Organizations across Asia are already rolling out AI tools, but many are discovering that access alone does not translate into impact. Real progress begins when employees understand how AI fits into their day‑to‑day roles, feel confident using it safely, and are equipped with the skills to turn experimentation into meaningful outcomes.
In this episode of Frontier Forward: Asia Edition, we spotlight Ernst & Young (EY) and explore how their partnership with Microsoft is helping customers bridge the gap between AI ambition and practical adoption.
Episode 7: Building AI confidence through capability and culture
This conversation brings together Katherine Boiciuc, Regional Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Oceania at EY, and Vicki Batka, Enterprise Partner Lead at Microsoft ANZ, as they discuss what it takes to move from AI rollout to real organizational impact. The dialogue highlights how the EY organization’s people-centric approach, combined with Microsoft Cloud technologies, is helping organizations across Asia translate AI ambition into meaningful change across their day-to-day operations.
Key takeaways from the conversation
- Driving AI adoption through workforce enablement: Enterprise AI success requires more than leadership or technology; it depends on aligning strategy with how employees use AI in daily work. EY’s AI Academy helps customers build confidence through practical training, prompt guides, hackathons, dashboards, and new team rituals.
- Meaningful customer impact through literacy and training: The most successful AI transformations happen when organizations focus on building skills as well as implementing technology. For example, after EY’s AI Academy training, 3,600 employees saw their confidence using AI rise from 2.6 to 3.9 out of 5, showing how workforce readiness drives adoption and supports long-term success.
- Balancing pace with safety through strategic alignment: Organizations adopting AI must balance speed with safety and governance. The EY organization’s transparent strategies and leadership alignment, together with Microsoft, help customers adopt AI confidently and securely across the enterprise.
- Creating a culture of collaboration and experimentation: EY sees AI as a people-focused transformation. Their #PassThePrompt campaign encouraged employees to share prompts, speeding up learning and fostering a collaborative, experimental culture.
- From license rollout to AI-managed workloads: As AI becomes part of daily work, its true value depends on how well employees use it. Moving beyond basic summarization to agent-driven tasks and AI-managed workflows boosts operational impact. Strong prompting and regular practice are key to unlocking productivity across the enterprise.
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Keep tuning in to Frontier Forward: Asia Edition for more partner stories and insights that showcase how enterprise organizations are building AI capability, confidence, and long-term value through collaborative transformation.
Full transcript:
Disclaimer: This AI-generated transcript may contain errors. Please verify with the original audio or script for accuracy.
Vicki Batka:
Hi everyone, and thanks for joining us today. It's my pleasure to welcome KB today, as she likes to be called. It's great to have you here with us today, KB. Could you maybe start by briefly telling us what your role is at EY?
Katherine Boiciuc:
Thanks for having me. I am the regional EY chief technology and innovation officer for Oceania. And so I work with our internal teams and our clients on how technology, data, and AI can solve real business problems. And how do we actually make that into meaningful change across organizations.
Vicki:
And maybe you could share a little bit on what your organization does and maybe which markets you serve.
Katherine:
EY works across all sectors across Australia and New Zealand and really about helping organizations solve complex problems and helps them create long-term value. We also have treated ourselves as client zero for AI. What that means is that we use it on our own business first, learning what makes it work in practice, and then taking those lessons to our clients.
Vicki:
Yeah, I love that. Maybe, KB, you could share a story of a recent example of something that's impactful. Maybe a customer win or transformation that was built on top of, say, Microsoft Cloud.
Katherine:
It's been nice to see the accelerated adoption of AI across Australia and New Zealand with our clients. I think a recent example that really stands out to me stood out for a couple of reasons. One was it was the combination of leadership support and the fact that they had really clear use cases and were focused on people's training. So people's literacy as the secret sauce to unlock the adoption momentum required to make their AI strategy successful.
The biggest barrier that we're seeing is that alignment, that alignment from the organizational strategy down to people's purpose in their day-to-day role. And people have very different understandings of what AI does and how to use it safely. And so with this client, we designed our EY AI Academy that we have used internally for them. So we helped them close the knowledge gap with practical learning, prompt guides, hackathons, and adoption dashboards and new rituals in their organization to help them move faster with their AI confidence. With this particular organization I'm thinking of, 3,600 people adopted AI, they completed successfully the EY AI Academy training, and their confidence in using AI for their day-to-day work increased from 2.6 out of five to 3.9 out of five. So you can make material difference by giving people the time and the skills and investment in their training to make them feel confident about using AI.
Vicki:
Yeah, I love that. And it is a confidence thing, but I'm sure that along the way you faced some challenges. How did you maybe face some of those challenges leveraging the Microsoft technology?
Katherine:
The overarching challenge for almost everyone on the AI adoption journey is pace and balancing pace with expectation and safety. Australia has been an early pilot region for many large organizations. And we find ourselves working at the very cutting edge of Microsoft's technology and the adoption. We've seen some wonderful Frontier Firms in Oceania. I think the secret sauce is to actually be really clear about what is the agenda and having a transparent strategy. So everyone knows the plan. Everyone knows the resourcing and the level of support required to upskill people. And if you can create that alignment and clarity across the organization, but also with Microsoft, the ability to close that gap on pace expectations and doing it safely so that people could do it with confidence is really important.
Vicki:
Yeah, that trust and confidence is something that I think we do need to lean into. And Microsoft's definitely here along with EY to help our customers together. I'm sure there's a lot of best practices or advice you could share. Maybe I could ask you just to share a couple of those best practices with Microsoft that you've picked up.
Katherine:
I think treating it like a partnership and that it's a people transformation versus a technology deployment is really important. I think a lot of the missteps we're seeing is people treating it like every other tech rollout they've done when this is a mindset, skillset, and toolset shift. It also is important to collaborate. I think regional collaboration matters because the challenges that we're seeing here in terms of guardrails and regulation and transparency reporting are going to be different to other countries around the world. And so staying close to your regional partners is important because you're going through those choices together at the same time often. I also think it's really important to create a culture of excitement where people feel empowered to share what's working and also what's not working. It's expected to be messy, and it's expected to be celebrated both the wins and the losses with AI because that's how we build better skills and better capability. For us, we used a campaign called #PassThePrompt where we saw hundreds of thousands of our people using the hashtag weekly, sharing their favorite prompts. And so, very quickly, the best prompts went viral across the organization. So I'm a huge fan of creating those culture-building moments.
Vicki:
I love that—#PassThePrompt. OK, challenge accepted. We need to do more of that. And certainly my team here in ANZ, thank you for sharing that. Maybe what's one thing that you'd like to leave us with? Any kind of thoughts?
Katherine:
AI has moved beyond the hype cycles, and it's beyond the experiments. It's really becoming a part of everyday work. It's really clear that the value only comes from people's ability to use it well. And I talk about this phenomena of people using their old search habits. You'd type into Google to look for something, and you'd maybe write one or two words, and then it prompts and try and completes the search for you, and then off it goes. The real value of working with AI is high-context, high-quality prompting, and really taking the time to master that skill. And you're going to be really underwhelmed if you're still treating it like a search engine. AI is so much more than that. So I encourage you to practice talking with AI and practice with scheduling prompts, practice with building agents that can produce the report that you used to manually produce every week. There is so much more potential with AI, and I find a lot of organizations are stopping at the, we've rolled out the license and people are summarizing their meetings and searching with it, but they haven't really gone on to AI-managed workloads or AI-orchestrated workloads, but there's so much more upside. So keep exploring and creating with it.
Vicki:
Yeah, thank you so much. I love that. And I think talking and using voice prompts is something that I hadn't explored until I joined Microsoft a few months ago. So it is definitely, there's so many different ways to engage and interact with the tools. So there's so much great insights that you've shared. I want to thank you so much for joining us today and wish our continued partnership with EY all the best for the future. Thanks so much, KB.
Katherine:
Thank you for having me.