Microsoft's Copilot Agent Development program sends FDEs into customers, and NTT DATA has spun up its own internal FDE team

Microsoft has published a Japanese customer story (Oct 19) on NTT DATA Group's use of its Copilot Agent Development (CAD) program. Microsoft says the program, which was called the "FDE program" at the time NTT DATA joined, places a dedicated Japanese-speaking engineer from Microsoft's US headquarters into the customer's project as a forward deployed engineer for four weeks to build minimum viable products together in Copilot Studio.

NTT DATA's IT management office signed up in November 2025 as a "client zero" exercise. Working with the Microsoft engineer, the team shortlisted use cases from an internal survey and built three MVPs in parallel: an internal Q&A agent, a Microsoft license-management agent and an agent that collects external Power Platform and AI news. The team says requirements took about a week, followed by rapid fix-and-retest cycles with contact roughly every two days, and that switching the Q&A agent's knowledge source from SharePoint to Dataverse lifted answer accuracy.

The more notable outcome is what came next. In April 2026 NTT DATA started its own internal FDE program, led by Zhang Chenxi, which goes to departments whose agent projects are stuck and builds alongside them. The company says FDE activity aimed at outside clients has also begun, and that it plans to combine Microsoft's Work IQ with its own agentic platform LITRON.

For FDEs, this is a clear example of the model spreading in two directions at once: a hyperscaler packaging short, fixed-length FDE engagements to drive platform adoption, and a large systems integrator using that experience to build its own in-house FDE function. Microsoft's renaming of the offering from "FDE program" to "CAD program" also shows that the same work is not always advertised under the FDE title.