New Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff Takes Center Stage At Microsoft Ignite

“We need to put the ‘I’ back into AI. If you look at what's happening today, developers have to navigate a sea of data, thousands of connectors, thousands of APIs, all while sipping data through 1,000 tiny straws and trying to influence it. ... We can do better,” says Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff.

Product and partner program news dominated Microsoft’s annual Ignite user conference, but the event also put front and center the tech giant’s recently promoted Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff.

Althoff, who led Microsoft’s global sales organization and architecture of the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions for nine years before his promotion in October, delivered the keynote address from the floor of San Francisco’s Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors NBA team.

He also participated in a fireside chat with Microsoft Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen, where he spoke of how important Microsoft’s 500,000-plus partner ecosystem is to landing AI deals.

“The success rates of AI projects are not what we'd like them to be,” Althoff acknowledged in his opening keynote, later adding that partners are the ones who bring intelligence and trust in technology to life for Microsoft’s customers across all industries.

“Partners make Microsoft who we are today,” he said.

Microsoft Ignite 2025

With Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella notably missing from Ignite programming—in fact, Nadella delivered a virtual address to a separate conference during Ignite, MeterUp, also held in San Francisco—the week gave Althoff an opportunity to show partners his vision for their future in Microsoft’s AI era.

Althoff’s ascension to a CEO role put him alongside Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI; Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming; and Ryan Roslansky, CEO of Microsoft-owned social media network LinkedIn.

Roslansky’s job also includes executive vice president of Microsoft Office and Copilot, and he delivered a keynote address during Ignite as well.

Partners’ Asks Of Althoff

In the weeks since Althoff’s promotion, Microsoft solution providers have shared with CRN changes they hope to see with an executive who’s worked so closely with partners now receiving greater responsibilities.

Michael Goldstein, South Florida market president for Fort Myers, Fla.-based Microsoft solution provider Entech, told CRN in a recent interview that Althoff was a “great” choice for the role.

“He has been very community-friendly,” Goldstein said. “We hope that continues.”

Nyasha Tunduwani, founder of Seattle-based Microsoft solution provider Real Impact Technology Consulting, predicted that Althoff’s elevation “will be highly impactful” for partners who want less complexity in how they partner with Microsoft so that they can focus on “what matters: helping customers harness data and AI for meaningful outcomes.”

Tunduwani, who works with many nonprofit customers, told CRN in a recent interview that this new chapter of Microsoft’s Althoff era puts cost and accessibility of technology at the forefront and that he hopes Althoff keeps medium and smaller partners and customers in focus.

News coming out of Microsoft Ignite focused on AI pricing plans includes the Dec. 1 availability of the $21 per-user, per-month Microsoft 365 Copilot Business offer for organizations with fewer than 300 users. The new offer promises the same AI-powered productivity features as the current $30 Copilot offer, according to Microsoft. Users need Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium licenses.

Microsoft also added new value to its E5 licenses with the inclusion of the Security Copilot AI tool along with giving license holders 400 security compute units (SCUs) per month for every 1,000 paid seats and up to 10,000 SCUs per month, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft expects that this capacity is enough to support “typical scenarios” and will eventually throttle usage beyond the allocated SCUs. Users will have the option of paying $6 per SCU on a pay-a-you-go basis to scale beyond the allocated amount (SCUs typically cost $4 per unit per hour).

One other pricing plan unveiled during Ignite 2025 is Agent Factory. The program offers a single metered plan for using Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio to build agents for deploying in Microsoft 365 Copilot and elsewhere with no up-front licensing and provisioning required. Eligible organizations also have access to forward-deployed engineers and tailored role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams, according to Microsoft.

A Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan gives partners and users Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry services through one pool of funds without the need to choose a platform or manage multiple contracts. Users buy agent commit units (ACUs) up front in a one-year metered plan. Users can buy 20,000 ACUs for $19,000, 100,000 ACUs for $90,000 and 500,000 ACUs for $425,000.

A formula Microsoft offers for calculating ACU consumption shows that 100 ACUs are consumed when Copilot Studio generates a retail cost of $100 based on Copilot Credit and Microsoft Foundry usage.

“What we’re trying to do is to build this layer of business IQ that our partners can build upon and deliver that out in the market,” Althoff said during his Ignite remarks.

Room For Improvement In NCE, Solution Designations

Microsoft solution providers have also told CRN that they hope Althoff being in a higher leadership position leads to the vendor revisiting more controversial partner program changes in recent years.

Bobby Guerra, CEO of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Microsoft solution provider Axiom, told CRN in an interview that even three years after the launch of Microsoft’s new commerce experience (NCE), the controversial program has made life as a partner harder.

“My hope is they might take a closer look at walking back NCE,” Guerra said. “We are a huge driver for Microsoft growth and adoption. It felt like a big stiff-arm when it was rolled out. I was totally shocked at how Microsoft misunderstood the change.”

NCE has added more time and effort to working with dozens of Axiom customers on whether to opt for a month-to-month or year-to-year offers, Guerra said. “It’s a huge task that isn’t worth the money.”

Wayne Roye, CEO of New York-based Microsoft solution provider Troinet, told CRN he’d like to see the Microsoft partner program better reward solution providers that support, consult and drive adoption with customers as opposed to taking a pure sales approach.

Multiple Microsoft solution providers have told CRN that they feel the vendor’s solutions designations badging structure that replaced Gold and Silver rewards net-new customer acquisition more so than the places where a partner like Troinet shines. Those designations can bring with them incentives and benefits that can improve business for a partner.

“Partners that cannot or don’t want to make the requirements will look somewhere else like Google and Amazon,” Roye said.

AI Success Rates ‘Not What We'd Like Them To Be’

As for the rest of Althoff’s message during Ignite 2025, the commercial business CEO said that improving success rates means more consistent alignment between business and IT professionals, rationalizing data quality to improve AI tool output and too much experimentation and “random acts of innovation” instead of putting AI to use at scale in real business scenarios.

Althoff described a “frontier success framework” he’s seen work for companies now seeing returns on their AI investment. That framework includes taking time to train employees on new AI tools and tying the tools to measurable key performance indicators, he said in his Ignite remarks.

“It's no wonder that you see the partners that are adopting our capabilities the most are also the ones doing the best selling it effectively in the market,” Althoff said.

The AI era represents democratized intelligence, Althoff said. Successful companies leverage AI and create artifacts in the tools they already know and maintain observability of total agents in the IT estate, where employees access the agents and what workflows they have assigned.

“We need to put the ‘I’ back into AI,” Althoff said. “If you look at what's happening today, developers have to navigate a sea of data, thousands of connectors, thousands of APIs, all while sipping data through 1,000 tiny straws and trying to influence it. … We can do better.”