Customers are moving beyond general AI conversations. Increasingly, they are looking for partners who understand their industry, business processes, regulatory environment, and desired outcomes well enough to help them deliver meaningful transformation.
That is the message I heard throughout MCAPS Start for Partners, and it is shaping how we are approaching FY27 across the Americas.
Thank you to every Americas partner who joined us. FY26 was a remarkable year because of the impact you delivered. Hundreds of customers advanced their AI and cloud journeys because your teams showed up, invested in their success, and helped turn ambition into action. As we look ahead to FY27, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: industry depth is emerging as one of the strongest differentiators a partner can bring to the table.
At MCAPS Start for Partners, my team and I spent time walking through our priorities for FY27. Across public sector, financial services, software development companies (SDCs), and every other segment we discussed, one theme consistently surfaced: industry expertise matters more than ever.
That is one reason we have restructured our go-to-market approach across the Americas so that sellers in the United States, Canada, and Latin America are aligned to industries rather than territories. This is not a cosmetic change. It means customer conversations begin with business priorities, industry challenges, competitive pressures, and outcomes, not simply technology.
We have built that same thinking into how we engage alongside partners. Your presence in an account is increasingly visible within seller planning and account strategy discussions. Today, that footprint spans 71% of our Enterprise Managed Partner List, touches more than 10,000 customers, and surfaces roughly 200 systems integrator (SI) and SDC partners directly to Microsoft sellers. When our teams sit down to plan an account, they have greater visibility into the partners already delivering value and helping customers succeed.
Why industry depth matters now
Why is industry depth so important? Because AI transformation is increasingly extending beyond technology deployments and into business processes, workflows, operating models, data strategy, and compliance requirements. Customers are not looking for a generic AI conversation. They are looking for partners who understand their business deeply enough to help them identify where AI can create measurable impact.
That is where industry expertise becomes a competitive advantage.
Microsoft is continuing to invest in that opportunity. Partner skilling participation is up 57% year over year, our go-to-market and sales enablement teams are embedded earlier in partner engagement efforts, and FY27 incentives place greater emphasis on customer adoption, consumption, growth, and measurable outcomes. We are also expanding opportunities for partners to demonstrate advanced capabilities through new specialization paths, including the Frontier Partner specialization.
These investments are designed to help partners turn expertise into growth.
Turning expertise into repeatable value
You can already see what this looks like in practice.
At the Redmond Police Department, Axon did not simply deploy technology. They helped build a drone-as-first-responder program that puts a drone in the air in under two minutes on 80% of calls, helped locate more than 550 people last year, and increased retail crime clearance rates by one-third. That is not an isolated technology project. It is a transformation of how a public safety organization operates, delivered by a partner that understands the mission, the environment, and the outcomes that matter.
Similarly, SoftServe worked alongside TerraPower to create a repeatable Azure-based solution that reduced qualification time for advanced nuclear reactor designs from 18 months to just eight weeks. That is the power of combining industry expertise with scalable technology and repeatable intellectual property.
The pattern is one I believe every partner should be paying attention to:
Bring your industry fluency. Build it once. Make it repeatable.
When partners combine deep industry expertise with scalable solutions, they create more value for customers and stronger growth opportunities for their own businesses. One partner used our financial-services-focused incentives to generate millions in pipeline, demonstrating what is possible when industry depth, investment, and platform capabilities align.
Where to start in FY27
If you are thinking about where to focus your efforts this year, I would suggest starting with these actions:
1. Identify and demonstrate where your industry expertise runs deepest
Look for the industries where your teams already have proven customer success, differentiated experience, and credibility. Then look at your specializations and designations, not as a badge to display, but as a way of showing sellers exactly where that depth sits. This year's additions are worth a fresh look, even if you checked that box last year, and the organizations that keep adding to it are the ones sellers point to first.
2. Turn successful customer work into repeatable solutions and services
The greatest opportunity comes when industry knowledge becomes something you can scale and deliver repeatedly across customers with similar challenges.
3. Take advantage of FY27 opportunities
Review the skilling, incentives, specializations, and go-to-market offerings available to your organization, and engage with your PDM to understand how your account footprint is represented and where new opportunities may exist.
This year is all about moving from possibility to performance. The opportunity is no longer just about AI capability. It is about combining AI capability with industry expertise to create outcomes customers would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. If you're deciding where to put your energy in FY27, that's where I'd start: show up with industry depth, and you'll find the field, the incentives, and the platform pulling with you.
We'll keep unpacking what this looks like industry by industry throughout the year. For now: welcome to FY27. Let's go build it, industry by industry.