How PwC and Microsoft are jointly engineering AI solutions to help deliver real business outcomes

Innovation is crushing adoption. The pace of change in AI is accelerating faster than most organizations can absorb. New models, tools and capabilities are emerging almost daily, creating opportunity, but also a level of disorientation for leaders trying to turn that momentum into real business value.

What I hear consistently from clients is not a lack of ambition—it’s where to start, and how to move from experimentation to execution.

Early on, it’s not about getting the technology stack perfect. It’s about getting hands on by building, testing, and learning quickly. Over time, architecture and platform decisions become critical to scale. But progress starts with developing the capability to execute. And that’s where many organizations are getting stuck.

While the term forward deployed engineering has evolved over the past decade, the core intent has remained consistent. PwC and Microsoft have been focused on solving our clients’ most important problems at the point of impact, combining PwC’s industry depth with joint engineering delivery.

That model, often referred to today as customer engineering, has been foundational. It aligns the right expertise to the problem in real time, accelerating the path from idea to outcome. But the environment has changed. 

The pace of innovation has increased the volume of demand from clients. Backlogs are growing and simply adding more resources to traditional delivery models isn’t enough to keep up. In engineering terms, scaling requires a different approach.

That’s why PwC and Microsoft are evolving this model into a more deliberate, real-time motion—maintaining the depth of forward deployed engineering while creating the capacity to innovate and scale across a broader set of clients.

This includes establishing dedicated, jointly aligned engineering capacity focused on priority challenges. Teams are continuously engaged—designing, building and refining solutions in real time, rather than mobilizing only at specific points.

At its core, this is about commercial engineering and industry solutions engineering: starting with a clear business outcome and engineering toward it. 

Solutions are shaped by industry context from day one, built directly within client environments and aligned to enterprise requirements around governance, security and scalability. Technology decisions are made in the context of business priorities, not in isolation. And because engineering is embedded throughout, solutions are positioned to scale.

Just as importantly, trust and Responsible AI principles should be embedded from the start—not layered on after deployment. As organizations move AI capabilities closer to core operations, considerations around governance, security, transparency and human oversight become foundational to scaling successfully.

That’s another advantage of jointly engineering solutions directly with clients. Responsible AI, enterprise architecture and operational controls are designed into the process alongside the business outcome.

We’re also accelerating this model through new ways of working. One example is a series of rotating, in-person engineering sessions—three-day hackathons that bring together select clients, PwC and Microsoft engineers to focus on specific business challenges. The first of these sessions took place at the end of April. 

These are not theoretical exercises. They are working sessions designed to get hands on. Where clients and engineers from Microsoft and PwC are building, testing and iterating solutions in real time. The strength of the PwC and Microsoft relationship allows us to move quickly, align deeply, and focus on outcomes from the outset.

That experience reflects a broader shift we’re seeing across clients. As Robin Cole, Vice President of Engineering at Microsoft, puts it:

“The pace of innovation is creating more demand than traditional delivery models can absorb. What’s working is a more continuous, engineering-led approach, where teams are actively building and refining solutions alongside the business, not stepping in at discrete points in time.”

As organizations move beyond early-stage AI initiatives, execution—consistently, at pace and at scale—is becoming the differentiator. 

That requires tighter alignment between business and technology, deeper integration across stakeholders and a shift toward continuous, collaborative engineering models.

By evolving our joint engineering approach, PwC and Microsoft are helping clients move beyond experimentation—embedding AI into the core of how their business operates, and turning innovation into sustained, enterprise-wide value.

About PwC

At PwC, we help clients build trust and reinvent so they can turn complexity into competitive advantage. We’re a tech-forward, people-empowered network with more than 364,000 people in 136 countries and 137 territories. Across audit and assurance, tax and legal, deals and consulting, we help clients build, accelerate, and sustain momentum. Find out more at www.pwc.com.  

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