Are you a Frontier Firm? Answer with your own numbers.

In its 2025 Work Trend Index, Microsoft named a new kind of company: the Frontier Firm — a company powered by intelligence on tap, human-agent teams, and a new role for everyone, the agent boss. Microsoft expects every organization to be on the journey to becoming one within the next two to five years.

So boards have started asking a simple question: are we one?

The honest answer is not a survey or a slide. It already sits in your Microsoft tenant, in the usage reports Microsoft publishes to every admin. Aristo reads those reports through one read-only consent and answers the question on one page: the Frontier Firm Report.

What Microsoft means by a Frontier Firm

Microsoft describes the journey in three phases:

• Phase 1 — AI as an assistant. People do the same work, better and faster.
• Phase 2 — agents as digital colleagues. Agents take on specific tasks at human direction.
• Phase 3 — agents run the process. People set direction for agents that run whole workflows, and check in as needed.

Microsoft is clear that most organizations will be in all three phases at once. Its advice to leaders ends with a plain instruction: get to broad scale, fast. The time for pilots alone has passed.

Six questions, one page

The Frontier Firm Report answers six questions, in the order a leader asks them:

1. Where do we stand?
2. Are we wasting money?
3. What is actually being used?
4. What should we do next?
5. How do we know it's working?
6. What's coming that we should care about?

It opens with the answer: a score out of 100, built from three parts —

• Adoption (50 points): how many people use Copilot, how recently, and whether they find it helpful.
• Activation (25 points): the share of assigned seats that are genuinely active.
• Security readiness (25 points): read straight from Microsoft Secure Score.

The score lands in one of four bands: Emerging (0–29), Developing (30–54), Advancing (55–84) and Frontier (85–100) — where, in the report's words, AI is how the everyday work runs. Every input traces back to a Microsoft source, and the report shows the source beside each number.

What it looks like

This is the report on a sample tenant, run 15, unretouched:

• The answer, first: Advancing, 78 out of 100.
• Seats working: 18 of 24 assigned Copilot seats are active — 75%, counted from Microsoft's own Copilot usage report.
• Ready to start: 6 assigned seats have gone cold. That is $180 a month of paid Copilot, rerouted to people who asked for a seat — never removed.

Your own report comes from your own tenant, about 30 minutes after consent.

What a leader does with it

The report ends with one next move and its arithmetic: the single change that lifts the score most. It leaves as a PowerPoint deck for the room it is going to — the board, finance, IT and security, or a seller — and it runs again on a schedule, so the next meeting starts from the new number rather than the old one.

For Microsoft account teams

The Frontier Firm is Microsoft's own frame — Aristo owns the measurement; Microsoft owns the concept. The report places a customer's own numbers inside it — where they stand, which seats are working, and which are ready to start — so the next account conversation begins from the customer's position, in Microsoft's language, with the source of every figure on the page. It is available on Azure Marketplace and billed through the customer's Microsoft agreement.

See your own number

One read-only consent. About 30 minutes to the first report. phoenixhalo.com/aristo

Sources: Microsoft WorkLab, 2025: The year the Frontier Firm is born. Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Copilot usage report; Microsoft Secure Score. Sample-tenant figures are from Aristo's Frontier Firm Report, run 15, 23 September 2026.

Published 24 September 2026 · All insights