According to CRN, Microsoft’s newly promoted Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff took center stage at Ignite 2025 while Satya Nadella was notably absent from programming. Althoff announced the December 1 availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business at $21 per user monthly for organizations under 300 users, matching the $30 Copilot’s features but requiring Business Basic, Standard or Premium licenses. Security Copilot now comes with E5 licenses including 400 security compute units monthly per 1,000 seats, throttling usage beyond allocations at $6 per additional SCU. The Agent Factory program offers metered plans for building AI agents without upfront licensing, while the Agent Pre-Purchase Plan ranges from $19,000 for 20,000 ACUs to $425,000 for 500,000 ACUs. Althoff emphasized that Microsoft’s 500,000-plus partner ecosystem is crucial for improving AI project success rates that currently disappoint.
The partner pivot
Here’s the thing about Althoff’s promotion: he’s spent nine years working directly with Microsoft‘s global partner network, and partners are clearly hoping this means their voices will carry more weight. During his fireside chat with Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen, he acknowledged what many in the industry have been saying quietly – AI projects aren’t delivering the success rates everyone expected. But he positioned partners as the solution, calling them the bridge that brings “intelligence and trust in technology to life.” That’s a significant shift in rhetoric from pure product focus to ecosystem enablement.
The pricing complexity problem
Look, Microsoft’s new AI pricing models are… complicated. We’ve got SCUs, ACUs, metered plans, pre-purchase commitments – it’s exactly the kind of complexity that Althoff himself criticized when he talked about developers “sipping data through 1,000 tiny straws.” The Security Copilot inclusion with E5 sounds great until you realize they’ll throttle you beyond allocated units. And the Agent Factory program? Basically, you’re buying abstract “units” that translate to retail costs in some formula Microsoft provides. This feels like the kind of partner-unfriendly complexity that solution providers have been complaining about for years.
Partner frustrations boiling over
The article reveals some pretty stark partner dissatisfaction that’s been building. Bobby Guerra from Axiom didn’t hold back calling the New Commerce Experience (NCE) a “big stiff-arm” that’s made partner life harder three years after launch. Wayne Roye from Troinet wants Microsoft to reward partners who drive adoption and consulting, not just those focused on pure sales. And several providers mentioned that the solutions designation badges favor net-new customer acquisition over the deeper customer relationships that drive real value. When partners start talking about looking at Google and Amazon alternatives, that’s a red flag Microsoft can’t ignore.
What “putting the I back into AI” really means
Althoff’s signature phrase about putting the “I” back into AI is more than just catchy – it’s a recognition that current AI implementations are too fragmented and technical. His “frontier success framework” focuses on practical business alignment: training employees properly, tying AI to measurable KPIs, and moving beyond “random acts of innovation” to scaled business scenarios. The question is whether Microsoft can simplify their own offerings enough to make this vision achievable. Because right now, partners are navigating that “sea of data, thousands of connectors, thousands of APIs” that Althoff described – and many of those complexities come from Microsoft’s own product and licensing structures.
