The integration of AI and agents into business processes is no longer aspirational—it’s actively reshaping how organizations operate and compete. As enterprises move from experimentation to execution, the strength of strategic partnerships, along with a shared commitment to trust, security, and adaptability, becomes essential.
In the fourth episode of our ongoing Frontier Forward: Asia Edition series, we spotlight FPT Software and their collaboration with Microsoft to define the next chapter of agentic AI and enterprise transformation.
Episode 4: Advancing agentic AI through partnership
This episode brings together Frank Bignone, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at FPT Software, and Richard Koh, Chief Technology Officer, Enterprise Partner Sales Asia at Microsoft, for a candid discussion of how global partnerships drive innovation at scale. They share perspectives on the shift toward agentic AI, the realities of enterprise adoption, and the foundational elements that empower organizations to transform with confidence.
Key takeaways from the conversation
- Agentic AI is becoming an operational workforce: With the shift from AI as an assistant to AI as an active digital worker, agents can now collaborate with human teams, execute tasks autonomously, and contribute to business goals—prompting organizations to rethink workforce models, accountability, and governance.
- Disciplined partnership accelerates transformation at scale: FPT Software’s partnership with Microsoft shows how consistent execution, aligned operating models, and disciplined collaboration empower both organizations to succeed together.
- Security and governance are foundational to responsible AI adoption: As AI agents gain greater autonomy, trust becomes critical. FPT Software and Microsoft emphasize enterprise-grade security, data protection, and governance practices to earn customer trust and confidence.
- Change management enables speed without disruption: Rapid advances in AI require continuous skilling and organizational adaptability. FPT Software highlights the importance of ongoing learning, cultural readiness, and agile change management when adopting new technologies.
- Trust and collaboration remain central to digital transformation: At the core of successful partnerships is trust—between partners, people, and processes. FPT Software’s journey with Microsoft demonstrates how open communication and mutual accountability unlock innovation, resolve challenges, and sustain growth. Even in an era of digital workers, people remain the foundation of transformation.
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Stay connected with us through Frontier Forward: Asia Edition for more insights and partner stories that inspire innovation and progress. Together, we are shaping a future where human and digital workers collaborate to achieve extraordinary outcomes.
Full transcript:
Disclaimer: This AI-generated transcript may contain errors. Please verify with the original audio or script for accuracy.
Richard Koh:
Welcome, Frank. Thanks for joining us today. It's really great to have you here. And for the benefit of the audience, could you please introduce yourself to them.
Frank Bignone:
Thank you, Richard, and thank you for the invitation for today. So my name is Frank.
I'm working in FPT Software for the last four years, and I'm managing now the corporate growth and the strategy for the company. And under that scope, in fact, we're developing a partnership with Microsoft globally.
Richard:
Very cool. Corporate growth and strategy. Tell us more a little bit about what your organization does and what are the markets that you serve?
Frank:
FPT Software is a Vietnamese IT service company that belongs to the FPT group, and we are delivering IT services to all our customers globally, in order to help them for their digital transformation, AI transformation, and tomorrow’s frontier transformation, so they can solve their most critical business problems along that way.
Richard:
I understand that you have quite a global footprint, if you will, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about a recent example of an impactful story, like with a customer building on the Microsoft Cloud.
Frank:
So as we're in Asia, let's take an example with Japan. You know that in Japan, many companies are quite legacy, and it’s difficult for them to do this transition to data and AI. So we are working, since now it will be 16 months, with a road construction company that used to have a very legacy system, data a little bit everywhere, and so on. And slowly, we moved them from the very classic SharePoint to the Cloud, then from here, moved them to the data Fabric to organize all their data.
And very recently, in fact, we introduced to them all the agentic framework and so on, and they just signed a contract two weeks ago to move all to Fabric plus agentic to develop some use case on the security service, knowledge retention, and so on, which was quite interesting, and showing also the impact that we can have with all this new technology and Microsoft Cloud and Azure in order to help the customer, in fact, to solve their transformation challenge and be more efficient. Especially in Japan, you know, you have the problem of retention for the knowledge, as people are quite old, and leveraging agentic AI and Fabric help us with that purpose.
Richard:
Yeah, especially when they're faced with the aging population and the workforce itself. So during the project, did you face like a challenge, and then how did you overcome it together with Microsoft?
Frank:
I think the first one was really to convince the customer first, because the big, large Japanese corporations, they tend to fear to become the first one to test. So this is where, with Microsoft's support, especially of your technical team, we explain to them all the use cases that exist to give them confidence. And then also, as it was already a 16 months engagement, as I mentioned, technology is changing very fast. You've got Fabric now with agents, and we use Fabric with an ontology for the agentic framework. So working with your technology team also to be able to skill fast our people, and then to bring that knowledge to the customer to build the best solution with the best blueprint was very important for this engagement.
Richard:
I like the point about skilling fast to be able to overcome the challenges itself. Obviously, you have now quite a lot of experience under your belt working with Microsoft. So what are the best practices or advice from your experience that you can share with our audience?
Frank:
Oh, that's a good question. I would not say that I have a long experience because it would be 16 months of managing also the partnership with Microsoft. No, but I think that what helped FPT to really scale fast in the partnership with Microsoft, I would say it's discipline. We have to be very disciplined on how we are working together. You have a clear process for sales process that we have also to map on the sales process to be really aligned with your definition, how you are working, and so on. And also consistency. To not have a relationship that is a kind of confetti relationship, but something that is really consistent where the teams always engage together, where we are sharing the problem, but also sharing the success together to motivate the team. And this was some of the key factors that help us to grow very quickly in the last 16 months to where we are today with Microsoft in terms of partnership.
Richard:
That's great to hear. Our audience is always very keen to learn from our partners. So Frank, 2026 has been framed as the year of the agents. And I'm sure there's a lot of conversations that you're having with customers around agentic AI itself. So in your experience, in your interactions with customers, what are you seeing? What are you hearing from your customers?
Frank:
I think that we're seeing a shift with the classic, I would say, Copilot that is more an assistant to really an agentic digital worker that will be more a colleague that you will have in your organization with whom you can interact, you can delegate activities, tasks, and you can also manage like you're managing real people. And that agent will help you in fact in your work. And this, when we explain it to our customer, this is where they see a big shift in their operation and how they can accelerate at the same time, their internal transformation, but also better engagement with our customer and so on. It is still difficult to explain. And I think what we saw during Ignite or the latest product that you have with the IQ and this ontology mapping is really helping those agentic digital workers work very well and start to really be able to act on behalf of people.
Richard:
That's great. So the customers are really warming up to this idea and really thinking about seriously, how would they combine humans and agents together to work on their processes?
Frank:
Yes, this is what we see. Even us, we are one of your Customer Zero. So this year, for example, CHRO, that is managing the human resources, under his responsibility, will have to manage also digital workers. So he's no longer managing physical people; he's also managing digital people. So this is a change in the scope of that work. And we see this not only in our organization, but in other organizations where the human resources now is managing both workforces.
Richard:
I’m really glad to hear that customers are really warming up to this. But I think we also hear from customers that they are concerned about security, data security, how the agents will have access to data and doing some of these tasks autonomously. So there's certainly concerns. How are you addressing this in your conversations with customers?
Frank:
It's true that today, one of the most critical challenges that we are facing is the security theme amongst our customers who are wondering how they can manage that flow of information, how they can manage a system that are accessing, for example, critical information for the companies and so on. And this is where I think Microsoft has an edge because with everything that you push on the Agent 365, basically you are treating that security as an agent, the same way that you are treating the security of a physical person. Basically we can do with the agent everything we are doing with a physical person. So the whole base access, security, cyber, monitoring all the log activities, and so on. And which helps to have, I will say, a governed and secure professional enterprise platform, which gives a lot of confidence then to our customers on how we'll deploy all those agents in a very governed and secure compliant infrastructure at the end of the day. So that's an edge that we have compared to your competitors today.
Richard:
What is the one thing, what advice you would leave with our audience?
Frank:
Believe in the trust, the trust of the partnership and the trust of the people also. I used to tell my salespeople, you know salespeople, all their accounts are very personal. I was afraid to say, but why do I need to give my contact point to a partner and so on? And so you can trust Microsoft 100%, and showing that trust, in fact, helps us to really unlock problems that we may face, and these are normal problems that we have.
And also will help, in fact, the partnership to grow exponentially and to be really strong with all the new challenges that we'll face together and also to develop a strong business together at the end of the day. So it's still a people thing.
Richard:
Yes, absolutely. People are still crucial. Thanks for sharing with us all the insights and experience that you had with your customers. And thank you so much, Frank, for the partnership. Really appreciate it.
Frank:
Thank you very much, Richard. And thank you for the invitation for today. It was very nice to talk to you about technology and the challenges that we are all facing today. And thanks to Microsoft, we are solving quite well.
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