Cloud Solution Architect - AI Business Solutions

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The Customer Success Architect (CSA) for AI Business Solutions is responsible for enabling Microsoft’s enterprise customers to achieve business transformation through AI-powered solutions. Operating within the Customer Success Unit (CSU), the CSA plays a strategic role in leading technical engagements across AI Workforce and AI Business Process portfolios. This includes designing and implementing secure, scalable, and resilient architectures using Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Power Platform.

The CSA guides customers through the entire Copilot journey, from envisioning to deployment and adoption, applying value-based delivery frameworks and Success by Design methodologies. In this capacity, the CSA serves as a trusted advisor and advocate for customers and partners, translating feedback and insights into actionable solutions that align with industry best practices.

Beyond technical delivery, the CSA acts as a business strategist and customer advocate, translating feedback and insights into actionable solution designs that align with industry trends and customer goals. The role demands strong business value literacy, the ability to articulate ROI and transformation impact, and experience in change management and customer success planning. The CSA identifies opportunities to drive consumption and usage growth, ensures operational excellence, and collaborates across engineering, field, and partner teams to scale delivery and support unified customer success.

This position is recognized for technical excellence, innovation, business strategy, and customer obsession.

Required/minimum qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 4+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 4+ years experience working on technical projects.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, AI, Power Platform, M365 and security certifications).

Business Impact

• Operates according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking). Collaborates across Microsoft and customer/partner teams through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase customer/partner satisfaction. Proactively manages business and technical risks, adapts methodology and applies governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures. Continuously prioritizes among competing demands in their work and identifies where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.
• Delivers solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., product offerings such as value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets. Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices and/or involving the change management team, proactively helps the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage. Guides customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities. Provides feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.
• Proactively identifies new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Actively listens to and respectfully challenges customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements. Identifies, and evaluates industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps existing architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Proactively captures opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model.
• Proactively identifies, escalates, and mitigates blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption. Applies business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.

Customer Centricity

• Proactively acts as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams and internal communities leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems. Identifies patterns of feedback across customers/partners/territories/industries and leverages them to develop strategic and actionable insights. Presents business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate.
• Identifies and/or translates customer/partner problems into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, and explains why and/or how they meet customer/partner outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals (e.g., via proof of concept, minimally viable product [MVP], rapid prototype) relative to competitive offerings.
• Proactively helps the customer/partner adopt and use Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions. Builds relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs), and helps build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Independently interacts as needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements across BDMs, TDMs, CIO and CISO teams, appropriately engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper expertise is required.
• Drives self and guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Defines customer/partner conditions of success by leveraging an understanding of customer goals. Anticipates and addresses customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, and executes strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.
• Identifies and prioritizes several opportunities that align with revenue goals, and orchestrates growth of solution utilization pipeline with partners. Provides assistance with partner and sales teams to bring clarity to specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.

Technical Leadership

• Leverages market insights and demand signals to assist leadership in identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling and/or accreditations based on demand. Role models technical readiness, both depth-aligned to solution area priorities and breadth-aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU)/corporate initiatives (e.g., security, resilience, AI), and influences team to drive their own technical readiness. Acts as a mentor, leading readiness and upskilling activities in the team/organization by educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices.
• Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicates those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, IP (both existing and new), technologies, and/or processes/practices that enable solutions to scale across customers. Contributes to the development and modification of Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies. Provides thought leadership and innovation to customers/partners and internal communities at the local level.
• Contributes to leading virtual teams (v-teams) around technologies and customer/partner challenges, and shares ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape.
• Demonstrates strong industry knowledge and increases recognition for Microsoft solutions by contributing to and sometimes leading presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite) Contributes to intellectual property (IP) and identifies patterns where no IP exists (e.g., CoPilot and AI scenarios) to help build scalable and repeatable models. Participates in external technical and non-technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, webcasts, blogs, hackathons) that elevate the Microsoft brand and shares learnings across internal teams

Capabilities and Skills

Driving Customer Outcomes

• Understanding and mapping customer requirements to the company's offerings effectively. Identifying opportunities, translating customer needs into tailored solutions, ensuring that products or services precisely meet customer expectations, resulting in high levels of satisfaction and success.

Leading with Technical Intensity

• Being the trusted technical advisor to the customer, prioritizing technical skills growth aligned with our cloud strategy, and infusing technical insight into helping the customer make the right business decisions.

Technical Skills

• M365 Administration
• Assigning Copilot licenses
• Configuring SharePoint Advanced Management
• Managing Microsoft Graph connectors
• Ensuring data readiness for semantic search
• M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio
• No-code agent creation using natural language
• Connecting to SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams
• Power Platform integration
• REST API and custom connectors
• Event-driven workflows
• Data engineering and MLOps
• Responsible AI practices
• Conversational UX design
• Prompt engineering (for advanced scenarios)
• Security & Compliance
• Implementing Microsoft Purview for data governance
• Managing sensitivity labels and access controls
• Oversharing prevention and audit logging

Understanding the Business

• Understanding the business means having a firm grasp of the Microsoft strategy, consumption, and support and connecting that to customer outcomes, using data to find new opportunities and demonstrate customer success, and leverage our internal systems to accurately capture the state of your customer.
• The ability to identify business needs and determine solutions to business problems; solutions may include a software-systems development component, process improvement, organizational change or strategic planning and policy development.
• The ability to develop and maintain positive working relationships with supervisors, staff, managers, customers, and vendors. This includes expressing empathy and compassion when dealing with the needs and problems of others, being approachable, taking time to address the concerns of coworkers, and treating others with respect and dignity
• The ability to interact confidently with senior leaders of the organization in order to present/defend/clarify concerns or issues regarding an existing project, program, or solution. This includes the ability to confidently address difficult questions, handle push back from a high-level audience, and maintain an executive demeanor while engaging in difficult or sometimes high-pressure situations.