CAIP Frontier Consultancy
AI-first delivery
The Opportunity
The market is shifting, the fast movers are setting the terms, and the margin is yours to take back.
Not a new tool. A new delivery model.
Late 2025, the models crossed a line. Building software stopped needing a software engineer. That one shift is rewriting all three layers at once.
Firms that see this first don't just adopt faster. They set the price for everyone else.
Turn your delivery model into a competitive advantage
A Microsoft partner already shipped this. Earlier this year. The question is what your practice does with the same play.
- ~1 week zero to production
- 1 delivery lead + fleet of specialist agents
- Build AND operate. Same fleet runs it after go-live
- Recurring on operate outsizes the build fee in year one
- Compress the build fee. Days, not months. Win on time-to-value, not body count.
- Build IP that compounds. Agents, skills, prompts and templates you ship for one customer become reusable assets across the next ten. Build once. Ship many times.
- Earn on outcomes, and move the risk. The fleet stays on after go-live, so IP becomes recurring revenue. The long, expensive bet that used to sit on your books moves to the customer's choice of partner, won by proven IP.
What makes a loyal customer switch?
Delivery just got cheaper to run. The partner who passes that on wins the next deal.
same scope
to deliver it
A competitor ships a third faster and a third cheaper. Loyalty won't win you the next deal. This happens with you or without you.
So, can we agree this is happening?
Your best people lose a quarter of every week to busywork.
Different firms, same three pressures. Fix them and it shows up in two places: your margin, and who you keep.
The market moves with or without you. What's left is your decision.
So, can you see why you need to make this move?
Becoming a Frontier partner takes three moves.
Two of them you run yourself. The third, the field work, we run together. That's today.
How do you actually use these tools?
Drag each row from never to daily. Scan the QR on screen.
Every demo today is the same four parts.
An agent, taught with your skills, grounded in your knowledge, reaching your systems. Get these right. The rest is just which surface you run them in.
An agent, taught with your skills, grounded in your knowledge, reaching your systems through MCP. That is the whole game.
So which one, and when?
How much do you want it to run on its own? Answer that and you've picked your Copilot.
M365 Copilot answers. Cowork does the job you hand it. Scout starts the job before you ask. The CLI builds the thing that didn't exist yet.
Not one phase. Every phase.
Every phase, every surface. The bigger the dot, the more the agent carries.
60 to 70% of project overhead lives in Pursue and Scope. That is where AI-first compounds first. Build and Ship is where the fleet earns its keep. Run is where your IP becomes recurring revenue.
Monday's researcher. Wednesday's engineer. Friday's delivery lead.
One consultant. One terminal. One week. Three jobs that used to take three people.
Same terminal, all three days. The role changed three times. The consultant is still you.
Turn these two on before Monday.
WorkIQ, so the agent knows your customer. Azure Skills, so it can act on Azure. Both ship today.
Everything your customer actually said and did. Meetings, documents, chat, connected systems. Every Copilot surface reads the same context.
Repo + admin script: github.com/microsoft/work-iq
One install in your Copilot host gives the agent a curated Azure catalog. No per-server MCP wiring. No hosting your own.
Both links are pinned in the workshop resources page so nobody has to hunt for them after the room clears.
Workshop notes → customer-ready HTML deck
One prompt. Self-contained web page. Brand-aligned. No PowerPoint wrestling.
The cast for today's demos: we are Aurora, a data & AI consultancy and Microsoft partner. Nordwind and later Helios are our customers.
WorkIQ on stage + check your kit
First, the agent grounded in your customer's actual work. Then two minutes on your own laptop.
The Tuesday before
One discovery call. One feasibility question. One Thursday checkpoint.
- Can an AI avatar work in a flagship store?
- Voice-first. EN, NL, FR. Half-duplex for the noisy floor
- Helios brand on UI · "Deployed by Aurora" in the footer
- EU only · no customer PII captured
- 3 questions: latency, engagement, real store noise
- If yes → 8-week pilot. If no → kill it.
If I gave this to a senior consultant on my team, how long would it take?
The Helios prototype, let's build it
One prompt, three modes, two pauses that matter. You saw the setup. Now we take it to the terminal.
One prompt. Three modes.
From a Tuesday call to a talking kiosk. Five beats, two pauses that mattered.
From a vague ask to a working kiosk, in one prompt and a senior's twenty seconds of judgment.
Branding driven by config. Swap the partner, swap the customer, redeploy.
In a moment, one prompt will do all of this
You're about to paste a single prompt into Copilot CLI. It will fetch pages it has never seen, edit your config, and tell you the two commands to verify. You never open a file.
/restart if a reload is needed, then /mcp to confirm the new tools are live. No silent magic, no guessing.Delivery stops being clicks. Delivery starts being instructions.
Now it's your turn
Twenty minutes. One client. One tool. A brief worth sending.
Tiered setup, fresh account, baseline, stretch, super-stretch. Nobody sits out.
The Trust Boundary
Why this works at enterprise scale. Platform-grade trust on the data, the model, and the agent itself.
Johan Wallquist · Partner Solution Architect, Microsoft · aka.ms/caip-frontier
Three patterns to adopt in your delivery
None new. All partner-tested. Pick the one that fits the customer already on your calendar.
Detail per pattern lives in the appendix and on the partner site. Pick the one that fits the customer already on your calendar this week.
Announcement noise → your offer + your IP
Build 2026 happened. In the GitHub Copilot app, three prompts later: a sorted canvas, a fixed-price offer, and IP that compounds.
Your firm wins. You win.
Two stories from the same motion. Both land on the same Monday.
Both happen at the same time. Same motion. Same Monday.
Two free instruments. Install them this week.
A baseline of where your practice is, before you book any of the four shapes.
Score how ready a repo is for agentic delivery. Surfaces missing copilot-instructions, weak MCP allowlists, missing PR gates. Returns a remediation list.
Two uses: install on your own repo to baseline your practice, and run it on every customer engagement to score the codebase you're about to deliver into.
VS Code extension. Reads your local Copilot session logs (nothing leaves the device). Tells you where your team uses Copilot well, and where they have stalled. Click "See it" to view the live dashboard with my own data.
Two scorecards. Two starting points. Both shipping today. Both yours by Monday.
Thank you. Questions welcome. Decks, exercises and links live on the partner page.
Three ways to go deeper
Pick what fits. One of these becomes your next session.
More options on the table▾
"Which one would you want to run first, and what would have to be true to make it happen?"
From today's workshop to market recognition
Frontier Transformation is Microsoft's official partner strategy. The path through it starts in this room.
No separate attainment workstream. The engagements, the trained team and the hack output are the evidence.
Thank you.
The muscle is yours. Pick a follow-up. Ship something this week.
Decks, exercises, links: partner page. One message away for the rest.
Detail per delivery path
Four detail slides, one per path. Plus the squad pattern at the end. Reach for them on demand, or step through with the arrows.
Four paths, one delivery model
Same lifecycle, four shapes of work. Use this map for your next pipeline review.
Detail per path lives in the appendix. Press End to jump there, or step through with the dots on the right.
Build your AI delivery toolbox
Six roles every CAIP partner has. Six agent patterns. What is each person doing on Monday that they were not doing on Friday?
Start with the Azure Skills Plugin (25 skills · 200+ MCP tools · one install). Layer your delivery IP on top. 2–4 weeks per partner-specific agent. No model training required.
What to do Monday morning
Three tiers. Pick the one that matches where your delivery team is today, and the metric line that proves you moved.
% meetings transcribed · weekly active Copilot users · workshop hours per engagement
time-to-first-PR · rework rate on AI-drafted artefacts · documentation freshness
gross margin per engagement · billable utilisation · defect escape rate
If the thesis is economic, the metrics have to be too. Pick three from your tier and report them quarterly.
Workshop-to-Plan
Six steps. From customer research to delivered plan. Traditional 15–25h becomes 4–6h.
- 1. Research. AI-assisted customer context via MCP (30 min, was 2–4h manual)
- 2. Prep. Copilot-generated deck and agenda (1h, was 3–5h from scratch)
- 3. Workshop. Teams Recap + live transcription (no scribe needed)
- 4. Capture. Action items auto-extracted and assigned
- 5. Synthesis. AI drafts findings and recommendations
- 6. Deliverables. Plan delivered in 48 hours instead of two weeks
Tools: M365 Copilot · Copilot Studio · Azure MCP · GitHub MCP · Teams Recap
Agentic Modernization
App and data migration, accelerated end to end. You lead. Microsoft's Cloud Accelerate Factory backs you.
Azure Migrate · GitHub Copilot · Modernize Copilot · Cloud Accelerate Factory · Azure AI Foundry
AI Path to Production
The meta-play. Use AI tools to deliver AI projects. Grounded in Microsoft Foundry.
- 1. Readiness. AI maturity assessment, use-case prioritisation, data readiness audit
- 2. Foundations. AI Landing Zone, governance, Responsible AI framework, security baseline
- 3. Build. Microsoft Foundry Agent Service. Prompt agents, workflow agents, hosted agents, manifests
- 4. Govern. Production monitoring, cost management, agent identity / OBO, evaluation in CI
Microsoft Foundry, learn.microsoft.com/azure/foundry · rebranded from Azure AI Foundry in late 2025
AI-First Delivery with GitHub Copilot
Four surfaces. GitHub Copilot powers them all. Partner IP compounds across all four, and custom MCP is only one of them.
MCP connects. Skills capture method. Evals measure quality. Continuous AI runs on every PR.
From individual productivity to delivery factory
Multi-agent topology, stored in your repo.
.squad/. Inspectable with your code.squad.config.ts. copilot --agent squad. Alpha · MIT.Brady Gaster · bradygaster.github.io/squad · Surfaced from Juan Manuel Servera Bondroit's review
Three motions, one measurable outcome
AITP, Frontier Consultancy and HVE are aspects of one story. Sequential, not competing. They converge on a credential we can measure.
Not competing initiatives. Different aspects of the same story: helping partners adapt to the agentic shift.