An AI Center of Excellence helps align business strategy, people, and technology decisions around AI.
While most leaders recognize AI’s transformative potential, many still lack a clear implementation strategy. AI Center of Excellence guidance can help organizations close that gap. According to Microsoft’s annual report, The State of AI Infrastructure, 99% of organizations face challenges in scaling AI, and only 33% of leaders feel they have sufficient AI skills and talent. It’s clear that AI transformation requires a combination of technological, organizational, and cultural shifts for businesses to accelerate innovation.
Last year, we announced comprehensive AI adoption guidance within Azure Essentials for customers to adopt AI at scale and build well-architected AI workloads. Since then, the AI adoption scenario within the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, and the AI workload guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework has been viewed nearly 160,000 times, demonstrating the value customers are finding in our prescriptive guidance and best practices.
Beyond adopting these technological best practices, organizations also need to facilitate the organizational change necessary to achieve AI transformation and deliver broad, innovative AI projects at scale. To respond to that need, we recently published new AI Center of Excellence (CoE) guidance within Azure Essentials for leaders to understand how establishing an AI CoE is a sure path for organizations to harness the opportunity of AI.
What is an AI Center of Excellence?
An AI Center of Excellence is a strategic enabler that brings together a cross-functional team of people within an organization to bridge gaps and align stakeholders to develop a unified vision of AI adoption. The AI CoE helps align business strategy, people, and technology decisions around AI. By fostering a coordinated approach, AI initiatives are effectively integrated across the organization, maximizing their impact and value.
AI CoE guidance is tailored toward organizations developing scalable, customized Azure AI Foundry (pro-code) solutions; however, many of the concepts span low-code and no-code AI scenarios as well.
The AI CoE competencies represented within the e-book, Implementing an AI Center of Excellence, help an organization recognize what they need to tackle to unlock the full potential of AI, building upon the five key drivers of AI value.
- Business strategy: business value alignment, use case identification, and prioritization.
- Organization and culture: organizational readiness, skilling and knowledge management, and AI roles and functions.
- AI strategy and experience: use case implementation and AI lifecycle mastery.
- Technology and data strategy: data practices, development and deployment processes, infrastructure management, cost efficiency, and AI model performance metrics.
- AI governance: responsible use of AI.
AI CoE success in action
Across industries, Microsoft partners are not only embracing Azure Essentials—they’re using its built-in AI Center of Excellence guidance to help customers operationalize AI with confidence. From establishing governance frameworks to accelerating AI adoption, these partners are combining Microsoft’s structured approach with their own expertise to build scalable, high-impact AI CoEs. Here’s how four partners are putting this into action.
NTT DATA used Microsoft’s AI CoE guidance to help customers scale their cloud environments.
NTT DATA, in strategic partnership with Microsoft, launched Agentic AI Services for Hyperscaler AI Technologies — a full-stack solution for low-code and pro-code agentic AI development. Powered by our new Agentic AI Center of Excellence, this offering helps clients scale seamlessly in the cloud. Through close collaboration with Microsoft experts and guidance from Microsoft’s AI Center of Excellence, we’re helping clients unlock the full potential of agentic AI.”
—Charlie Doubek, VP, Managed Collaboration and Communications, NTT DATA
Capgemini is leveraging Microsoft’s AI CoE guidance to help customers maximize the value of their generative and agentic AI solutions.
“Capgemini and Microsoft have been partnering to support our clients for over 25 years now. But we have never been more excited than we are today to support clients through their AI transformations, powered by Microsoft’s technologies and best practices, including Microsoft’s AI Center of Excellence approach. Capgemini will accelerate the implementation of these best practices across its solutions and offerings to ensure more organizations worldwide take full advantage of the business impact of Generative and Agentic AI technologies.”
—Anne-Laure Thibaud, EVP, Head of AI & Analytics Global Practice, Capgemini
EY established an AI CoE based upon Microsoft’s guidance to scale generative AI use cases within their organization.
“Microsoft and EY have together helped customer organizations transform to keep pace with the rapidly evolving AI market. At EY, our global AI Center of Excellence created a global, secured sandbox to rapidly test and scale AI use cases. This has allowed us to support deployment and shorten the progression of ideation to implementation, testing over 1,000 cases since its launch. We continue to align our AI Center of Excellence approach with the latest leading practices from Microsoft to drive game-changing transformations for our customers.”
—Diego Garcia Puado, Partner–EY EMEIA Microsoft CoE leader
PwC is using Microsoft’s AI CoE guidance to accelerate agentic AI solutions.
“The agentic AI center of excellence will focus not just on building smart models, but on deploying intelligent, autonomous agents that plan, act, and collaborate across platforms. This will fundamentally change the human-agent dynamic and how work gets done across the enterprise. PwC and Microsoft are collaborating deeply on this approach, building and deploying agents across functions like software development, human resources, and customer operations, and helping drive organization-wide transformations that can help raise employee productivity and innovation.”
—Diego Jarne, Principal, Data Analytics & AI, PwC
Get the support you need for your next AI project
Establishing an AI CoE in your organization is an important step toward successfully building AI projects at scale. If you have a project in mind, and you’d like expert assistance, consider using Azure Innovate.
To learn more about establishing an AI CoE, use insights provided in the Implementing an AI Center of Excellence e-book and empower your teams to lead with confidence. Additionally, the curated Azure skilling plan on Microsoft Learn equips you with the training needed to help set up an AI CoE.
