London, United Kingdom – The EY organisation and Microsoft have announced a new global initiative aimed at helping organisations scale artificial intelligence adoption and generate enterprise-wide business outcomes, expanding the companies’ long-standing alliance.
The initiative includes an investment of more than $1 billion over five years and combines Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) with EY industry professionals to support AI deployment across business operations. The collaboration will use Microsoft’s FDE AI-native Hypervelocity Engineering approach to accelerate AI implementation and change management initiatives.
The companies said the initiative is designed to help organisations move beyond AI experimentation by integrating AI into broader business operations. EY and Microsoft plan to deploy joint teams of engineers and consultants aligned by industry to co-develop secure, industry-specific AI solutions focused on business functions such as finance, tax, risk, human resources, and supply chain.
The expanded alliance will initially focus on industries including financial services, industrials and energy, consumer and retail, government, and healthcare.
EY Global Chair and CEO Janet Truncale said: “Together with Microsoft, EY is supporting clients to unlock value through rapid deployment of AI at scale. With access to a single, integrated team, clients will have at their disposal both Microsoft’s market-leading engineering depth, alongside EY teams’ deep industry knowledge and change management capabilities. By combining people and innovation in this next phase of the Alliance, clients will be empowered to realise the transformative power of agentic AI within the enterprise.”
As part of the initiative, EY is also applying Microsoft technologies internally under what the companies call “Client Zero.” EY said it initially deployed Copilot to 150,000 users, resulting in a reported 15% productivity increase that was reinvested into client delivery and employee learning. The company is also expanding Copilot adoption through Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite to more than 400,000 employees globally.
EY also outlined several AI-related deployments within its organisation, including finance modernisation through Microsoft Power Platform and Copilot Studio, which it said led to a 95% improvement in lead times and a more than 37% reduction in operational costs.
The firm said it also integrated a multiagent framework using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft Fabric into EY Canvas, supporting workflows for 130,000 assurance professionals across 160,000 audit engagements. Additionally, EY said it adopted Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence within its Global Tax Platform to automate document data extraction, reducing manual workloads by up to 90%.
Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s Commercial Business, said: “AI is quickly moving from experimentation to a core driver of business performance, and the companies pulling ahead are those scaling AI Transformation. Our initiative combines Microsoft’s trusted AI platform and engineering teams with EY’s industry capabilities and experience as Client Zero — applying these technologies across their own organisation — to help customers move beyond pilots to enterprise execution, enhancing decision-making and delivering measurable impact.”
The companies said the offering will operate under shared governance, aligned commercial models, and joint accountability structures across both organisations.
