Microsoft x Infobip: How partnerships can bring AI-powered customer engagement to life

AI-powered customer engagement takes more than isolated pilots. It requires AI embedded across business workflows and partnerships that combine cloud capabilities, communications expertise, and industry knowledge.

With this in mind, we spoke with Myladie Stoumbou, Regional General Manager at Microsoft, about Microsoft’s frontier firm vision, the role partners play in customer AI transformation, and how the company’s six-plus-year partnership with Infobip has evolved from integration and joint selling to co-innovation.

The frontier firm turns AI into business outcomes

Stoumbou describes a frontier firm as a company that embeds AI across full workflows. Rather than confining AI to a small team or a productivity experiment, this approach brings it into the work that supports decision-making, customer outcomes, and operational efficiency.

Microsoft’s own transformation shows what this means in practice. The business impact measures Stoumbou shared included faster customer service, better collections in finance, and improved revenue per seller. The examples span customer service, finance, and sales, showing how AI can contribute across different parts of an organization.

However, this is a wider task than deploying another tool. It calls for expertise that can connect technology to specific industries and customer needs, which is why Microsoft puts partners at the center of its AI strategy.

Partners connect technology to customer needs

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has described the company as partner-led. In a period of rapid AI innovation, customers need technology providers, system integrators, and specialist solution providers to work together.

For Microsoft, strategic partners bring three qualities. They combine innovation with deep industry expertise, invest in go-to-market activity beyond a single market, and commit to creating customer value together. That commitment includes publishing solutions in Microsoft Commercial Marketplace and working jointly to bring them to customers. All three qualities matter, with innovation as the starting point.

Looking at the Microsoft and Infobip partnership, Microsoft brings a secure, scalable, trusted cloud and AI platform, along with Microsoft Commercial Marketplace as a route to customers. Infobip brings expertise in customer conversations and strong relationships across the telecom ecosystem, all while building solutions on Microsoft’s platform, training its engineers on Microsoft AI, and expanding its global reach.

Infobip also holds Microsoft’s Certified Software designation, the highest standard Microsoft expects from software vendors on its platform. Together, the partners combine cloud, AI, and go-to-market capabilities with communications expertise and industry reach.

A partnership built in three phases

The Microsoft and Infobip relationship has grown through three phases over more than six years. Stoumbou has been involved since its early stages and described a progression from making the technologies work together to developing solutions and taking them to customers jointly.

The first phase focused on integration. The teams worked to connect Infobip’s conversational solutions with Microsoft technologies so customers could use them together. The second phase moved into joint customer engagement. Microsoft Commercial Marketplace became a sales channel, supported by shared go-to-market activity and work to secure the first major customers.

Now the partners are co-innovating. Their work includes AI and agentic solutions, reflecting a shared view that customer engagement is moving from separate conversational touchpoints toward connected and intelligent experiences.

That evolution has created both a commercial route to market and a base for new customer work. The Marketplace figures and a public-sector project illustrate how the partnership is being applied.

Marketplace growth and public services show the opportunity

The partnership reports triple-digit growth in joint customer sales through Microsoft Commercial Marketplace over the previous couple of years, with hundreds of customers across 13 regions. The figures point to the partnership’s reach, while the continued momentum gives both companies confidence in further joint growth.

A project with an European government shows another dimension of the work. The government wanted to transform how it engaged with citizens. Because the initiative was nationwide, it required scale and different ways for people to contact the government and receive services.

The project gave the teams insight into what citizens expect from connected, intelligent conversations with organizations. The learnings could inform similar work with governments and large organizations around the world. It is an example of how the partners can apply their combined expertise to complex services that need to reach many people.

The commercial and public-sector examples point toward a broader opportunity. Organizations want customer communications that feel connected and relevant, while using AI to improve engagement and retention.

Intelligent customer engagement is the next frontier

Demand is growing for conversational, connected, and personalized experiences. The opportunity is to bring cloud and AI capabilities together with communications expertise and industry knowledge, then make those capabilities available to customers across markets.

Over the next five years, the partnership’s success will be measured by the customers Microsoft and Infobip win together, the innovations they bring to market, and the scale they build. That ambition depends on keeping customer value at the center as the partners continue to develop their work.