To perceive a bakery you have to take a look at the ovens. To appreciate the products, you have to know the mass of others.
But how does it work? You have to eat the cookies.
That’s the recipe Judson Althoff recently followed to learn firsthand about the generational goals and ambitions of Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest bakery company and a Microsoft customer.
Althoff, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief advertising officer, visited Grupo Bimbo’s oldest factory in Mexico: “a museum room” filled with vintage equipment, as one Grupo Bimbo executive described it. But after a virtual upgrade, the establishment is now a monetary dynamo. .
At the Guadalajara plant, Althoff climbed a hairnet. He visited blenders, cutters and conveyor belts. He stopped to chat with the partners and managers. And she enjoyed a collection of freshly baked breads and treats. Company executives have taken note.
“To be true partners with our consumers and help them innovate pragmatically, we want to deeply understand their day-to-day operations and the demanding situations they face,” Althoff said of the visit. “With our first-hand experience, we were able to bring the best of Microsoft to help Grupo Bimbo reinvent its operations. “
“It was important,” says Juan Pajón, Grupo Bimbo’s global senior vice president of enterprise technology. “The only way to perceive what’s going on is to communicate with the user online, to perceive their problems, their concerns, their ideas. Innovation happens here.
Still, it’s more than just a pleasant time. Althoff’s scale is the result of a long-term personalized collaboration between Grupo Bimbo and Microsoft: a new type of partnership designed through Microsoft called the CEO Co-Innovation Program, or COIN.
Several times a year, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, and some of his top executives marry the CEO and several senior executives of a select consumer company. Together, they explore and describe new product responses or features that are visionary but also market-ready.
COIN conversations are tailored to each visitor’s business opportunities. But what makes those meetings different: The topic of generation doesn’t even enter the discussion until everyone understands what the visitor is looking to achieve and why.
Each COIN participation lasts four to six months and eventually brings together a small organization of the company’s engineers, expanders, and industry experts who expand concepts to get answers that can bring those concepts to life. COIN sessions can be held in person, through Microsoft. Teams, or both.
COIN was introduced in 2018. Since then, approximately 40 Microsoft users have taken advantage of this exclusive program to create and launch their inventions, from insights to ensure better outcomes for hospitalized patients to the creation of a standalone method for transporting people.
At its core, COIN seeks to help customers boost their aspirations through the spirit of co-creation. However, it’s not a Microsoft sales tool. There are no contracts to sign, no business numbers to reach. The focus is squarely on customers’ business desires and tactics to help them fulfill those desires faster than simply showcasing Microsoft’s technology.
“It’s a marriage between engineering and business, and it’s beautiful,” said Deb Cupp, president of Microsoft Americas. Cupp is one of the leaders responsible for the creation of the COIN concept and remains a common player in COIN.
“The experience was extraordinary: seeing consumers sit down at the table, converse in a space with the ability to dream of what’s possible. “
The freedom to talk freely about new business concepts has been an eye-opener for some customers, especially those who implemented a more inflexible technique for virtual modernization, Cupp says.
“I think we’ve opened their eyes. We created an environment that allowed them to feel that innovation is safer than before. I think we’ve helped them realize that there’s nothing to create and imagine. It was fun to watch.
And as generative AI evolves, select companies can engage with Microsoft leaders through COIN to explore how AI can help reshape operations, visitor and worker experiences, and drive innovation, says Cindy Rose, lead chief operating officer for global business sales at Microsoft and the COIN rate executive today.
For a review of the program, three users agreed to share their COIN experiences: what solution they envisioned for their collaboration, what they ultimately built, and what they learned.
The company: Amadeus.
Travel technology. Based in Madrid, Spain.
COIN participation: November 2021 to March 2022.
The idea: to capture a new moment in the journey.
In late 2021, nearly a year after COVID-19 vaccines became available, many U. S. and European corporations began restoring the worker matrix. In 2022, the business rate doubled in those regions. In 2023, companies reported that their domestic and foreign revenues had reached at least 70% of pre-pandemic levels, according to a global survey.
The alarm clock was on. But an emerging truth accompanies this resurgence: companies would be subject to greater scrutiny compared to pre-pandemic years.
In their first COIN meetings, Amadeus and Microsoft executives discussed how employers now deserve to justify the price of their products and the environmental effects it generates. The meetings were attended by Wolfgang Krips, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Amadeus.
The organization saw an opportunity: a smarter way to manage pricing and carbon. Unlike private trips, business trips consist of groups of workers traveling to the same city for a single occasion.
“What if we managed to move away from the classic way of separately recording a set, entering expenses, and getting reimbursed?”Krips remembers asking, “What if we followed a style where we planned together, aligning ourselves with the flight and hotel and sharing transportation on the floor?”
The process: Both groups temporarily learned that they had a secure platform available to fulfill their vision. They would integrate Amadeus’ Cytric Easy, a spending tool, into the Microsoft 365 suite, which includes Teams.
The company’s engineers worked on the integration. Sales reps explored monetization and developed a go-to-market plan. Eventually, Microsoft workers tested the solution.
“By being an early adopter, Microsoft helped us solidify our solution,” Krips says. “We gained feedback on the issues. We learned a lot.
Collaborations with Microsoft have also helped “open doors” in the market by connecting Microsoft consumers with the Amadeus team, Krips says.
Such discussions shape the foundation of COIN, a program driven by Microsoft’s transformation from a transactional software licensing corporation a decade ago to one that invests in the good fortune of visitors and today’s business bottom line, says Rose, Microsoft’s lead chief operating officer for global business sales.
“We’ve learned over the years to actively pay attention and be curious about what our consumers are going through,” says Rose. “COIN isn’t about promoting Microsoft products. We’re here to prioritize the demanding situations and opportunities our consumers face. and them at each and every level of their unique transformation journey.
For example, users will soon be able to take advantage of Microsoft 365’s generative AI features and use herbal language activations to make their reservations.
Creation: Cytric Easy built in with Microsoft 365, allowing businesses to plan, book electronically, and track expenses.
COIN’s conclusion: “Everyone participates on an equivalent level,” Krips says. “It’s not the classic (sales-oriented deal): OK, I signed up for your cloud program, now you want to hand it over to us. No, it brings out what’s in any of us.
The company: Equinor
Energy. Headquartered in Stavanger, Norway.
COIN participation: August 2021 to January 2022.
The concept is to design a faster way to design offshore wind farms.
You may be familiar with the sight of huge white turbines in the sea, each secured through underwater foundations, their blades spinning amid the sea breeze. Average wind speeds tend to be higher on water than on land, allowing those farms to generate more electricity.
But initial work to analyze potential wind farm locations can be challenging. Engineers have to make a lot of assessments: what platform and what length of turbine are needed?What are the characteristics of wind and waves?How to expand the wind farm? How much electricity will it produce?Is that the cost?
“So we asked ourselves, why don’t we digitize and automate this first total phase?Why don’t we do numerical simulations?” said Alvin Shaffer, head of partnerships, ecosystems and intelligence at Equinor.
The process: Engineers from Equinor and Microsoft partnered to drive progress on a virtual platform that can simply take care of multiple design iterations and ultimately automate the site assessment process.
“The ocean of knowledge you want it to be to analyze those things is important,” Shaffer says. “You want there to be a platform to orchestrate and manage all this work. “
To build them, the organization relied on several Microsoft technologies, Azure Digital Twins, which creates virtual models of the physical world, and Azure IoT, which connects, monitors, and controls IoT devices.
As is typical in a COIN engagement, there were also conversations between Nadella and Equinor CEO Anders Opedal, as well as senior executives from both companies.
“Being able to talk to Satya, listen to his questions, his commitments, and his suggestions, it was pretty impressive,” Shaffer says. “You don’t see that in the CEO moment when two corporations come together.
“Their enthusiasm helped me put (development) on my side,” he added.
The creation: digital wind farms.
Design evaluations and adjustments that used to take weeks can now be done with the click of a button, Shaffer says.
COIN’s key takeaways: “There’s something special about two corporations being willing to put money on the table and then co-innovate to locate a business opportunity,” says Shaffer. “”It took me a little while, but I figured it out. Personally, I need more.
For Microsoft, a common procedure that provides a more detailed (real-time) view of a customer’s priorities and pressures is also of great value, Cupp says.
“We’re learning how we can provide ourselves and create the space for a visitor to make those inventions a reality, not only with us, but also with themselves,” Cupp says.
The company: Grupo Bimbo
Baked goods. Based in Mexico City.
COIN participation: February 2021 to June 2021.
The idea: The year before, Althoff put on a hairnet and visited Grupo Bimbo’s bakery in Guadalajara, the nearly 80-year-old company that ponders an important business conundrum.
How can we get real-time knowledge into the hands of our salespeople: give them genuine business insights to make more sales and have more strategic conversations when they meet with the stores that sell our products?
For seven decades, the company’s style of distributing and delivering baked goods to retailers depended in large part on the expertise of Grupo Bimbo’s salespeople and their ability to connect with those retail customers, says Pajón, the company’s senior vice president.
But the salespeople didn’t have significant sales histories with customers. What they needed was a tool that could demonstrate recent sales metrics for Grupo Bimbo products in express stores.
The process: During their COIN sessions, Microsoft and Grupo Bimbo developed an AI-powered tool that provides insights beyond sales.
“We put that story in their hands, helping the salesperson not only leverage their expertise, but also recommend data that we wouldn’t possibly see as humans. “
At the same time, Microsoft executives like Cupp and Althoff collaborated with the Group’s senior leaders “not only for tactical and operational conversions, but also to make sure we were moving in the right direction,” Pajon says. “We’ve had so many visits from Judson to our bakeries, they listened to us and understood where we wanted to go.
The creation: The sales tool called Ben, powered through the “Star Wars” character Obi Wan Kenobi or Ben Kenobi.
“We’re looking for that Ben Kenobi spirit: the force is with you, taking the sales rep to the moment of truth,” says José Antonio Parra, vice president of global virtual transformation, insights and analytics at Grupo Bimbo. “The concept is to empower, to bring something extra to the user who is at the forefront. “
COIN’s key takeaways: “In terms of our exposure to Microsoft’s senior management, it goes beyond a business relationship,” Parra says. “It’s closer to a friendship when we’re communicating about business. “
Customers interested in learning more about COIN or applying to participate touch their number one Microsoft touch.
Above: Image of a wind turbine, courtesy of Equinor.