SEATTLE – July 1, 2024

Avanade, the leading Microsoft solutions provider, today announced that it has been selected as winner of the “Best AI Consulting Service Provider” award in the seventh annual AI Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market today.

The award recognizes Avanade’s Disrupt Avanade program, one of the flagship initiatives established following the appointment of Florin Rotar as the company’s first-ever Chief AI Officer. The program is part of Avanade’s Global Center for AI which oversees the company’s AI strategy, the upskilling of 60,000 employees, and responsible AI practices. It helps Avanade explore, build, and adopt AI across all business functions, with a ‘people first’ mindset that prioritizes culture, upskilling and change management.

The award celebrates a milestone in Avanade’s ongoing innovation with AI on Microsoft, as one of just 10 organizations in Microsoft’s Early Access Program (EAP) with OpenAI. It recognizes how Avanade is innovating with AI to transform itself – which leads to learnings shared with hundreds of clients wanting to realize value from AI. These innovations span out-of-the-box Copilots, through to Microsoft Agents, and custom-made AI solutions which embed natural language processing and generation, retrieval-augmented generation, and platforms like Azure Open AI and Fabric Data Platform.

Avanade has explored hundreds of innovative ideas which have the potential to enhance productivity, creativity and collaboration with AI – prioritizing and scaling those which have the biggest impact. By putting generative AI tools in the hands of its people, Avanade has also been able to quantify value. For example:

• HR teams can now create job postings 87% faster with an AI-powered tool.
• Security analysts are saving up to 40% on foundational tasks.
• People across multiple functions have reported a 50% improvement in creativity and innovation.
• Sales teams are freed up time to spend with clients by saving hours a week on mundane tasks.

“Disrupt Avanade is a core component of Avanade’s ambitions to help our people and clients reach their potential and realize new value using AI. It’s helping us shake up how we work and collaborate with AI, safeguarded by our responsible AI frameworks, policies, and governance,” said Florin Rotar, Chief AI Officer of Avanade. “This award from AI Breakthrough underscores our aspiration to cultivate transformative ideas with high-impact innovations - pushing boundaries through continuous ideation, experimentation, and learning.”

The mission of the AI Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of AI and machine learning related categories, including Generative AI, Computer Vision, AIOps, Deep Learning, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, industry specific AI applications and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 5,000 nominations from over 20 different countries throughout the world.

“Avanade is embracing the possibilities of gen AI to enable human-centric companies to be more effective, productive and reimagine how they do work. Gen AI has posed the questions of how you can harness its possibilities in a way that is employee-centric, builds a resilient, future-ready workforce, and ensures solutions are in service of the humans doing the work?” said Steve Johansson, managing director, AI Breakthrough. “Congratulations to Avanade on winning ‘Best AI Consulting Service Provider’ for demonstrating their leadership in the AI consulting service and leading the way in AI adoption with a focus on ensuring solutions are implemented and scaled responsibly for the benefit of both employees and clients.”

About Avanade

Avanade is the leading global provider of digital, cloud, AI and advisory services, industry solutions and design-led experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem.

Together with Accenture, we have been recognized as Microsoft’s Global SI Partner of the Year more than any other company. With the most Microsoft Most Valued Professionals, certifications (60,000+) and 18 (out of 18) Gold-level Microsoft competencies, we are uniquely positioned to help businesses grow and solve their toughest challenges.

Avanade is a responsible business committed to building a sustainable world through the power of people and Microsoft. We hold ourselves accountable to environmental, social and governance targets, ensuring our business is sustainable for the long term. Every day, our 60,000 professionals in 26 countries harness the power of their diverse backgrounds to make a genuine human impact for our clients, their employees and their customers. Learn more at www.avanade.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

About AI Breakthrough

Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the AI Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Artificial Intelligence technologies, services, companies and products. The AI Breakthrough Awards provide public recognition for the achievements of AI companies and products in categories including Generative AI, Machine Learning, AI Platforms, Robotics, Business Intelligence, AI Hardware, Computer Vision and more. For more information visit AIBreakthroughAwards.com.

Tech Breakthrough LLC does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our recognition programs, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with award designations. Tech Breakthrough LLC recognition consists of the opinions of the Tech Breakthrough LLC organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Tech Breakthrough LLC disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this recognition program, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.