Microsoft Frontier Company says its FDE teams have taken on nearly 500 projects with 200+ customers in 28 countries

Four months after launching Microsoft Frontier Company, its president Rodrigo Kede Lima posted the unit's first public progress figures on the Official Microsoft Blog. He says the unit has engaged on nearly 500 projects with more than 200 customers across 28 countries, working side by side with customers through its Forward Deployed Engineering teams. Named customers include 3M, Alaska Airlines, BMW, KT, London Stock Exchange Group, Mastercard, McKesson, Northern Trust, Novo Nordisk, Publicis Groupe, Saint-Gobain, Siemens and Unilever.

The post describes several engagements for the first time. At Unilever's Pondicherry home care liquids factory, Microsoft engineers are helping run a digital twin that uses live plant data to anticipate issues and guide operators. With 3M, they are building an agent-driven order management workflow covering credit checks and delinquency assessments, with human approval steps and a monitoring dashboard. At Publicis Groupe, they are co-building agentic processes that use reinforcement learning from real outcomes and human feedback.

Kede Lima says most customers that completed initial projects returned for further work, generating hundreds of follow-on projects, and sums up the method in four steps: start with value, redesign the process, build in fast cycles with the customer's own teams, and put security, governance and cost controls in from day one.

For FDEs, this is a useful signal that Microsoft's 6,000-person deployment business is landing repeat work across many industries rather than one-off pilots, which points to sustained demand for engineers who can redesign customer workflows, not just ship models.