Scale AI transformation with Azure Essentials: AI Center of Excellence guidance
An AI Centre of Excellence seamlessly integrates business strategy, personnel, and technology decisions revolving around AI.
Are you a leader in AI or a technical decision-maker finding it challenging to scale and operationalise AI within your organisation? You’re certainly not alone. As highlighted in Microsoft’s annual report, The State of AI Infrastructure, nearly every organisation, 99%, encounters difficulties in scaling AI, and only a third of leaders believe they possess the necessary AI skills and talent. Clearly, transforming through AI necessitates a blend of technological solutions, organisational reform, and cultural shifts to foster innovation.
Last year, we introduced comprehensive guidance on AI adoption within Azure Essentials to assist customers in implementing AI at scale, ensuring well-architected AI workloads. Since then, the AI adoption scenario in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, alongside the AI workload guidance from the Azure Well-Architected Framework, has seen nearly 160,000 views. This underscores the value our customers find in our detailed guidance and best practices.
Beyond merely adopting technological best practices, organisations must also encourage the organisational change vital for achieving AI transformation and delivering extensive, innovative AI projects at scale. In response to this demand, we have recently published new AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) guidance in Azure Essentials. This resource will aid leaders in understanding how establishing an AI CoE can be a key strategy for organisations to seize AI opportunities.
What is an AI Centre of Excellence?
An AI Centre of Excellence acts as a strategic facilitator, uniting a cross-functional team within an organisation to connect various stakeholders and formulate a cohesive vision for AI adoption. The AI CoE encourages alignment between business strategy, personnel, and technological decisions regarding AI. By nurturing a collective approach, AI initiatives can be efficiently streamlined throughout the organisation, significantly enhancing their impact and value.
The guidance provided by the AI CoE is designed for organisations creating scalable, bespoke Azure AI Foundry (pro-code) solutions; however, many principles are applicable to low-code and no-code AI applications as well.
The competencies highlighted in the e-book, Implementing an AI Centre of Excellence, assist organisations in identifying the areas they need to address to unleash the full potential of AI, focusing on five core drivers of AI value.
- Business Strategy: Aligning business value, identifying use cases, and setting priorities.
- Organisation and Culture: Enhancing organisational readiness, skilling, and knowledge management, along with defining AI roles and functions.
- AI Strategy and Experience: Implementing use cases and mastering the AI lifecycle.
- Technology and Data Strategy: Establishing data practices, optimising deployment processes, managing infrastructure, ensuring cost efficiency, and evaluating AI model performance.
- AI Governance: Promoting the responsible use of AI.
Success Stories from AI CoEs
Across various industries, Microsoft partners are embracing Azure Essentials and integrating its AI Centre of Excellence guidance to assist customers in confidently operationalising AI. From establishing governance frameworks to boosting AI adoption, these partners blend Microsoft’s structured methodologies with their own insights to create high-impact, scalable AI CoEs. Here are some examples of how four partners are implementing this effectively.
NTT DATA leveraged Microsoft’s AI CoE guidance to expand their customers’ cloud capabilities.
“NTT DATA, collaborating with Microsoft, introduced Agentic AI Services for Hyperscaler AI Technologies—a comprehensive solution for low-code and pro-code agentic AI development. With our new Agentic AI Centre of Excellence, we help clients scale effortlessly in the cloud. Our partnership with Microsoft enables us to unlock the full potential of agentic AI.”
—Charlie Doubek, VP, Managed Collaboration and Communications, NTT DATA
Capgemini harnesses Microsoft’s AI CoE guidance to enhance the value of generative and agentic AI solutions for clients.
“Our partnership with Microsoft spans over 25 years, but the excitement surrounding AI transformations is unprecedented. Leveraging Microsoft’s AI Centre of Excellence approach, Capgemini is set to expedite the implementation of best practices, ensuring organisations globally fully capitalise on the benefits of Generative and Agentic AI technologies.”
—Anne-Laure Thibaud, EVP, Head of AI & Analytics Global Practice, Capgemini
EY created an AI CoE adhering to Microsoft’s guidance to scale generative AI use cases effectively.
“Together with Microsoft, EY has empowered organisations to adapt to the rapidly changing AI landscape. Our global AI Centre of Excellence has established a secure, global sandbox, allowing swift testing and scaling of AI use cases. We have supported the deployment of over 1,000 cases since inception, continually aligning our approach with Microsoft’s best practices.”
—Diego Garcia Puado, Partner–EY EMEIA Microsoft CoE leader
PwC is utilising Microsoft’s AI CoE guidance to accelerate the deployment of agentic AI solutions.
“Our agentic AI centre of excellence will not only focus on crafting intelligent models but will also deploy autonomous agents that can plan, act, and work collaboratively across various platforms. This approach is set to fundamentally alter the human-agent dynamics and improve overall productivity across enterprises. PwC and Microsoft are closely working on this initiative to build and deploy agents in areas like software development and human resources.”
—Diego Jarne, Principal, Data Analytics & AI, PwC
Get Support for Your AI Initiatives
Establishing an AI CoE is a critical stride towards successfully developing AI projects on a grand scale. If you have a specific project in mind and require expert support, consider using Azure Innovate. For additional comprehensive technical guidance, delve into the Azure Essentials resource kit—a valuable gateway to the essential resources for constructing secure, efficient, and reliable AI solutions.
To deepen your understanding of setting up an AI CoE, explore the insights in the Implementing an AI Centre of Excellence e-book. Empower your teams to lead with assurance and explore the curated Azure skilling plan on Microsoft Learn, equipping you with the training necessary for establishing an AI CoE successfully.
