Leading Through Change: How Microsoft Is Reinventing IT for the AI Era [Speaker Spotlight]

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, few organizations can claim a 50-year legacy of technological transformation like Microsoft. At the forefront of this journey is Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Digital, Microsoft's IT Team who offers a rare insider’s perspective on how Microsoft has continually reinvented itself—most recently by transitioning from a traditional IT model to a vision-led, AI-centric organization.

In this thought-provoking speaker spotlight, Nathalie reflects on the lessons learned from decades of innovation and outlines how Microsoft is using AI not just to enhance productivity, but to securely power a new era of hybrid work, intelligent infrastructure, and long-term business value. From building resilient systems to aligning AI solutions with corporate objectives, this is a behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world’s most influential tech companies is preparing for what’s next. Get a preview of the insights she'll bring to the stage at the 7th annual American CIO & Cybersecurity Summit!

Can you introduce yourself, and share more about your career journey leading up to
your current role as the Corporate VP of Microsoft Digital?

My name is Nathalie D’Hers, and I’m the CVP for Microsoft Digital, the IT team at Microsoft.
I joined Microsoft back in 2000 – in fact, I just celebrated my 25th anniversary at the
company in April! When I joined Microsoft, I led a beta support team for Visual Studio.

I joined Microsoft IT in 2007 to lead the Operational Excellence initiative, where my team
delivered the monitoring roadmap for Microsoft’s key internal operations. During that era I
discovered that I really loved working in IT, and I was fortunate to have great support from
phenomenal leaders who invested in me and helped me to grow my scope and impact.

What was the initial catalyst or business driver that led Microsoft to transition and become an AI-centric organization?

The catalyst for Microsoft Digital to become an AI-forward organization is the opportunity and excitement we all feel about the potential for AI to transform the breadth of our services to make them more resilient, secure, and more reliable. Not to mention the ability of tools like Copilot to simplify and improve the employee experience. We also have a mission to provide the IT blueprint for our customers to follow, and it’s exciting to help businesses all over the world to take advantage of this generational opportunity to transform with AI. Beyond Copilot, we are transforming workflows across our IT functions, improving operational efficiency, end user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance and data driven decision making. Additionally, we’re transforming end user services to simplify employees’ day-to-day experience, allowing them to be more productive. Finally, we are also investing in our corporate functions, to bring the power of AI to our HR, Facilities and Legal teams so they can be more efficient and effective. CIOs really need to embrace the AI-forward movement because we're all being asked to "do more with less", and AI is the ultimate engine for us to achieve our business goals while living within our budgets. 

What foundational technologies or frameworks were most critical to enabling AI adoption at scale?

Probably the best example of this is the incorporation of Copilot into Microsoft Teams. In fact, if you ask nearly any Microsoft employee what their favorite Copilot is, they’d probably respond that it’s Copilot in Teams. The thing that’s so incredible about our Teams integration is that it enables meetings to become asynchronous events – there’s no more “fear of missing out” for people in different time zones because they can easily consume a meeting recap, see where they were mentioned, identify action items, and even ask Copilot to catch them up on what they missed if they joined a meeting late. Additionally, we’ve deployed Agents that can help with meeting facilitation or even real-time interpretation for employees who speak different languages. It’s an incredible tool to enable hybrid team productivity. Another great example is simply using Copilot chat to reason across enterprise knowledge.

At Microsoft, we have about 11 petabytes of data in our Microsoft 365 tenant. It used to be incredibly difficult for people to find what they were looking for across all that enterprise knowledge – now any employee can use natural language queries to scale across our
tenant to find information, answers, and colleagues who can help them. It’s much more powerful than traditional search and is making our hybrid employees far more productive.

How do you approach building a unified security strategy that spans devices, applications, and infrastructure?

My team partners closely with our CISO counterpart who is responsible for defining our internal security posture and requirements. Our team deploys, manages and runs our services in accordance with those policies. I’m also fortunate that Microsoft produces some of the world’s leading security products that span devices, apps and infrastructure, so we’re able to utilize Microsoft’s technology stack starting with Entra for identity, as well
as Defender, Sentinel and all the other great services that are built by our Security product group. At Microsoft Digital, we are building AI-powered solutions on top of our world-class security products that help us to keep our network, infrastructure and devices even more secure which is especially important in a world where the number of bad actors is only increasing. Few companies have a target on them like Microsoft, so it’s critical that we keep
innovating in this space.

How do you measure ROI on AI investments beyond short-term gains—especially in areas like efficiency, innovation, or customer experience?

Over time, we’ve looked at different ROI dimensions like cost reduction, employee productivity, engagement, and revenue impact, which are all great measures. But we recently settled on six dimensions of business value for our AI investments, each of which is equally as important as the other, and we’re working hard to instrument our portfolio of services so we can measure each of them. Those dimensions (in no particular order) are revenue impact, employee productivity & efficiency, security & risk management, employee & customer experience, quality improvement, and cost savings. For every AI investment in our IT portfolio, we evaluate those six criteria on an ongoing basis, to ensure that our investments are providing the value we anticipated. It’s critical to instrument your experiences and to evaluate telemetry on an ongoing basis to ensure that you’re getting the ROI you expected.

How do you see AI evolving as a driver of strategic value in the next 3–5 years?

It’s difficult to predict the next 3-5 months, much less the next 3-5 years! I would say that the biggest shift is going to be in the form of fully autonomous agents. Those routine, repeatable tasks that nobody likes that AI can easily handle are going to start to fade away so our human workers can focus on important strategic tasks and deliverables. However, I do think that we’ll always need “humans in the loop” to continuously monitor and train those agents to ensure they’re getting smarter and more effective over time.

Don’t miss the opportunity to learn more from Nathalie as she shares Microsoft’s innovative approach to an AI-centric future. Join us at the American CIO & Cybersecurity Summit, taking place June 2-3, and be part of industry-leading discussions shaping the future of IT & Cybersecurity. 

For more information and registration details, visit www.cioamerica.com.