This week at Microsoft Ignite, we are defining what it means to be a Frontier Firm—organizations that embed AI across every layer of their business. A Frontier Firm is a next-generation organization built for the AI era. These companies blend human judgment with AI agents to scale faster, make smarter decisions, and deliver more value.
The foundation for Microsoft partner success begins with becoming Customer Zero. These partners go beyond selling AI. They internalize and operationalize it and bring meaningful credibility to every customer engagement. This approach builds real-world experience and insights and transforms the partner’s go-to-market with capability and expertise that differentiates them with customers.
By leading as Frontier Firms, these Customer Zero partners enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes, and bend the curve on innovation with AI, Copilots, and agents across their own organizations.
Frontier in action
Across our ecosystem, partners are building Frontier solutions on the Microsoft Cloud with AI, Copilot, and agents that deliver measurable business outcomes.
- Enrich employee experiences: Insight, a leading Scale Solution Provider, is transforming frontline work in the Asia Pacific region by improving service efficiency for your town, which operates Australia’s only 24/7 Kids Helpline. Previously, counselors spent up to 45 minutes after each call manually writing case notes, limiting their ability to assist more youth and impacting their own well-being. Insight deployed an AI-powered notes solution built on Azure OpenAI and Dynamics 365, reducing administrative time by 70% and saving up to 20 minutes per call. This innovation not only improved documentation accuracy and consistency but also gave counselors time to decompress, boosting job satisfaction and mental health.
- Reinvent customer engagement: Blue Yonder, recognized as the 2025 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Partner Innovation – Global ISV, is revolutionizing supply chain interactions for customers like Heineken. Leveraging Microsoft Copilot, Azure AI Services, and Microsoft AI Foundry, Blue Yonder integrates AI-powered agents into Copilot using the Agent SDK. Customers can interact with their supply chains through intelligent, conversational experiences that feel like working with virtual teammates. These agents personalize engagement, streamline operations, and deliver real-time insights—transforming how businesses connect with their data and customers. By reinventing customer engagement with Microsoft AI, Blue Yonder is setting a new standard for supply chain transformation.
- Reshape business processes: Infosys, 2025 Partner of the Year for Azure – Secure Migration and Modernization, supports organizations looking to modernize operations and drive sustainable impact. For NOVA Chemicals, a global agri-chemical company that was facing rising operational costs and struggling with forecast accuracy, Infosys delivered Cobalt Agri-Chemical Cloud—an AI-first platform integrating IoT, AI, ML, and ESG tools. This solution transformed operations, improving forecast accuracy by 65% and reducing energy consumption by 30%. By reshaping business processes with Microsoft AI, Infosys empowers customers like NOVA Chemicals to unlock new levels of efficiency and environmental responsibility.
- Bend the curve on innovation: Arrow, the 2025 Global Microsoft Distribution Partner of the Year for Partner Innovation, is accelerating cloud growth through ArrowSphere AI, with agentic selling, custom assistants, and insight-driven execution. With Arrow’s solution, their reseller partner TIBCO was able to leverage Arrow’s white-labeled marketplace to expand reach and applied the ArrowSphere Assistant to identify small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers ready for Microsoft Copilot. Using real-time insights and AI-driven targeting, TIBCO boosted Copilot adoption and improved customer enablement. The results speak volumes—partners using these tools grew 33% in the second half of FY25, nearly double the rate of those not using them. By embedding AI into every stage of the distribution journey, Arrow is transforming how the channel innovates and delivers value.
Each of these examples demonstrates how partners are using Microsoft AI and agents to deliver customer outcomes across industries and geographies, redefining what’s possible with AI.
Evolving the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program to empower Frontier Firms
Ignite marks an important evolution for the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, introducing new investments for partners to lead as Frontier Firms, translating their own AI experience into customer impact.
Building AI-first capability across the ecosystem
Technology is evolving at unprecedented speed, demanding continuous learning for both technical professionals and business users. In this environment, agility is everything. The partners who move fast, build skills, and lead with credibility are the ones who succeed.
When you look at the world’s Frontier Firms—the organizations that consistently outperform, innovate faster, and set the direction for entire industries—there’s one common pattern that stands out: they devote 10 to 20% of their time to skilling. In an AI-first world, skilling is the new currency.
That’s why, in the past year, we have made record levels of investment in partner skilling, with more than 2.4 million learners trained across solution areas. AI skilling is accelerating as well. We expanded our AI course catalog by 66% year over year and now offer 145 AI-focused courses that have supported 1.7 million learners building new capabilities.
To deepen AI skills, we introduced the Agentic AI and Copilot Partner Skills Accelerator webcast series and new Agentic and AI Workshops. These learning experiences give engineers and architects hands-on practice designing and deploying multi-agent solutions with Microsoft Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio, and Azure AI Foundry.
The Partner Skilling Hub, now generally available, brings these learning paths together into a single, unified destination for mastering Microsoft Cloud and AI solutions. It offers comprehensive learning experiences that are live, virtual, or on demand for every role across presales, sales, and technical audiences. Partners can expand their expertise, earn certifications, and advance their Frontier journey and capability.
These programs are part of a global skilling movement that is accelerating rapidly. With localized content in over 30 markets, partners can skill by role, workload, or solution area. Every team member, from sales to engineering, has a clear path to build skills and drive measurable impact.
Recognizing partner excellence and differentiation
We continue to evolve our designations and badges, which differentiate partners in the market.
The Frontier Partner badge recognizes organizations leading AI transformation through an AI-first, human-led approach that combines AI agents and human ingenuity to scale innovation and impact. Earned by showcasing excellence across numerous Microsoft Cloud and AI disciplines, it’s a new symbol of leadership and impact, and it’s how we recognize partners who are bending the curve of innovation and setting the pace for what’s next.
The Frontier Distributor designation, now globally available, recognizes distributors that meet the highest standards of performance and enablement. This is designed to create differentiation and scale for partners that deliver meaningful value to the SMB segment, empowering distributors to grow faster, activate more resellers, and deliver greater consistency in customer experience.
The Support Services designation celebrates partners that deliver exceptional customer experiences across the Microsoft Cloud. Because these partners meet rigorous standards for satisfaction, resolution, and service excellence, customers can identify them with public badging that signals their support capabilities and differentiates them in market. Begin pre-enrollment now for an eligibility assessment.
The Digital Sovereignty specialization identifies partners uniquely qualified to assess, architect, and implement sovereign-cloud strategies across Azure, Microsoft 365, and Security. These partners drive innovation while maintaining the highest levels of trust, privacy, and compliance.
Simplifying engagement and expanding opportunity
Microsoft Marketplace continues to expand as a key growth engine for partners, now featuring global availability of resale enabled offers. This capability allows publishers and channel partners to resell software solutions directly through Marketplace, simplifying transactions, expanding reach, and scaling revenue.
We also introduced App Accelerate, a unified offer that brings together incentives, benefits, and co-sell support across the Microsoft Cloud. App Accelerate provides end-to-end technical guidance, developer tools, and go-to-market resources so software development companies can innovate and scale. Previews are beginning now, with full availability planned for 2026.
New Copilot for CSP
Partners can now bring enterprise-grade AI to millions of small and mid-sized organizations with Microsoft 365 Copilot Business. This offering delivers the full Copilot experience at an accessible price point of $21 per seat, for organizations of up to 300 users, through Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium plans.1 Available through the Cloud Solution Provider program, it enables partners to simplify work, boost productivity, and grow customer value with trusted AI.
Microsoft’s AI Business Solutions brings together new end-to-end solutions and capabilities for SMB customers. With this integrated set of solutions, you can provide best-in-class productivity and communication tools with secure, work-ready AI chat, search and agents.
Bringing together Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 Business Copilot, Microsoft Business Central and the Microsoft Purview Suite, you get a comprehensive, secure, and connected toolkit, at a price designed for small and mid-sized businesses.
On December 1, we are introducing a set of compelling offers, including a promotional offer on the new Copilot Business SKU, new bundles that bring together Microsoft 365 Business SKUs and Copilot Business into a single offer with a promotional discount, as well as a new 50% off promotion for the Purview Suite.
New Agent Factory
Microsoft Agent Factory is a new program designed for organizations that want to move from experimentation to execution faster. At the heart of this program is the Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan (P3), which streamlines procurement and removes complexity. With P3, partners can offer their customers access to 32 Microsoft services through one flexible pool of funds, eliminating the need to manage multiple contracts or choose between platforms. This single metered plan not only reduces upfront licensing and provisioning but also enables greater predictability for organizations investing in AI innovation.
Flexibility is key—and Agent Factory delivers. Partners help customers deploy agents anywhere, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, and take advantage of availability in CSP and other licensing models to meet diverse customer needs. Eligible organizations can also tap into hands-on support from top AI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and access tailored role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams. Together, they unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation while helping customers confidently embrace the future of AI. See more at aka.ms/MAF-Blog.
The path ahead
This year’s Ignite marks a key step in our shared Frontier journey, both in how you achieve that ideal and how Microsoft empowers you to do so. Every announcement, investment, and innovation we share today is designed to strengthen capability, expand opportunity, and deliver impact at scale.
The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program will continue to be the engine that fuels our partner ecosystem and empowers partners aligned to the innovation we are bringing to market.
I invite you to join our Ignite partner-focused sessions this week to learn more:
Be sure to explore all partner announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2025 at aka.ms/IgnitePartner25 and read the official Microsoft Ignite blog.
Missed the keynote sessions? Catch them on demand:
1Throughout this document, $ refers to US dollar (USD).