Microsoft's vision for AI agents in the future of enterprise Finance

Now I can think of no better way to continue this keynote than to bring out one of the leaders in the agentic era and OneStream strategic partner, Microsoft. Please welcome Microsoft CTO, Global Partner Solutions, Tony Surma to the stage.

All right, thank you so much for being here, Tony. And when we think of Microsoft, you're on the frontier of AI adoption in the enterprise. And you're not only delivering the tools, but you've spent considerable time in research, you know, understanding the emerging AI operating model for business.

So from your vantage point, from what you see, how is AI reshaping expectations within the finance function? Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me. Thank you for being a partner with Microsoft. Thank you all for being here.

Possibly like my team, your team might be worried you'd be sneaking off to a galaxy not so far away. So I'm thankful that you all are staying here with us. So to your actual question, what I want to say is, we've worked with a study that's based upon thousands of enterprises and looked at what's happening with AI agentic, everything that's going on.

And we found a couple of things. First, they modeled this in a quadrant in the upper right hand quadrant, as always is, is called frontier firms. And what was seen there is that there's three things that define the folks who are driving leadership internally and within their industry and getting the most results around adopting this wave of technology.

The first is that they're simultaneously bringing together organizational readiness and frameworks with their technical readiness and frameworks. So that means it's not just about buying a technology using a technology.

It's about how you align that with the business. And you've heard that so far throughout this keynote. The second thing is specifically around readiness, looking at their data state, looking at their skills, looking at how they apply governance, all of that, and thinking about how you need to be ready for this transformation.

Much like the move from paper to a computer or from an on-premises data center to a cloud, there's things you need to be ready and know about. And so it's those who really focus there. And the last thing is frontier firms, the ones that are the most successful, are not the ones that are the most experimental.

It's the ones who are the most intentional. And intention in this case really means having that readiness, everything I said. It also means looking at this through an eye of how are you going to get the business value? How are you going to see ROI? How can you analyze, predict, see what you want to see come out of that, pick the right choices, get that value early and often, and then evolve from there? And one of the things that I think is so important for this audience, what I just described, sounds like the superpowers of a finance department, of folks in the CFO or other audiences, where you need to think about how do you make the right decisions? How do you inform that with your data? How do you see an ROI, a clear path to value when you leverage this technology? So I think there's an opportunity to advance everybody's enterprise, but also an opportunity for finance to play a really strong role there.

Absolutely. And I think you hit on one key element there, the technical readiness being super important. And it seems that finance would need help in defining and executing an AI strategy, both within the function and across the enterprise.

And so how do you see AI reshaping the partnership that might exist today between the IT team and the office of finance? Yeah, I think that's exactly the way to think about it is think about the partnership between finances and IT as like the physics or the operating model for the enterprise.

Because you've thought about what I just said a moment ago, you need organizational and technical. That means your data state, your security, all of those technical aspects need to be modernized, need to be leveraged by agents and other such things.

And remember, AI is going to be like a robot with a flashlight. It's not going to see stuff it's not supposed to. It's going to see the stuff that you configured it to see. And so that means it's going to be very important to have the technical data governance, security, all of those aspects inside of there so you can get that.

At the same time, as you heard earlier, AI without data is a very eloquent guess. And so you need the data and the context that's going to come into that. Finance is a great way to drive that. Also think about governance, think about risk, think about all that other analysis.

So again, together, I think this becomes that operating model. And one last advantage of what's happening right now with this technology transformation, just like the IT departments worried less about keeping servers powered and turned on when they move from on-premises to the cloud, this is allowing this wave of agentic is allowing you all in finance and IT to again up level from those tasks that you do have to deliver, to focus more strategic, and to have that time to drive the enterprise forward.

So simultaneously, we have the opportunity where it's the right two organizations, but also the technology that's enabling the right capabilities in them as well. Absolutely. Yeah, I think to that same point, I think OneStream and Microsoft have a key role to play there for you all out there in the audience.

And when I think about that, you know, OneStream and Microsoft, you guys are one of our, guys are our most strategic partner, you know, to OneStream and a longstanding partnership with a common mission to deliver the innovation that empowers finance and IT to accelerate and achieve exponential value.

So for those that don't know, you know, OneStream is entirely built on the Microsoft stack from the .NET runtime to the Azure databases, the Azure compute, you guys are critical to us. And as you heard from Jeremy today, the Office 365 add-in is another huge plus, you know, as we move towards continued integration at the application layer.

So when you think about that, and I would love to hear your view on Microsoft OneStream partnership and the joint value we're able to collectively deliver to customers. Yeah, as I said at the start, thank you, thank you for the partnership.

But I think more importantly, we know that we are a partner powered company. And so we know that the value of our platform is going to be realized best when we can work with our partners and bring the domain expertise and what you all need.

It also means that if you're a joint customer of ours, that their solution, their capabilities that we work together to build are running in the same environment, are running in the same platform that drives intelligence, choice and trust, does that at an enterprise scale, that if you're on the IT side of the house, you have consistent ways of looking at security and other aspects of operationalizing that environment.

It also means that you could take advantage of looking at the data that's between any solution you're running on our platform and bringing that together. So there's a lot of better together is what we sense there.

And not just on the technical side. You're a great partner in terms of our marketplace and the ability to procure and transact and even leverage the usage of this platform, this technology through a commitment you as a customer may have to Microsoft and you're something called a Mac.

And then overall, what I would just say is we have a great partnership building solutions, building those differentiated capabilities. I know you know this, but I don't know if everybody in the audience knows that you were actually voted, awarded, recognized, if you will, as the Microsoft Software Development Company Partner of the Year in the Americas, the organization that I'm part of.

Absolutely. Thank you. That's incredible. Yeah, I appreciate that. As we think about, you know, we hit on some of the infrastructure and scale and some of the application layer and we're continuing to innovate more at the application layer with you guys as well as, you know, one of the most exciting announcements here at Splash is how we're incorporating one stream sensible AI agents within the Microsoft Agent 365 agentic framework.

Can you impact that a little bit for us as well? Yeah. So as you heard and as you saw today with those little agents on the Pokemon cards, which I loved, I'm clearly a nerd. I also love Excel, by the way, so I feel very much at home.

But one of the things that we realize is that as more and more agents and more of these solutions are deployed, we have a product, we have an offering called Agent 365, because just like you've heard today, you're going to want observability.

You're going to want the ability to know what it's doing, what identity, what security frame that that's operating under. You're going to be able to discover either agents that you've acquired through great solutions like OneStream, or that might be being developed by your own team members, or even from other competitive platforms brought into your enterprise.

Overall, that's what Agent 365 does. It takes great specialized agents like you see here today and brings that broader environment so you can wrap the security, the governance, observability, all of that in there together.

And then we couple that also with all of our data capabilities and underneath there, another area that you're partnering with us greatly and in the future. Because we know, as I said earlier, data is key to the value of AI, and it's not just the data in one system, it's the data across systems.

So those two capabilities to manage, monitor and observe what's happening in a controlled environment with your agents and empower them all with the proper data across multiple solutions, data sources, data types, those two areas together create sort of the two best value vectors to make AI do the promise that we're looking for together.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And as we think about the, you know, just even further on the application layer, you know, the, you know, with the Microsoft tools that you use each and every day out there in the audience, could you give a few examples of, you know, where OneStream sensible AI agents might show up for you, you know, and help solve some finance use cases? Yeah, the great part is I'm actually going to say nothing you haven't heard already in this keynote.

So obviously, you know, we know that you all work in Excel, we heard that. When you hear the phrase buckle up in Excel in the same breath during a conference, again, you know you're somewhere special.

And so we have that ability for those agents together to show up inside of Excel, where many of us work a lot during the day, but also in teams or other products you might be using for that ad hoc collaboration, for that question and answer capability you want to do.

And then also, as you've mentioned, within M365 Copilot, we see it's very important that as people use those productivity and cross domain agents that really understand your enterprise, the files you might have in SharePoint and OneDrive and the communications and teams, being able to bring in that data and that agent capability from the platform creates an opportunity that you can tie that all together so that our whole key here is we, as we've heard today, we want to augment, we want to amplify, we want to put agents and AI in sort of the flow of human ambition, not something off to the side.

And so the ability to meet all of your users, all of our customers together, where they are, and the tools they use, that's key to our philosophy and the partnership that we have. A hundred percent. I couldn't agree more.

And in the meantime, right, as we look to wrap up here, if there's one message you'd want to leave finance leaders to walk away with about this partnership, about AI, what would it be? Yeah, so let's probably take it back to one of the first things I said.

I think this is a wave of transformation. You're seeing what OneStream is going to do to help you go through and take advantage, leverage and get the benefits of that wave of transformation. Microsoft certainly does that as well together with you.

But I think it's more than just being able to leverage and get the benefits of this wave of transformation. Together, I think we're creating the opportunity to take finance further as the leaders of that transformation.

So you can all drive the next opportunity, the next evolution, the next generation of whatever you do in the companies that you're part of. So take that leadership opportunity, leverage what we're bringing, plus what you know about your business to really drive the future that we don't know what that is yet, but we're going to build that together.

Absolutely. Tony, thank you so much for being up here. Thank you, Microsoft, and I appreciate the time today. Thank you.