Microsoft Ignite 2025 Keynote

Microsoft Ignite is in San Francisco, Moscone Center November 18–21, 2025.

The opening keynote featured Judson Althoff, CEO Microsoft commercial business, with senior Microsoft engineering leaders as they unveil the latest innovations driving the next wave of AI transformation that empower every human and every organization across every industry to redefine what it means to become frontier.

In the keynote Judson Althoff talked about frontier transformation and how we need to empower the frontier transformation which is different from AI transformation.

There are 4 common reasons why AI projects fail:

• Alignment between business and IT professionals is very inconsistent.
• There are a sea of data quality issues out there that need to be rationalised by AI developers in order to get meaningful output.
• Governance, requirements and market, whether regulatory or otherwise require AI to be kept on the side-lines from efforts that can impact business.
• There is an over emphasis on experimentation rather than acts of innovation. AI should be put to work on business areas that can make an impact.

Many businesses who are achieving ROI are using the frontier success framework.

• Enrich – employee experience
• Reinvent – customer engagement
• Reshape – business processes
• Bend the curve – on innovation

They tie AI back to measurable ROI so the business can see the benefit and they make sure the results are shown in the customer experience journey.

In this new world he mentioned the need to reshape business processes, not simply to apply technology to existing process and expect revolutionary results. It is necessary to examine how business processes can become AI first and change them. Also to focus deeply on innovation and bending the curve to drive competitive advantage. There needs to be a technical focus shift to business focus and holistically reimage the business aligned with human ambitions.

Democratising intelligence through human ambition and AI tools like Copilot and the agent ecosystem  transform how we work, learn, and lead. This AI transformation should do more for humanity.

If you study frontier firms there are 3 traits

• They put AI in the flow of human ambition: AI is infused in the tools we use
• Ubiquitous innovation: there is a maker in everyone of us
• Observability at every layer of the stack: We need to govern and managed the AI that is deployed

Beyond this there are two traits which are fundamental building blocks, Intelligence and Trust. 

Intelligence by putting the 'I' back into AI.  It is how you work, who you work with and how you reason over the data.  It is how we align AI to our purpose to get the outcomes we need. Trust with observability are core.

The keynote set the seen for the event highlighting the human element and that the business processes we have require an over haul to work in new ways. Trust and governance will help set the fundamental building blocks we need to move forward.