everyday apps like Teams, Word, and PowerPoint. Marketers can ask questions, explore insights, align with teammates, and take action without jumping between tools—turning intelligence into impact at the moment it matters. Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot: now generally available A major milestone in this journey is the general availability of the Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot, now available via Microsoft Commercial Marketplace. The Adobe Marketing Agent brings Adobe customer experience intelligence directly into Copilot, enabling marketing teams to: Accelerate time from insight to decision Move seamlessly from analysis to execution Keep humans firmly in control, with AI supporting—not replacing—decision‑making Importantly, the agent is enterprise-ready by design. IT administrators can deploy and manage the experience through the Microsoft 365 admin center, ensuring security, governance, and compliance at scale. Expanding executive experiences with Copilot Cowork Looking ahead, Adobe skills designed for customer experience orchestration will be accessible in Copilot Cowork—in a future release. This upcoming experience will enable customer experience leaders to engage with customer experience insights in a more direct, conversational way, bringing strategic visibility into the same Copilot environments where decisions are made and actions are coordinated. Built on Azure to scale securely and responsibly The technology foundation of this innovation is Azure. Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, and Adobe AI Agents are built on Azure and leverage Azure AI models, providing the scalability, security, and reliability enterprises require. By running on Azure, these agentic experiences benefit from Microsoft’s global infrastructure, enterprise‑grade security, and responsible AI commitments—supporting customer trust as organizations scale AI across their business. Designed for interoperability across agent ecosystems Modern enterprises don’t operate in a single ecosystem—and their agents shouldn’t either. Adobe agents are built to interoperate with agents created using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry or Copilot Studio, enabling customers to orchestrate richer, cross‑functional workflows across marketing, sales, service, and operations. This architecture is designed to enable organizations to compose agentic solutions that reflect how work actually happens—across systems, teams, and business processes. Moving from experimentation to execution This partnership reflects a broader shift in how organizations adopt AI—moving from experimentation to embedded, enterprise‑ready execution. By bringing the full power of Adobe Experience Platform together with Microsoft’s AI platform, cloud infrastructure, and Copilot experiences, we’re helping teams move faster with clarity, confidence, and control. This is how AI becomes not just powerful—but practical. Learn more Adobe + Microsoft partnership page Adobe Marketing Agent for Microsoft Copilot pageICYMI | Explore curated Microsoft Partner Digital Skilling Journeys
Skilling is foundational for success in an AI-first market. Keeping up with evolving technologies and capabilities better positions you with the skills you need to succeed in an ever-changing market, making it a base-level requirement for sustained growth. As part of our effort to support partners with skilling, we offer Microsoft Partner Digital Skilling Journeys (PDJs), curated presales, sales, and tech skilling experiences designed to enhance your knowledge aligned with partner strategic wins. First-time users may need to register—use your work email credentials to sign up. Curated journeys include: Continue reading this article on our new Partner Skilling discussion board Be sure to click follow in the top right to be notified of all new announcements!GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage. Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model. This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users. Learn more here and access partner resources here. APAC Office hours link – May 6, 7:00 PM — 8:00 PM PDT EMEA/AMER Office hours link – May 7, 8:00 AM — 9:00 AM PDT
