Joint investment of over $1 billion in AI by EY and Microsoft

EY and Microsoft announce a major initiative that advances their global strategic alliance, investing more than $1 billion over a five-year horizon, with the aim of helping organizations leverage artificial intelligence (AI) at enterprise scale and achieve measurable results.

Human capital skills development, change management, and transformation through the use of agentic AI, will give clients the ability to evolve into “Frontier Firms”, that is, organizations that can effectively scale their growth and create value.

EY and Microsoft will jointly create specialized teams of consultants and engineers, by industry sector. Together, they will co-develop secure, specialized AI solutions, tailored to customer needs, to capitalize on opportunities for creating sustainable business value.

EY as “Client Zero”

The initiative is based on EY’s role as “Client Zero”, as the organization is the first to implement Microsoft technologies in the daily work of its teams. Initially, EY proceeded with making Copilot available to 150,000 internal users, recording a 15% increase in productivity. EY is now making Copilot available to its more than 400,000 people worldwide, through “Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite”. In this way, it is integrating agentic AI capabilities across the entire organization, with the aim of enhancing operational efficiency.

Beyond Copilot, EY is already applying artificial intelligence across a wide range of its functions, including:

• The modernization of financial functions, using Microsoft Power Platform and integrating digital agents through Copilot Studio, achieving 95% faster request processing times and a reduction in operating costs of more than 37%.
• The integration of a new framework of multiple AI “assistants” (multi-agent framework), which connects with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Fabric, into EY Canvas, that is, EY’s unified, global Audit Services technology platform, which supports the daily workflows of 130,000 professionals across 160,000 audit engagements.
• The early adoption of Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence in EY’s global Tax Services platform, using advanced machine learning techniques for the automatic and accurate extraction of critical data from documents, reducing manual work by up to 90%.

The new chapter in the collaboration between the two organizations will have a fully integrated character, with a shared governance framework, a coordinated commercial approach and shared accountability. Initially, the services and solutions will focus on finance, risk management, human resources management and the supply chain, in sectors such as financial services, industry and energy, consumer products, the public sector and healthcare.

Commenting on the initiative, EY Greece CEO, Georgios Papadimitriou, stated: “Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from the stage of experimentation to meaningful use by organizations, for the benefit of productivity and efficiency. Through this collaboration, our clients can benefit from the technological foundation of Microsoft and the deep sector knowledge of EY, in order to develop AI capabilities at enterprise scale and, ultimately, move forward with their transformation and “unlock” real value.”

For her part, Gianna Andronopoulou, Managing Director of Microsoft Greece, Cyprus, Malta and Adriatics, commented: “Every technological change acquires real significance when it expands what people and organizations can achieve. Today, we are moving into a new chapter of artificial intelligence, where people and AI agents collaborate to redesign entire workflows and business processes. With EY, we want to help organizations make this transition securely and at scale, combining technology and deep sector knowledge, so that AI creates measurable value at every level of the organization.”