Avanade CEO Rodrigo Caserta issues Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025: People, Data, Technology.
Mid-market enterprises explore return on AI investments with the above principles at the heart of their decision making. Latestsale.com received Rodrigo Caserta’s Avanade Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 in November 2024 and has put forward insights and analysis of the findings in time for its wider release in 2025.
Avanade, is the leading Microsoft solution provider of cutting edge digital, cloud and consultancy services across 26 countries. With a focus on human impact outputs, Avanade enjoys the most Microsoft certifications (60,000+) and 18 Gold-level Microsoft competencies.
In 2024, Avanade and Accenture were named Microsoft’s first ever Global Business Transformation Partner of the Year for Copilot. Majority owned by Accenture, Avanade was founded in 2000 as a joint venture between Accenture LLP and Microsoft Corporation.
AI VALUE VERSUS ENTERPRISE RETICENCE
4 X expected return on AI investment within 12 months
Initial results from the Avanade Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 research data targeting 4,100 decision makers across 10 countries and 9 industries indicates that enterprises have high expectations, and plan for quick results in order to assess whether AI is contributing to the bottom line. The risky 12-month timeframe will only generate more failures of AI tools within the enterprise space with companies turning to new vendors or sticking to the status quo (human employees) if AI tools do not meet their expectation within 12 months.
The AI ROI Value calculator hinges on productivity and cost efficiency: 84% of medium sized enterprises believe their organization is investing in AI to replace employees. Therefore, if within 12 months, an AI product introduced into an enterprise does not deliver sufficient value showcasing exactly how it will replace employees and/or show how a quadruple return on an AI investment can be realized within 12 months, it will be rejected. Therefore, the margin of risk and error for startups with no clear go to market strategy is thin.
MID MARKET ENTERPRISES SEEK AI SPEED, AI RESILIENCE AND AI INNOVATION
Avanade’s Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 research uncovered further insights that may help Founders achieve product market fit more quickly. Startups, according to this research, should take the following into consideration:
- Cost conscious strategies
- Definition of growth metrics
- Less capital deployment
- Ambition solidified
EXPEDIENCY= OUT OF THE BOX SOLUTIONS WITH SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS
Can AI become a proactive member of the team? This is the key problem startups need to solve for their enterprise customers. Equally, the expedient nature of company timelines would suggest that corporations are prepared to explore out of the box solutions as long as they can complete specific (relevant) functions.
WORKFORCE DYNAMICS- AI FORGETFULNESS
Which decisions should AI handle autonomously? Defining human versus AI generated value whilst ensuring the correct guardrails are in place to teach AI tools to “forget” outcomes with unintended bias or unethical facts is another layer of complexity that tech Founders need to take into account.
Whilst AI is moving at an incredibly rapid pace, 48% of decision makers are still developing a business case, leaving the door open to tech startups able to create truly innovative solutions. Even for those enterprises whose leaders are trying to implement AI into the workplace, 44% of said respondents still remain at the proof-of-concept stage, giving more opportunities to startup Founders who can assist with essential AI R&D expertise.
PRODUCTIVITY AND MARKET COMPETITION
69% of Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 respondents use productivity gains and operational improvements as their primary AI success metrics and value drivers with little emphasis allocated to saved human positions.
An interesting factor and opportunity for growth amongst tech startups is to consider nearly half of those business leaders questioned who expect ROI to derive from productivity alone. The need to create new revenue streams is palpable. Whatever goals enterprises put in place for AI implementation, few are actively measuring outcomes.
With high level growth targets in place, mid-sized enterprises are not prepared to wait more than six to twelve months (40%) for a return on copilot AI solution investments whilst 27% of business decision makers are only comfortable waiting three to six months.
RESPONSIBLE AI ADOPTION
The Avanade Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 indicates a 9% decline in enterprises whose leaders have a defined plan– just 39% of midmarket organizations have set guidelines, and only 26% completely trust the outputs of AI, down from 48%, clearly demonstrating the challenges corporations are facing and the opportunities that exist for startup Founders who embed workable solutions into enterprise solutions with existing plans (42%) to develop RAI guidelines into workflows.
Furthermore, the report highlights four strategic pillars for adopting AI into enterprises:
AI Implementation Strategy 1
EMPLOYEE Gen AI SKILLS TRAINING-
Also essential for building trust and increasing adoption rates, by showcasing how AI can help teams reach their full potential.
AI Implementation Strategy 2
AI RATIONALE-
Avoiding the pitfalls of AI integration for AI sake, defining the “path to value” that can bring about healthy competitiveness facilitating the disruption of processes, functions, business models – and even industries themselves through AI adoption.
AI Implementation Strategy 3
DATA PROCESSING
A Responsible AI framework for data processing and much more is non-negotiable. This governance and compliance framework generates trust.
AI Implementation Strategy 4
SUPERPOWERED WORKERS
Data matters and scaling AI without robust data and analytics tools in place earmarked to streamline costs, value and future proofing is more difficult to evaluate. Will billions of workers feel comfortable with AI copilots (virtual colleagues), aimed to supercharge their capabilities, and the new team structures and organizational models that derive from it?
MICROSOFT CEO SATYA NADELLA PUSHES FABRIC AS KEY DATA RELATED PRODUCT IN 20 YEARS
To this end, the Microsoft Fabric SaaS data platform was born. Its November 2023 launch was earmarked to showcase how it “delivers an intuitive, consistent, secure and AI-infused user experience throughout data readiness principles necessary to optimize enterprises.”
Deploying public and private clouds alongside Microsoft Fabric should deliver a laser focused reference point and unique data point source with in-built data governance.
Microsoft Fabric is a cost effective, responsive “open, integrative data management layer that works with and brings together the existing investments in the data tools an enterprise may already have – including Azure Databricks, Snowflake, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics and Power B.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has described Fabric as the most prominent data related product release in over 20 years due to its performance value measured on five core factors:
- Fabric is a comprehensive analytics platform that enjoys unified user experience and architecture. All team members are incorporated into a role specific to the analytics process.
- Fabric runs off multi-cloud data, operating as a type of OneDrive for the full suite of an enterprise’s data needs, removing the need to manage, secure and sync replicated data across multiple data siloes.
- The Azure OpenAI Service aims to help all users unlock the full value of their data responsibly and uncover data insights expediently. Microsoft Fabric Copilots remove the requirement for prompt engineering deployment as it facilitates conversational language generation of data analytics systems and visualized results.
- Organizational expansion of the tool is possible due to Fabric’s deep integration with Microsoft 365 applications including presentation tool enablers found in Power BI, Teams, PowerPoint, SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 apps.
- Fabric reduces costs by offering users a single pool of computing to power all Fabric workloads thus removing waste generated due to unused or excess and untransferable capacity.
AVANADE CEO RODRIGO CASERTA’S MOVES TO FABRIC
Avanade CEO Rodrigo Caserta’s move to Fabric reflect his pivotal shift towards unlocking superlative value from data and the need to accelerate responsible AI implementation for clients and Avanade as a whole, with internal reporting and analytical capabilities distributed used across Avanade’s 60,000-person global workforce.
As of November 2024, the Accenture AI and data investment level reached a whopping $3 billion generating a 5,000+ Fabric-certified professional eco system. Avanade has pushed for employee programs such as Disrupt Avanade and the employee driven Avanade School of AI, to unleash untapped skills in generative AI, responsible AI and prompt engineering.
Avanade accelerates people-first sales productivity strategy with Copilot
The deployment of AI copilots used to automate processes has already begun at Avanade, giving sellers the opportunity to update records, minimize time spent on regular daily tasks such as summarizing emails and meetings and preparing client outreach materials.
ENTERPRISES WORRY: HOW TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN AI AND HUMANS
The Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 findings indicate that mid-sized enterprises worry about the viability of creating AI-generated value, with 78% of respondents expressing concern that human achievements were at risk of being attributed to technologies such as AI. This preoccupation also raises questions about how performance reviews and appraisals would be conducted for staff members who are not embracing AI.
THE UNLEARNING EFFECT
Teaching AI copilots and agents to forget has been earmarked as imperative by the Avanade Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 to ensure that any inaccurate, biased facts or norms are eliminated from future systems. The guardians for such triggers have yet to be defined even though some enterprises operate with AI tools assigned the task of making high-risk decisions autonomously. As with development tools Latestsale.com undertakes, our parameters reflect many of the issues highlighted in the Avanade Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 that indicates the majority of mid-size enterprises (94%) have determined that the development of tools that address a real problem- sensitive data security- is of utmost importance in order to protect organizational reputation.
Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025 Survey methodology credit lines
Avanade commissioned independent market research firms McGuire Research Services and Vanson Bourne.
A total of 4,100 IT decision makers and senior business decision makers outside of IT were interviewed between August and September 2024.
Regional based research parameters covered insights from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the USA.
Respondents worked for organizations with $500M to $5bn global annual revenue in the following industries: Banking, Consumer Goods, Energy, Government, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Nonprofit and Retail.
Data findings, © 2024 Avanade Inc. All rights reserved. The Avanade name and logo are registered trademarks in the USA and other countries.
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