Mahendra Sekaran, Microsoft CVP, on AI Transformation, Copilot, Work IQ, and Multi-Model Agentic AI

Mahendra Sekaran, Corporate Vice President for Product Management and Data Science at Microsoft, discusses the rapid pace of AI transformation and its impact on the communications and collaboration space.

• Azure continues its strong growth at 43%, fuelled by accelerating AI adoption and cloud investment, with remaining performance obligations reaching $678 billion.

• Microsoft's product teams are using AI agents to compress planning cycles from six to eight weeks down to days, with approximately 80% accuracy on cost estimates.

• Full agentic loops are being built across Microsoft's code bases, transforming the software development lifecycle and accelerating iteration velocity.

• Work IQ provides the platform layer that makes enterprise knowledge, including documents, emails, chats, meetings, and transcripts, accessible to Copilot and agents, whilst maintaining data governance and compliance.

• Microsoft's multi-model approach gives customers choice across OpenAI, Anthropic, and in-house models, optimising for cost, performance, and flexibility.

• Microsoft Teams Phone Agent is in Frontier Public Preview, enabling voice AI agents to front customer interactions with an expected 70-80% call deflection rate.

Thanks to Pure IP, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud.