Microsoft Frontier Company FDEs and Saint-Gobain researchers find new low-carbon cement molecules in months

Microsoft says a team of forward-deployed engineers, now part of Microsoft Frontier Company, has spent about two years embedded with research teams at construction materials giant Saint-Gobain. The first phase improved an existing cement additive formula; the second set out to discover new molecules that could strengthen concrete while cutting CO2 emissions, a problem Saint-Gobain had pursued for more than two decades.

Using the Microsoft Discovery platform, then in private review, the combined team gathered 62,000 patents and 44,000 abstracts into a knowledge base in a couple of hours, work Saint-Gobain estimates would have taken its researchers a year. Within weeks this summer the group had several candidate molecules and hypotheses for new formulas. The teams worked in two-week sprints; Saint-Gobain challenged the platform hard on security, and its team helped identify improvements to Discovery, including a fix that lowered the cost of running part of the system.

For FDEs, the story shows how the role now stretches into R&D: Microsoft's Global FDE lead for Frontier R&D, Ehsan Zare Borzeshi, stresses starting from the customer's highest-ROI problem rather than the product, and the work depended on earning access to a company's most sensitive data. It is the latest in a run of Microsoft customer stories, after KT and Northern Trust, putting its Frontier Company FDEs front and centre.