“We’re intentionally building the EY forward deployed engineer (FDE) capability through close collaboration and training with Microsoft, while maintaining integrated EY-Microsoft teams in the field,” he said in an email. “Clients will continue to experience this as one combined team, bringing together engineering depth and transformation expertise.”
EY has acted as “client zero” in this initiative, embedding AI in all facets of its organization while it validated ways of working with Microsoft’s technologies. After an initial trial of Microsoft Copilot with 150,000 users, it is now rolling it out through Microsoft 365 E7 to all 400,000 staff.
Its combined offering with Microsoft will be fully integrated, with shared governance and accountability across both organizations, it said. Initial services will cover finance, tax, risk, HR and supply chain activities within the financial services, industrials and energy, consumer and retail, government, and health care sectors.
Pain and suffering
The company’s status as client zero is important here, said Greyhound Research Chief Analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia. “It gives EY a proving ground, not just a reference story. The firm can test AI across its own global workforce, professional services processes and regulated client delivery environment before taking the patterns outward. That gives it a sharper commercial proposition: not ‘we understand AI’, but ‘we have suffered through the operating friction before you’. In enterprise technology, lived pain is often more valuable than polished optimism.”
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