Mahendra Sekaran, Corporate Vice President 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.