There is no better day than today to join Rebecca in the office to finish the campaign that needs to roll out before the festive season is upon us. Rebecca has been literally burning the midnight oil, trying to help the team reach their goals. She can. She is an AI agent. “If you are not learning AI, and making AI work for you, you will fall behind,” said Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia.

Adoption of AI for Microsoft is a beast of a different order, as the company has globally disbursed teams, which come with its set of unique challenges.

In a conversation with Hari Vasudev, the CTO of Walmart US, Chandok unfolded — as part of Converge 2025, Walmart Global Tech’s flagship retail-tech event — the importance of incorporating AI into the workflow was discussed, with Chandok highlighting three important points.

“First, when it comes to AI, a principle I use on myself… belief comes before ability. Before we talk about learning AI and skills, start with a belief: Do you really believe that this technology can help you?”

He said that almost a third of Microsoft’s code last year was written by GitHub Copilot.

His second advice involves “every person in the company either hiring or building a digital colleague.”

Digital “colleagues” in the workforce are here to stay. “Can you not just think of AI as a tool now, but as a teammate? When you start a team, you can have five engineers and 20 agents. The new generation of agents that we are building at Microsoft are autonomous agents which can goal-seek in an unstructured environment, go solve the problem for you, take all the noise out, and come back and say something like, ‘Hey boss, I have something for you,” said Chandok.

He also highlighted the importance of learning how to use AI at work. “This is the time to have a growth mindset more than ever. The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”

His suggestions came hours after Microsoft’s AI division announced its first homegrown AI models: MAI-Voice-1 AI and MAI-1-preview. The company says its new MAI-Voice-1 speech model can generate a minute’s worth of audio in under one second on just one GPU, while MAI-1-preview “offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot”.

Chandok spoke about the rise of what is known as frontier models: “A concept that we call Frontier Firm. It’s different in a few ways. There are a few things that blew my mind. First, these Firms are thinking of intelligence on tap. If you have a problem or a new business, you hire a team and you put people together and get them going. Frontier Firms are trying to do something different.”

Frontier Firms are already taking shape, and within the next two to five years, Microsoft expects that “every organisation will be on their journey to becoming one”. The company posted on its website: 82 per cent of leaders say this is a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations, and 81 per cent say they expect agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company’s AI strategy in the next 12–18 months. Adoption is accelerating: 24 per cent of leaders say their companies have already deployed AI organisation-wide, while just 12 per cent remain in pilot mode.

He said: “It’s intelligence on tap, that is, can you move intelligence from a scarce, hard-to-get commodity to something that is abundant and on tap? So, let’s say you have a problem to solve in the next seven days, you spend three hours a day on intelligence to work. Do we have the ability to manufacture intelligence for the first time as humankind? Intelligence is the most precious commodity we know.”

At the same time, it is important to keep track of where it all fits in with culture. “Tech is moving at the speed of 10x every year. Culture, if you are lucky, is moving at 1x. How do you think of culture in the new context of where (people) need to work with agents, they need to be skilled in a different way, and all of us need to learn.”

Until now, companies have been built around domain expertise, siloed in functions like finance, marketing, and engineering. But with expertise on demand, the traditional org chart may be replaced by a Work Chart—a dynamic, outcome-driven model where teams form around goals, not functions, powered by agents that expand employee scope and enable faster, more impactful ways of working.