EY announces new Microsoft partnership to help clients scale AI

EY has announced an expansion of its global alliance with Microsoft that will create integrated teams from both companies to help clients deploy AI solutions.

The next step in the alliance will leverage a $1-billion investment over five years to launch the initiative – which will combine Microsoft’s forward deployed engineers with EY business consultants aligned by industry. Together, the partners will co-develop industry-specific AI solutions in core business functions.

The initiative will initially cover solutions for finance, tax, risk, HR, and supply chain for clients in financial services, industrials, energy, consumer and retail, healthcare, and government.

EY says the offering will be fully integrated, with shared governance, aligned commercial models, and accountability across the two companies.

“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,” said Janet Truncale, chair and CEO of EY Global. “By combining people and innovation in this next phase of the Alliance, clients will be empowered to realize the transformative power of agentic AI within the enterprise.”

EY and Microsoft will work with clients to become “frontier firms” that generate value through agentic AI transformation and workforce upskilling.

The initiative draws on EY’s experience as “client zero,” with the Big Four firm having deployed Copilot to 150,000 of its employees to realize a 15% productivity boost. The accountancy will be scaling Copilot to its full global workforce of 400,000 people to embed agentic capabilities across the enterprise.

EY has also modernized its finance operations with Microsoft Power Platform and integrated a multi-agent framework into its audit platform EY Canvas.

“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 organization – to help customers move beyond pilots to enterprise execution, enhancing decision-making and delivering measurable impact,” said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business.