Is your UK business a "Frontier Firm"?

Are You a Frontier Firm? Questions for UK Business Leaders

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According to Microsoft’s latest research, the “Frontier Firm” has arrived. These organisations aren’t just using AI; they are rebuilding their entire business model around the concept of intelligence on tap. The transition from AI as a chat bot or “search tool” – to AI as “digital labour” is the defining shift. Is your business leading the charge, or is it tethered to an old fashioned blueprint?

How to Use This Audit
The following questions are designed to help you look beyond the “hype” of AI and evaluate the structural reality of your business. Becoming a Frontier Firm isn’t about how many licenses you’ve bought (anybody can buy Copilot); it’s about how deeply you’ve integrated digital labour into your core operations. As you read through each section, you need to be honest about your current workflows. This isn’t just a checklist – it’s designed to be a roadmap to identify the specific “capacity gaps”. These gaps are where your business can gain the most ground with AI.

The questions are split into the following sections:

Part 1: The Frontier Foundation

Deployment Scale

Has your organisation moved beyond pilot programs to deploy AI organisation-wide?

A Frontier Firm doesn’t leave AI to a few “power users.” It treats AI as a universal utility. Reflect on whether your AI strategy is currently fragmented across departments or if it is a unified, scalable standard.

Strategic Maturity

Does your leadership team view AI as a critical engine for long-term ROI, rather than just a productivity tool?

True maturity means moving past “how much time did this save?” to “how does this fundamentally change our business model?” If your leadership still views AI as an optional “add-on,” you may be missing the frontier.

Digital Labour Investment

Are you using AI agents to bring outsourced skills in-house or execute complex workflows?

The frontier is defined by the ability to buy “intelligence on tap.” Consider if you are leveraging agents to close your capacity gap – the deficit between rising business demands and your team’s human limits.

You can buy intelligence on tap

For decades, intelligence was one of the most valuable – and limited – assets in business, bound by human time, energy, and cost. That’s changing. Intelligence is becoming an essential durable good: abundant, affordable, and available on demand.
Stanford, The 2025 AI Index Report

Part 2: The ‘Agent Boss’ Mindset

Role Evolution

Do your employees see themselves as ‘managers of agents’ rather than just executors of tasks?

The shift from “I write reports” to “I manage an agent that writes reports” is the hallmark of the Agent Boss. Reflect on whether your team feels empowered to delegate to AI, or if they are still bogged down in manual execution.

The Human-Agent Ratio

Is your leadership calculating the optimal balance of AI efficiency and human oversight?

As digital labour grows, the “human-agent ratio” becomes as important as your headcount. Ask yourself: do we know exactly where human judgement is irreplaceable, and where an agent should take the lead?

Thought Partnership

Does your workforce treat AI as a ‘thought partner’ for creative exchange?

In traditional firms, AI is a command tool (Phase 1). At the frontier, it is a creative collaborator (Phase 2). Are your employees using AI to challenge their thinking, or just to fix their spelling?

AI skilling and digital labor are top workforce strategies

Part 3: Operational Agility

The Work Chart

Are your teams organised around ‘jobs to be done’ rather than rigid, siloed departments?

The Microsoft blueprint replaces the functional org chart with the Work Chart. Reflect on whether your internal siloes (Marketing vs. Sales vs. IT) are preventing you from deploying AI agents effectively across the customer journey.

Skill Prioritisation

Is AI literacy your most prioritised skill in hiring and upskilling?

At the frontier, the ability to manage AI is more valuable than any specific legacy technical skill. Consider if your current recruitment and training programs are evolving fast enough to keep pace with the era of digital labour.

Where does your firm stand?

Mostly Yes: You are a Frontier Firm, rebuilding for outsized value.

Some Yes: You are in the Journey Phase, likely using AI assistants but not yet fully agent-operated.

Mostly No: You are at Risk of Being Left Behind. The frontier is moving – it’s time for a new blueprint.

Tools that can help

  • Microsoft Copilot Studio The primary workspace for building, managing, and publishing your own custom AI agents. It allows you to create autonomous “digital colleagues” that can plan, learn, and execute tasks across your business data.
  • Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Builder A “lite” experience within M365 that allows any employee to become an Agent Boss. Users can quickly create declarative agents grounded in specific SharePoint files or Teams chats without needing deep technical expertise.
  • Azure AI Foundry (formerly AI Studio) The “factory” for professional developers to build more complex, enterprise-grade multi-agent systems. It provides the hosting, security, and governance needed to run sophisticated AI operations at scale.
  • Microsoft Graph & Copilot Connectors The “connective tissue” that gives your agents access to your entire business context. Use these to bridge the gap between Microsoft 365 and external data sources like Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Google Drive.
  • Azure AI Agent Service A managed service for hosting and orchestrating autonomous agents. It manages “threads” and “runs,” allowing your agents to maintain long-term context during complex, multi-step projects.

Why Managed IT is the Missing Piece

While these tools are powerful, they require a secure and governed environment to function. Our Managed IT and ITaaS offerings ensure that:

  1. Your data is “AI-ready”: We help you clean and structure your data so your agents don’t hallucinate or leak sensitive information.
  2. Governance is automated: We manage the Copilot Control System, ensuring the right agents are used by the right people at the right cost.
  3. Scale is seamless: As you move from Phase 1 (Assistants) to Phase 3 (Agent-Operated), we provide the infrastructure that scales with your growth.

Don’t let technical complexity block your path to the Frontier. Build your AI-first infrastructure with MTG.

Read more

Want to dive deeper into the data and the future of digital labour?

  • Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born Explore the full definitive study on how “Intelligence on Tap” is rewiring global business. Learn why 2025 is the turning point for autonomous agents and the rise of the human-led, AI-operated organisation.
  • Stanford HAI | 2025 AI Index Report For a broader look at the global state of AI, Stanford University’s 2025 Index provides an unbiased, data-driven analysis of AI’s impact on the economy, public opinion, and the technical benchmarks that define the current “Frontier” of machine capability.

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