Overview
The Customer Success Architect (CSA) for AI Business Process Solutions helps enterprise customers drive real business transformation using AI. As part of the Customer Success Unit (CSU), this role leads strategic technical engagements across the AI Workforce portfolio, with a strong focus on Power platform, Business process business transformation at scale and Agentic workflows.
The CSA designs and delivers secure, scalable, and resilient solutions using Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Studio, Foundry and Power Platform. Working end to end, the role guides customers from early envisioning through deployment and adoption, applying value‑based delivery approaches and Success by Design principles to ensure measurable outcomes.
Beyond solution delivery, the CSA acts as a trusted advisor to customers and partners. This includes translating business goals into practical architectures, shaping adoption and change strategies, and turning customer feedback into actionable improvements aligned with industry best practices.
The role combines deep technical expertise with strong business acumen. CSAs are expected to articulate business value and ROI, support change management, and contribute to customer success planning. They identify opportunities to grow usage and consumption, drive operational excellence, and collaborate closely with engineering, field, and partner teams to scale impact across the customer portfolio.
This position is recognized for technical leadership, innovation, strategic thinking, and a strong commitment to customer success.
Responsibilities
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 Agentic 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
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.
Conversations Skills
Frontier & Core Conversations — [Deep]
- Leading the combined value + technical solution conversation that opens every Frontier engagement
Consultative Skills
FinOps (Agent Cost Management) — [Deep]
- Token cost monitoring, dashboards, and optimization across the agentic platform
Business Value & ROI — [Adjacent]
- Use-case ideation, scenario-to-outcome mapping, ROI modeling, closed-loop value realization** **
Adoption & Change Management (ACM) — [Adjacent]
- Sponsor alignment, champion communities, training & communication strategies
- Sustained-adoption measurement and reinforcement (Prosci as the foundation)
Architecture Design — [Adjacent]
- Scenario-driven solution design with security & governance embedded from the start
Trusted Advisor — [Deep]
- Consultative architecture leadership across solution-area boundaries
Design Thinking — [Adjacent]
Technical Skills
Universal Prerequisite — Hands-on Agent Building (non-negotiable)
- Deep, hands-on experience building, testing, and refining agents in Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry, with L300–L400 depth in at least one primary platform. Without this foundation, the rest does not qualify.
Power Platform — [Adjacent] (deepen Power Apps)
- Dataverse data modeling (tables, relationships, business rules, calculated/rollup columns)
- Power Apps – canvas and model-driven app design
- Power Automate – cloud flows, desktop flows (RPA), approvals
- Power Pages – external-facing portals
- Power Fx expression language
- AI Builder (document processing, prediction, prebuilt and custom models)
- Connectors – standard, premium, and custom (incl. OpenAPI / REST)
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – solutions, environments, managed vs. unmanaged, source control / pipelines
- Power Platform admin center – environment strategy, capacity, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies
- Governance at scale – Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit
- Embedded analytics with Power BI
**Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) — [Deep] **
- Core first-party apps — Sales, Customer Service, Field Service
- Customer Insights — Data (CDP) and Journeys (real-time marketing)
- Dataverse as the underlying data platform
- Business Process Flows and business process automation
- Configuration & low-code customization (forms, views, business rules)
- Security model — business units, security roles, teams, field-level security
- Integration — dual-write with Finance & Operations, virtual tables, connectors
- Data migration and quality (Dataverse, dataflows, import/export)
- Copilot in Dynamics 365 (Copilot for Sales / Service)
- Mapping customer business processes to D365 (lead-to-cash, case-to-resolution)
Copilot Studio — [Deep]
- No-code / low-code agent creation using natural language
- Topics, trigger phrases, entities, variables, conversation design
- Generative answers and knowledge sources (SharePoint, Dataverse, websites, Graph connectors)
- Actions — connectors, Power Automate flows, and plugins
- Generative (agent) orchestration and multi-tool reasoning
- Autonomous agents and event-driven triggers
- Multi-channel publishing (Teams, M365 Copilot, web, custom)
- Authentication and end-user identity configuration
- REST API and custom connectors
- Agent analytics, monitoring, and continuous improvement
- Conversational UX design · Prompt engineering (advanced scenarios)
Work IQ — [Deep]
Azure AI Foundry (pro-code / advanced agent extensibility) — [Adjacent]
- Connecting Copilot Studio agents to Foundry models and agents
- Model catalog and Azure OpenAI model selection
- Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and agent orchestration
- Grounding/retrieval with Azure AI Search (RAG patterns)
- Prompt flow for building, testing, and chaining prompts
- Model fine-tuning and customization
- Evaluation, observability, and content safety / guardrails
- Data engineering and MLOps to support production agents
Foundry IQ — [Adjacent]
- Grounding agents on enterprise knowledge through Azure AI Foundry
Fabric IQ — [Adjacent]
- Grounding agents on governed business data and semantic models in Microsoft Fabric
Agent 365 — [Adjacent]
- Agent registry setup and lifecycle management
- Enterprise security, identity, and data security alignment for agents
- IT governance for agents at scale
M365 Administration — [Baseline]
- Assigning Copilot licenses · Configuring SharePoint Advanced Management
- Managing Microsoft Graph connectors · Data readiness for semantic search
- M365 Copilot & Copilot Chat foundation
**Other Baseline Technical **
Security & Compliance — [Baseline]
- Implementing Microsoft Purview for data governance
- Managing sensitivity labels and access controls
- Oversharing prevention and audit logging
- Power Platform / Dataverse security and environment-level DLP
- Entra · Defender · Security Copilot (foundational awareness)
- Agent governance: registries, testing & evaluation methodologies, safety guardrails, Customer Centre of Excellence (CoE) operating models
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.
Qualifications
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. Experience must include hands-on delivery with Microsoft business-applications and low-code/agent platforms — Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry — including demonstrated hands-on agent building.
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 Microsoft Cloud Technologies (e.g., Azure, AI, Power Platform, D365 and security certifications).
- Demonstrated experience building, testing, and deploying agents in Copilot Studio and/or Azure AI Foundry.
- Hands-on delivery experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and/or Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse).
- Relevant Microsoft certifications such as PL-600 (Power Platform Solution Architect), PL-200, the Dynamics 365 / MB-series, and AI-102.
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about **requesting accommodations.**