When every business uses AI, how do you maintain a competitive edge? Simply adopting the standard AI models isn’t enough—you need to adapt them to your business, and the work you want them to do for you.
Fine-tuning is the step that makes this possible: you can give your AI a hyper-accelerated education in everything that makes your company valuable. Learning from your data, the AI will become a specialist in your organization, uniquely designed to accomplish what you do best.
Historically, fine-tuning was a time- and resource-intensive process. But recent breakthroughs are changing the game. It’s now readily available to every organization—no coding experience required. Here’s how that change is unfolding, and what it means for your business.
Moving to more specialized agents
Many foundation models are trained on data from across the internet, which makes them powerful but general. Fine-tuning gives them targeted expertise: for instance, the model can take in countless examples from your business and learn to understand your data, language, and workflows. Build an agent based on that tuned model, and it’s like hiring a digital specialist with years of experience.
Thanks to recent advancements that make it easier and faster, fine-tuning is well within reach for organizations of any size. Businesses now have two ways to tap into these more knowledgeable models:
Custom: Fine-tune a model yourself and build agents based on it. This is a much easier process now with low-code tools like Copilot Tuning, a new offering we just announced at Build. (Your fine-tuned model and custom agents access data securely, and only within your organization’s Microsoft 365 service boundary.) Any agent you create has deep and specific knowledge based on your company’s own data about how best to do a particular task.
Pre-built: Buy an agent that has already been taught special skills. If you need help with advanced data analysis, for example, there’s a Microsoft agent called Analyst—built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model and designed to think like a data scientist. Its knowledge in that area is deep, but instead of being fine-tuned on your own company data, it’s trained on a broad, abstracted understanding of how businesses work. To access other special skills, you can tap into a whole ecosystem of agents from Microsoft and our partners.
Honing your competitive edge
Fine-tuning agents on what sets your business apart is the digital equivalent of onboarding a team with specialized skills and knowledge. Since your institutional knowledge and know-how are what differentiate you from your competition, tuning your agents is the way you scale that competitive advantage across the whole business. In essence, you’re encoding the valuable expertise of your subject matter experts into the systems that support everyone else.
For instance, imagine if your agents understood how and why your documents are crafted in specific ways (including format, word choice, and content). A biomedical company could use agents to write reports in the way it has developed over decades, so they’re not just accurate but aligned with how the firm’s experts communicate critical information. A legal firm could draft arguments that blend institutional knowledge with client-specific context to build the strongest cases possible. At a financial services firm, an agent could generate investment reports modeled on the tone, structure, and content of those drafted by the organization’s most experienced analysts.
This is institutional knowledge at scale—captured, codified, and available to any employee.
Agents go vertical, human roles go horizontal
Because of this new ability to scale organizational knowledge, the traditional model of an organization’s software customization is going to change—along with the role of humans. In short, software will go more vertical, and humans more horizontal. Software products have traditionally been universal—think of Excel, which anyone who works with numbers can use, or Word, a tool for writing and editing that’s used across countless professions and industries. We’re moving into an era of more targeted solutions, with agents as a new kind of software that has deep expertise in specific roles, industries, and organizations.
In the meantime, I expect that human roles will be able to expand horizontally as agents support them with deep, vertical expertise. AI-first organizations will pair human generalists with specialized agents at every level. Humans will step back to see the big picture—connecting dots across roles and orchestrating work between people and machines. They’ll manage and guide agents, validating their outputs, resolving discrepancies, handling exceptions, and making judgment calls. The real advantage will belong to those who can think strategically while deploying tools designed for precision.
Summing it up
What if everyone in your organization had access to all your company’s best thinking, preferred practices, and institutional knowledge? This is truly the definition of democratizing that knowledge across the business. Soon, a fleet of fine-tuned agents will make that vision possible. They embed your company’s best practices into the flow of work, helping teams move faster with more consistency and confidence—constantly sharpening your unique edge.
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