Our professors at International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore used to tell us stories about how they had to wait for hours just to run and test their code on those big mainframe computers. We thought we were truly cutting-edge and blessed when we were walking around with Desknotes (a mix of desktop and notebook… and yes, they were a thing!) and Nokia 7650 that boasted 4MB memory and the ability to send MMS. Now, try explaining that to your kids and you’ll sound monolithic. That’s exactly what conferences successfully make you feel these days – seasoned! (see how I didn’t say old?)
A couple of weeks ago at Ignite 2025, Microsoft made it clear that AI is no longer a copilot sitting at the edges of enterprise workflows. The “Frontier Firm” model outlined in Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index – which describes organisations combining human ambition with AI agents to unlock scale, efficiency and creativity – is no longer theoretical. It has become real!
The focus this year has clearly been on the building blocks needed to make this transition work: data foundations and governance.
If you haven’t caught up on Ignite yet, Microsoft has done a great job publishing session replays and blogs (Thank you Microsoft!). Here are three themes that stood out for me:
1. From “Copilots” to “Digital Coworkers”
Most of us now accept that Copilot can help write emails, summarise meetings and create slides. The case studies from Mercedes-Benz USA having 52 teams building agents, LSEG unlocking 33 petabytes of data with AI showed how Microsoft is pushing much further – establishing AI agents’ role as Digital Employees.
Identity, access control, security, and monitoring are no longer optional. They are now part of the AI stack itself through Microsoft Entra, Defender and Purview, making governance native – not bolted on. Trust is no longer a “nice to have”. It is what determines whether AI scales in the enterprise.
2. Quiet Hero: Data
We’ve been talking about it for years – and Microsoft doubled down again. Agentic AI is only as good as the data behind it.
Microsoft Fabric, OneLake and the semantic model layer were highlighted not as analytics tools, but as the foundation for intelligent systems. Without clean data, ownership, governance and interoperability, agents will simply accelerate confusion.
3. Work IQ: Context is Everything
This was probably one of the mis-sold items from the agenda – unfortunately a lot of the audience seem to have left without clarity on what is live, what was roadmap and how much was vision versus deployment-ready reality.
When working with AI, remember that context is King. Without context, whilst AI can respond, it cannot reason well because it does not understand intent, priority or relevance. Work IQ is about helping AI understand your workflows, habits and your business environments (emails, meetings, documents, collaboration) so that it can be more effective. When combined with Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ, this context is extended from personal work patterns to enterprise data and organisational knowledge – giving AI agents the grounding they need to make sound, business-aware decisions.
Clearly Microsoft Ignite 2025 wasn’t about tooling. It seemed to be more about operating models. It was great to see organisations working on embedding AI well into the day to day operations and starting to reap the benefits out of it.
If you haven’t had a chance to look at the content, do check them out here: https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/home