AI is reshaping how work gets done and how risk occurs across cloud, data, identity, and more. Many organizations want AI-powered productivity, but don’t have the security foundation in place yet. As organizations move to an AI-powered operating model, security becomes a key element in enabling them to responsibly scale innovation. In this new era of agent AI,1 You cannot layer protection after the fact. These must be built into the fabric of how AI systems are developed, managed, and used, based on strong cloud security posture, clear data governance, and zero trust principles that anticipate and continually test for breaches. Introducing two customer spotlights that explore how global organizations are implementing that approach.
Why security is a strategic enabler for AI-powered growth
These customer stories highlight how security is no longer a support function, but a strategic enabler of growth, speed, and trust. As AI accelerates decision-making and reshapes the way we work, leaders must modernize without increasing risk or slowing down their business. The experiences of these forward-thinking organizations reflect the reality faced by many businesses. This means gaining consistent visibility across complex environments, acting quickly while maintaining trust, meeting expanding governance and compliance expectations with AI, and increasing operational efficiency through automation. These examples show how the right security foundation can enable organizations to scale AI with confidence, turning protection into a competitive advantage rather than a constraint.
First, let’s take a closer look at St. Luke’s University Health Network.
How St. Luke’s University uses AI to accelerate efficiency and threat response
St Luke’s Church identified critical gaps in unified, real-time visibility across security tools, limiting the ability to detect and stop threats early. Organizations needed a way to understand the landscape and respond to emerging threats. To modernize and unify security operations, St. Luke’s University turned to Microsoft Security Copilot to improve analyst productivity and help its Security Operations Center (SOC) team operate at scale.
By connecting Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, St. Luke’s gains a single, AI-powered view across endpoints, identities, email, and cloud workloads, helping analysts act faster, correlate cyber threats more effectively, and move from reactive to proactive defense. By incorporating AI directly into daily workflows, teams can identify risks in real-time, discover visibility gaps, and make better, more informed decisions.
Streamline workflows and automate protection
At the same time, Security Copilot agents are transforming the way SOCs operate by automating time-consuming tasks like alert triage and vulnerability remediation. This reduces noise, speeds investigations, and allows analysts to focus on real threats and strategic work. The result is more efficient, collaborative, and resilient security operations built for today’s increasingly complex threat landscape. Using Microsoft Security Copilot, St. Luke’s University can:
- Unified visibility across Defender and Microsoft Sentinel eliminates silos and accelerates threat response.
- AI-powered insights help analysts detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats in real-time.
- Security Copilot Agent automates routine tasks and Security Triage Agent saves up to 200 hours of analyst time each month.
- Advanced phishing triage reduces false positives and increases confidence in decision-making.
- Centralized workflows improve collaboration, reporting speed, and overall SOC efficiency.
St. Luke’s views its investment in Security Copilot as the foundation of a self-improving security ecosystem. AI-powered security allows the team to stay ahead of both technological and business changes, ensuring St. Luke’s remains resilient in the face of evolving threats. To learn more about how St. Luke’s Church uses Microsoft Security Copilot to modernize and consolidate its security operations, watch our customer video or read the full St. Luke’s customer story.
How ManpowerGroup secures the world’s workforce with an integrated platform
manpower group is modernizing toward a unified, cloud-based security platform to protect a highly distributed workforce and address identity-centric risks and complex compliance requirements as AI becomes embedded in daily operations. Their experience shows how organizations can use Microsoft Security to secure the foundation of their AI transformation end-to-end.
As ManpowerGroup expanded globally, the combination of security tools it had been using for years became more difficult to manage as cyber threats and regulatory demands increased, creating complexity, inconsistent controls, and slow response times.
To reduce tool sprawl, ManpowerGroup deployed Microsoft 365 E5 for the real-time identity, endpoint, email, and cloud prevention, detection, and response capabilities of Microsoft Defender, as well as cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) performance of Microsoft Sentinel.
By deploying Microsoft 365 E5, ManpowerGroup reduced security complexity, reduced integration timelines from weeks and months to hours and days, unified global security operations, and created an AI-enabled security foundation. To see how the platform’s approach supports secure and agile operations around the world, watch the ManpowerGroup customer video to read the full story.
Repeatable playbooks for securing AI at scale
Although these customers operate in very different environments, their journeys to securing their organizations and deploying (or preparing to deploy) AI followed the same core patterns that other organizations can adopt as they modernize. Both started by anchoring security decisions to business risk, then unifying signals across cloud, data, identity, and operations, and finally automating guardrails so protection can scale in parallel with AI-powered work. These experiences demonstrate a clear and repeatable approach to deploying security and AI without slowing your business.
- Lead with risk and business value. By clearly defining what needs to be protected and why, security can enable AI adoption rather than limiting it.
- Unify visibility across your environment. Reduce blind spots by connecting cloud, identity, data, and security operations (SecOps) signals into a single operational view.
- Make governance a reality, not a wish. Operationalize classification, labeling, data loss prevention, and policy enforcement for consistent protection by default.
- Continually strengthen your posture. Prevent misconfigurations as your environment evolves with continuous configuration management and drift detection.
- Automate results at scale. Improve security and governance without increasing headcount by streamlining response and compliance reporting.
This approach enables both organizations to move more quickly with confidence and provides a practical blueprint for other organizations looking to secure the foundations of their AI transformation.
What frontier companies can get right in the AI era
These stories are indicative of a broader pattern that is emerging among major organizations. “Frontier companies” are organizations that lead in the AI era by combining speed and trust. They act quickly (but not recklessly) because security is treated as a fundamental feature rather than an afterthought. These organizations have protections built into the way they work, including governance that scales as AI adoption grows, resilience as the environment changes, and controls that continuously operate in the background. Security will be a fundamental element in enabling you to deploy AI with confidence rather than constraints.
These customers exemplify what this looks like in practice. And their stories provide a playbook that other organizations can confidently implement. By modernizing security as a platform and connecting visibility, governance, posture management, and automation, organizations can empower AI-powered work while strengthening trust across data, identity, cloud environments, and more. These customer stories demonstrate that in the AI era, organizations that treat security as a strategic foundation are best positioned to lead, adapt, and compete in an AI-powered world. Learn more about how Microsoft Security can help organizations protect their AI-powered work at scale.
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1Secure Agent AI for Frontier Transformation, Microsoft Security Blog. March 9, 2026.
