JAKARTA – Accenture will launch Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant Copilot to all 743,000 employees worldwide, in a deal dubbed Microsoft’s largest enterprise contract for the chatbot product.
This move is a significant boost for Microsoft, which is trying to convert its vast customer base into paying users of AI services.
The financial value of the cooperation was not disclosed by the two companies in a joint statement on Monday. However, the scale of implementation is considered strategic, given that it is currently just over 3 percent of the more than 450 million enterprise users of Microsoft 365 who subscribe to the Copilot service for 30 US dollars per month.
This deal comes amid growing investor concerns about the huge return on Microsoft’s AI investment. Microsoft shares are down 12 percent this year, after experiencing the biggest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis in the January-March period.
Microsoft’s AI Strategy Put to the Test
The full implementation at Accenture extends the company’s initial plan of 2024, when they targeted the use of Copilot for up to 300,000 employees.
Accenture itself is known as one of the most aggressive companies in the adoption of corporate AI. In fact, according to media reports, the company has linked top-level promotions to the level of utilization of AI technology.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet confirmed that the use of Copilot has had a real impact. “Our teams are already working on higher value work thanks to this technology,” she said.
Based on the company’s internal survey of 200,000 users, about 97 percent of staff said Copilot helped them complete routine tasks up to 15 times faster, while 53 percent reported significant productivity gains. However, claims of AI benefits are still a debate.
A survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives in US, UK, German, and Australian companies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February showed nearly 90 percent of respondents believed AI had not had a significant impact on employment or productivity in the past three years.
On the other hand, Microsoft continues to expand its AI strategy by offering a variety of artificial intelligence models, including technology from Anthropic.
Charles Lamanna, an executive who leads the M365 Apps and Copilot platforms at Microsoft, said the multi-model approach is also driving market demand.
Microsoft also introduced a tool called “Critique”, which uses one AI model to examine the results of other models.
This move is part of the company’s strategy to reduce its dependence on OpenAI while capturing opportunities from the growing interest in the products of developer Claude.
On the same day, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a new partnership that ends Microsoft’s exclusive rights to OpenAI technology. With the change, the creator of ChatGPT can now sell its products through rival cloud platforms.
For Microsoft, the deal with Accenture is an important signal that the enterprise market is still the main arena in proving the economic value of AI – not just a futuristic promise, but a business tool that must show concrete results.
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