Biz Apps Partner Podcast: Microsoft’s Cecilia Flombaum on FY26 Priorities, Partners Driving Modernization

In this episode of the Biz Apps Partner Podcast, John Siefert welcomes Cecilia Flombaum, Agent Ecosystem Development Lead, Business Applications, Microsoft. Flombaum details her view of key priorities for FY26, how partners are leading the front in modernization efforts to create customer-focused outcomes, and gives an overview of her Day 2 Keynote at the Biz Apps Partner Executive Summit.

Key Takeaways

• Top trends in FY26: “We’re in a golden era of Dynamics 365, more demand than ever,” explains Flombaum, as it relates to top trends in FY26. She emphasizes Microsoft’s deep commitment to partner success in the landscape of AI, particularly with Microsoft’s advanced ERP and CRM offerings. “What’s top-of-mind for me is generating more opportunities for partners so that they can hire more people, grow their businesses, and with their growth, our growth will come too.”
• Partners driving modernization: Flombaum explains how partners are driving conversations around modernization with customers. “Partners will sit down with their customers, whether it’s an existing customer or a net new prospect, and we’ll pick one painful area, one area that we gotta get on it. Once the problem has been identified, “we’ll apply automation through agents to that and we’ll get started that way.” She points out how now, partners need to be their own customer 0. “How are you as a partner using AI to make your business more efficient, to improve your own operations, to make your sellers more productive?”
• Keynote session: Flombaum will kick off Day 2 of the Biz Apps Partner Executive Summit with her keynote session, “How AI Innovation Changes the Way Partners Sell, Build Capacity, and Drive Customer Success.” Her session will focus on the ways AI is forcing partners to reframe their thinking because “at the end of the day, partners will be tuning, managing, and configuring the first-party agents that we will ship as part of the Dynamics 365 family.”
• Customer-focused outcomes: To enable tangible outcomes for the customer, it’s paramount that businesses are “zeroing in” on the work that needs to be done, explains Flombaum. “Then you talk about bringing automation through an agent to solve a problem, to get a piece of work done, and all these app conversations start blurring.”

Stream the audio version of this episode here:

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