Microsoft

Microsoft Platform Orchestration

Microsoft

Microsoft Platform Orchestration

 Microsoft

Instructor: Microsoft

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Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Beginner level

Recommended experience

7 hours to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace
Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Beginner level

Recommended experience

7 hours to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

What you'll learn

  • Lead the Post-SaaS Transition: Analyze the shift from paying for seats to paying for outcomes in the emerging AI economy.

  • Evaluate Agentic Readiness: Identify business processes ripe for transition from human+Copilot to Autonomous Agent.

  • Architect Multi-Agent Workflows: Design systems where multiple AI agents collaborate to solve end-to-end business problems.

  • Future-Proof Workforce Resilience: Redesign job architectures and incentive models to support a hybrid human-agent workforce.

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Assessments

17 assignments¹

AI Graded see disclaimer
Taught in English

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This course is part of the Microsoft AI Transformation Leader Professional Certificate
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There are 9 modules in this course

Most organizations deploying AI today are deploying Assisted AI—tools that augment human decisions by generating outputs that humans then act upon. Agentic AI is fundamentally different: It executes sequences of actions autonomously, makes intermediate decisions without human review at each step, and takes actions in the world—sending communications, updating records, triggering downstream processes—on the organization's behalf. The executive's analytical challenge is not choosing between the two; it is knowing precisely which workflows are appropriate candidates for agentic execution and which ones require the human judgment that autonomous systems cannot provide.

What's included

2 videos2 readings1 assignment

Authorizing an agentic deployment requires the executive to evaluate whether the proposed workflow architecture is sound—not to build the architecture, but to assess it. This module gives executives the architectural vocabulary and design principles to evaluate a proposed agentic workflow design: Whether the data connections are governed, whether the self-correction mechanism is designed or assumed, whether the oversight touchpoints are built into the architecture or left to informal monitoring, and whether the workflow boundary is defined precisely enough to prevent agent scope creep.

What's included

2 videos1 reading3 assignments

Seat-based SaaS licensing gave organizations predictable costs, clear per-user accountability, and relatively straightforward vendor relationships. Outcome-based AI pricing changes all three: costs become variable and tied to AI task execution volume, accountability shifts from user seats to business outcome metrics, and vendor relationships become performance contracts rather than software subscriptions. This module gives executives the evaluation framework to assess what this shift means for their organization's financial exposure, vendor leverage, and procurement governance.

What's included

2 videos1 reading1 assignment

The organizations that will have the most strategic flexibility in a rapidly evolving AI market are the ones that built interoperability and data ownership requirements into their procurement strategy before signing multi-year AI commitments. This module gives executives the procurement strategy framework to evaluate vendor lock-in risk, define data ownership requirements, and build interoperability standards into AI contracts so that the organization's ability to move, switch, and reconfigure as the market evolves is protected rather than surrendered in the initial procurement decision.

What's included

2 videos1 reading3 assignments

Organizational structures were designed around the assumption that humans do the production work. When AI agents take over production execution in defined workflow segments, the organizational structure built around that assumption becomes misaligned—roles are defined by tasks that AI now performs, reporting structures reflect production hierarchies that agentic workflows have made obsolete, and headcount is allocated to execution capacity that the organization no longer needs at human scale. This module gives executives the analytical framework to identify where organizational structure has become misaligned with agentic workflow reality and reconstruct it around orchestration rather than production.

What's included

2 videos2 readings1 assignment

Redesigning roles around orchestration without redesigning the incentive structures that govern performance is the most common organizational design failure in AI-driven workforce transitions. Employees whose performance is still measured by production output will optimize for production—even when the AI is producing at scale, and the organization needs them to optimize for oversight quality. This module gives executives the framework to design incentive structures that make orchestration the rewarded behavior—aligning employee performance measurement with the organizational value that only humans provide in a human-agent hybrid model.

What's included

2 videos1 reading3 assignments

Frontier risks in agentic AI are distinct from the deployment risks executives have been managing in Assisted AI environments. They operate at the system level rather than the use-case level, affecting not just the specific workflow where AI is deployed but also the interconnected organizational and supply chain structures in which the AI is embedded. This module provides executives with an appraisal framework to evaluate three frontier risk categories—agentic drift, deep-tier supply chain vulnerabilities, and cross-organizational agent interaction risks—and determine the governance architecture required for each.

What's included

2 videos2 readings1 assignment

A 3–5-year AI strategic roadmap is not a technology deployment schedule—it is an organizational transformation architecture that sequences capability development, governance investment, workforce transition, and frontier risk management to enable the organization to move aggressively without exceeding its structural integrity. This module provides executives with the roadmap formulation framework that integrates the full program's strategic, governance, workforce, and risk dimensions into a single forward-looking document.

What's included

2 videos1 reading3 assignments

Learners receive a provided Enterprise AI Transformation Blueprint submitted by a fictional strategy team and produce an Executive Review and Authorization Memo. The blueprint is realistic but contains specific gaps that reflect the most common strategic planning failures in long-horizon AI transformation documents — agentic workflow architectures that are ambition-driven rather than governance-grounded, procurement strategies that do not address interoperability or data ownership, workforce design sections that redesign roles without redesigning incentive structures, and a 3–5 year roadmap that front-loads capability deployment without sequencing the governance and frontier risk architecture that must precede it. Learners identify what is well-constructed, what is incomplete or misaligned, what specific changes must be made, and deliver a final authorization decision.

What's included

3 readings1 assignment

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 Microsoft
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