Customer Zero approach creates AI credibility

Fusion5 has been a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Business Applications for more than a decade, using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to reimagine business processes and drive positive business outcomes for its clients. Over the past five years, Fusion5 has more than doubled its headcount to help deliver these services, currently employing close to 1,000 people across Australia and New Zealand.

With the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and AI agents into the Microsoft Cloud stack, Fusion5 saw the opportunity to expand customer impact, so the team wanted to make sure that they had the skills to fully leverage these new technologies. “We’ve always been good at adopting the technology we implement for customers because at the end of the day, our internal business needs align pretty closely with what our customers’ needs, whether that is around customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or other solutions,” said Troy Gerber, Chief Technology Officer for AI-Enabled Transformation at Fusion5. “So when it comes to AI, becoming Customer Zero has been a key way for us to understand the impact of this new technology, learn from it, and convert those lessons into offerings and engagements for our clients.”

In addition to developing relevant service offerings, Fusion5 wanted to use AI pervasively throughout its organization to solve key areas of business pain and increase productivity. To date, they have achieved a 98% internal AI adoption rate, and training all employees on AI-powered solutions has had the added benefit of creating empathy with customer concerns around the AI journey. “Being Customer Zero is not just talking about innovation, it’s living it. It gives us credibility with customers and Microsoft sellers, because we can show them real-world results. It’s also helping us to refine adoption strategies and governance before we scale solutions to clients,” said Eisa Quelette, Microsoft Alliance Manager at Fusion5.

MIA increases Microsoft incentive attach by 30%

Agents are a big component of how Fusion5 is bringing AI capabilities to its business processes, and Copilot Studio has been serving as the go-to tool for rapid agent development. One of the first agents the company developed was the Microsoft Incentive Agent, or MIA. Since Fusion5 has added 600 employees to its workforce over the past five years, it’s not surprising that the demand from sales teams for help in navigating Microsoft incentives has increased dramatically. Tanya Barrie, the Alliance Operations Team Lead and incentives expert, was overloaded, so Fusion5 wanted to create an agent that could quickly scale her knowledge to answer standard sales inquiries and allow her to proactively focus on higher value work.

The initial goal for MIA was to enable users to ask natural-language questions and receive clear, accurate, and usable answers. Fusion5 used Copilot Studio Lite to create a prototype agent in just two hours, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat was used to help draft instructions for training it on Microsoft incentive guides and Fusion5 data stored in the company’s SharePoint. The team then spent two weeks fine-tuning MIA’s responses, working with Tanya to ensure that information was accurate and provided in a consistent format.

Now in production, MIA is the first stop for all sales team members with questions on customer eligibility for incentives or what incentives are available for a specific project. Tanya manages MIA as a digital employee, providing data stewardship to ensure the agent stays up to date. Since MIA was launched, Fusion5 has seen a 30% increase in Microsoft incentive usage across its business. “Watching sellers often scramble to understand what Microsoft incentives can be applied to a specific deal, we knew it was having an impact on pipeline progression,” said Eisa. “MIA is a game changer, simplifying incentive navigation for our team, accelerating deals, and ultimately improving customer success.”

Fusion5 is continuing to evolve MIA, linking the agent to Microsoft partner playbooks to help create a roadmap for next steps after an engagement is finished. The organization is also working on MIA 2.0, which will move to standard Copilot Studio and provide integration with Dynamics 365 so that MIA can be invoked directly inside the customer’s record. “MIA works phenomenally on Copilot Studio Lite, which enabled us to build so quickly and easily. For MIA 2.0, Dynamics 365 integration is a main goal, so we’re not only looking at Copilot Studio but also at some of the evolving capabilities within the Microsoft first-party sales agents,” said Troy.

CLAIRE reduces contract review time by more than 40%

Another business challenge that arose from Fusion5’s rapid growth was in the legal department, where General Counsel, Belinda Muir, and her team were dealing with a sharp rise in contract volume. Belinda, like all employees, participated in the company’s internal Copilot and AI adoption training workshops, and approached the Fusion5 AI team about whether an agent might be a good solution for streamlining contract reviews.

The result of this engagement is CLAIRE: The Contracting Legal AI Review Engine. Built with a Copilot Studio user interface and Microsoft Foundry on the backend, CLAIRE performs a first-pass review of all sales contracts. Fusion5 trained the agent on standard positions, risk tolerances, and preferred language, giving CLAIRE the capability to scan a contract and color-code content with green for “all good,” yellow for “needs a closer look,” and red for “high risk.” “She’s not replacing our judgement,” says Belinda. “She’s doing the groundwork fast and helping us focus where it matters most.”

Since bringing on CLAIRE, the legal team has been able to reduce contract review time by more than 40%.The agent has been so successful that CLAIRE will be getting its own digital employee called Nadia to extend contract review services to a broader set of users throughout the company. As a lighter weight version of CLAIRE, Nadia will offer contract integrity checks for sales and account teams, ensuring that what they hand off to CLAIRE and the legal team doesn’t have obvious issues. “CLAIRE does quite a lot of heavy lifting. A contract is ingested and the document is chunked up so it can be indexed, and then the indexed content is processed by two models,” said Troy. “Nadia won’t have this deep content indexing, instead relying on instructions to catch problematic content and save additional time and processing resources.”

AI vision offers sustained business transformation

MIA and CLAIRE are just two examples of how Fusion5 is tapping agents to help increase worker productivity and transform operational processes—the partner also has 78 agents built in Copilot Studio Lite already in use across the organization. This investment is not just an experiment—it is a strategic effort to tap into the transformational power of agentic AI.

“We are looking at 30% of our workforce being agentic over the next two years, with agents working alongside our existing teams,” said Troy. “We’ve upscaled all our consultants and have best practices in place for building agents, but our strategy also calls for using Microsoft first-party agents to the highest capacity, as well as looking at third-party vendor agents that can be used out of the box.”

With such a deep agentic AI focus internally, Fusion5 is also fueling success with its customers. The partner has developed an agent deployment framework that has already been invaluable in rolling out agents at financial, transportation, education, and energy clients. “Our Customer Zero mindset is proving the value of Microsoft agentic AI, providing us with the learnings and insights needed to enable Frontier Firm transformation across industries,” said Eisa.

“Being Customer Zero is not just talking about innovation, it’s living it. It gives us credibility with customers and Microsoft sellers, because we can show them real-world results.”

— Eisa Quelette, Microsoft Alliance Manager, Fusion5

“We are looking at 30% of our workforce being agentic over the next two years, with agents working alongside our existing teams. ... Our strategy also calls for using Microsoft first-party agents to the highest capacity, as well as looking at third-party vendor agents that can be used out of the box.”

— Troy Gerber, Chief Technology Officer for AI-Enabled Transformation, Fusion5

Customer Zero: Agents increase profitability and productivity for Fusion5 Microsoft practice