• Harvey committed $150 million to Azure cloud services over two years.
• The startup, which builds software for lawyers, has partnered with Microsoft since at least 2024.
• Harvey's expansion includes clients like Comcast and Verizon, and new foundation model integrations.

Legaltech startup Harvey has agreed to a two-year, $150 million commitment to use Azure cloud services, according to an internal email seen by Business Insider.

Jay Parikh, who leads Microsoft's new CoreAI unit, included the deal in an internal memo, writing that his unit "announced expanded partnership with Harvey Al with a 2-year $150M MACC and $3.5M unified expansion." Parikh joined Microsoft in October to lead a new engineering group responsible for building its artificial-intelligence tools.

Microsoft declined to comment, and Harvey declined to comment on the agreement.

MACC, or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, is an agreement customers make to spend a specific amount on Azure for a period of time, often for a discount.

Harvey, which builds chatbots and agents tailored for legal and professional services, is scaling up and entering the enterprise market. It's adding legal teams at Comcast and Verizon as clients, while developing bespoke workflow software for large law firm customers.

It has raised more than $500 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and OpenAI Startup Fund, a Harvey spokesperson told BI.

Harvey has closely partnered with Microsoft since at least early 2024. That year, the company deployed its platform on Microsoft Azure, followed by a Word plug-in designed for lawyers. It also introduced a SharePoint integration, allowing users to securely access files from their Microsoft storage system through Harvey's apps.

For years, Harvey, founded in 2022, ran its platform on OpenAI models, primarily because they're hosted in Microsoft's data centers, Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told BI last month. Law firms handle highly sensitive information and trusted Microsoft to keep it safe, Weinberg said.

"Law firms refused to use anything that wasn't through Azure," Weinberg said. That's now changing, he said, as vendors like Anthropic build the features enterprises require.

Last week, Harvey expanded its use of foundation models to Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude.

Still, Harvey's $150 million Azure deal signals it's not backing away from Microsoft anytime soon. The company's growing cloud footprint suggests that, while other partners are gaining traction with the legaltech start, Azure remains integral to Harvey's growth for now.

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• Microsoft hired ex-Facebook global head of engineering Jay Parikh to lead a new AI unit called CoreAI.
• Internal memos Parikh has sent to employees reveal the unit's early ambitions and accomplishments.
• Parikh's initiatives focus on cultural shifts, operational improvements, and customer focus.

Microsoft envisions an "age of AI agents," and CEO Satya Nadella recently tapped one of Mark Zuckerberg's former top lieutenants to bring it to reality.

In January, Nadella put Jay Parikh in charge of a new AI unit called CoreAI, central to Microsoft's ambition to help developers build digital personal assistants capable of taking over tasks from human workers.

Amid Parikh's first Microsoft Build developer conference in this new role, internal memos reveal his goals for the unit, its early accomplishments, and his advice to address what he sees as problems within the company. Microsoft declined to comment.

A fresh perspective for the 'next phase of Microsoft'

Behind the scenes at Microsoft, Nadella prides himself on hiring outside talent from other big technology companies to add fresh perspective and giving them wide latitude to change how things are done, several people close to the CEO told BI.

Those reports include Charlie Bell, who helped build Amazon's cloud from its earliest days before defecting to Microsoft to become its security boss, and AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, an ex-Google executive who joined the company from AI startup Inflection.

Parikh joined their ranks in October after running cloud security company Laceworks, acquired in 2024. He previously was vice president and global head of engineering for Meta. Zuckerberg has publicly credited Parikh for many technological achievements during his 11-year tenure at the company.

When Nadella announced Parikh's hiring in an email to employees, he wrote that the "next phase of Microsoft" would require "adding exceptional talent" from outside the company.

In January, when Microsoft reorganized to create a new organization under Parikh. The group, called CoreAI, combined teams from Parikh's new direct reports like Eric Boyd, a corporate vice president of AI platform; Jason Taylor, a deputy CTO for AI infrastructure; Julia Liuson, president of the developer division; and Tim Bozarth, a corporate vice president of developer infrastructure.

Nadella said at the time that Parikh would also work closely with the cloud-and-AI chief Scott Guthrie; the experiences-and-devices leader Rajesh Jha; Bell, the security boss; Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO; and Kevin Scott, the company's CTO.

A copy of Parikh's latest org chart viewed by Business Insider shows he has nearly 10,000 reports, most of whom (about 7,000) are in the developer division under Liuson.

Parikh's 'agent factory' vision

Four months in, Parikh has started to make his mark on Microsoft with a vision to create an AI "agent factory." In the early days of Microsoft, cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen had ambitions to create the world's first "software factory," a company full of programmers who would build everything from applications to operating systems.

Parikh said he met with Gates and discussed his own concept, a production line for AI agents and applications.

"Building our vision demands this type of culture — one where Al is embedded in how we think, design, and deliver," Parikh wrote in an April 14 email to his team. "The Agent Factory reflects this shift — not just in what we build, but in how we build it together. If we want every developer (and everyone) to shape the future, we have to get there first."

The memos reveal some of the developments at CoreAI since Parikh's arrival.

Since January, Foundry — Microsoft's AI platform for developers — has "delivered $337 million of favorable COGS (cost of goods sold) impact year-to-date, with a projected $606 million on an annualized basis," according to one of Parikh's memos.

Microsoft won new customers for its AI programming tool GitHub Copilot, deploying "5,000+ Copilot Business seats" for Fidelity with 5,000 more expected, another memo stated. Copilot Business sells for $19 per user per month, which would make the deal worth as much as $2.28 million annually at full price, though customers often get discounts for large deals. Fidelity declined to comment.

Startup Harvey AI, meanwhile, has agreed to a two-year $150 million commitment to consume Azure cloud services, according to one of Parikh's memos. Harvey AI declined to comment.

Making Microsoft think macro

The memos viewed by BI show how Parikh appears to be taking seriously his mandate to introduce a new perspective to the company and fix procedural problems that Microsoft may not be able to see that it has.

In a May 10 email to his team, Parikh said shifting the company's culture is "essential" to its future, and outlined progress toward priorities like accelerating the pace at which employees work, breaking down siloes to work better as one team, and making products more reliable and secure.

"One of my early observations coming into Microsoft is that we sometimes treat symptoms rather than systems," Parikh wrote in a May 5 email. "We often focus too much on the micro, which results in band-aids and bolt-ons vs taking a broader system view (which may mean thinking beyond what one team directly owns). This often leads to more complexity and operational burden. We'll help each other get better at this."

Parikh's plan to get Microsoft to focus on the macro is to create a "learning loop" with a debrief after every product launch, incident, customer meeting, internal meeting, or decision. He's started new processes to make this happen, according to the memos.

Parikh has an "Ops Review" series, going team by team to make specific improvements but also to "find common patterns of engineering pain that need broader improvements," he wrote. The reviews, he explained, focus on longer-term operational metrics to help with strategy. "We are zooming out and taking a more end-to-end view of a team's operational setup, creating space for an open discussion around what's working and what's not." The reviews began in April with the App Services team.

Also among Parikh's mandates: more customer focus. His organization is required to conduct reviews of major incidents, like outages, that could impact customers, and chart how quickly the teams identified the problem and deployed a fix.

He also started "get well plans" for unhappy customers after he "encountered a couple of fairly unhappy customers" in recent meetings, according to an April 26 email. His solution? Weekly reviews to "understand where we went off track, identify solutions, and execute the recovery plan," tracking progress until the accounts "get well again."

What Parikh thinks Microsoft should change so far

In the May 5 email, Parikh shared "several recurring themes and insights" within Microsoft that he believes the company should seek to change or simplify.

First, he encouraged his organization to engage engineers from outside their direct team because "different perspectives help."

In his view, Microsoft also takes too long and the process is too hard to deprecate, or discourage use of, old versions of software. "Supporting too many versions is unattainable," Parikh wrote. "We are following up with C+Al (the Cloud + AI organization, under Scott Guthrie) to brainstorm how we can modernize and streamline this."

Incident reviews are overloaded with metrics that don't have enough value, Parikh wrote, and Microsoft sends out too many alerts, which creates noise. "It's important to periodically zoom out and audit how your monitoring is running and to simplify if you are overloaded on alerts and metrics. Use Al to help triage complex alerting situations," he urged.

Parikh encouraged his teams to "see the forest for the trees on scalability," and to organize brainstorming sessions when faced with a traffic load they can't support to see what it would take to support five or 10 times as much traffic. "You may be stuck in a local maxima with incremental improvements, and it might be time to brainstorm how you can get a step function more scale," he wrote.

He also recommended employees seek to address classes of problems, not just one-offs. "Quick fixes lead to complexity," Parikh wrote. "Instead of band-aids, we should aim for broader system improvements that solve whole categories of issues and boost long-term efficiency."

"We're building muscle in spotting patterns, not just patching symptoms," Parikh wrote. "And that's a big deal."

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• Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off Monday with a slew of agentic AI updates.
• Microsoft's CTO said there's been an "explosion" of people using agents over the last year, with daily active users doubling.
• The keynote included new agentic features in GitHub, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and appearances from Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

It was all about agentic AI at Microsoft's big developer event on Monday.

"The thing that we've seen over the past year is just sort of an explosion of agents," Microsoft CTO and executive vice president of AI, Kevin Scott, said during the company's Build conference.

Scott added that the number of daily active users of the various AI agents that Microsoft has visibility into "more than doubled" since Microsoft's Build event last year.

CEOs and executives across the tech industry have heralded 2025 as the year of agentic AI, and the Microsoft executive took some time to define what Microsoft means by the term.

Scott described the AI agents Microsoft is building as "a thing that a human being is able to delegate tasks to." AI agents are still in their early days, and Scott said there's still a bit of a "capability overhang with reasoning" at the moment, but they will continue to improve. As that happens over the next year, he said AI agents will get more powerful and cheaper to operate.

'The next big step forward'

Microsoft made a slew of announcements about AI updates and partnerships related to agentic AI during its opening keynote at Build.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company is working to create a host of tools to help build an open, "agentic web" at scale, including cloud computing tools available through its Microsoft Azure platform. The company demoed multiple new AI features available in Windows, Office, Azure, and other platforms throughout the keynote.

Showcasing Microsoft's new Azure SRE agent for site reliability engineering, which will be embedded in GitHub Copilot, Nadella said agents are all about having a reliable AI "peer" that you can delegate complex tasks to and trust to help remove "pain points" for developers, such as getting woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a website issue.

"This is the next big step forward, which is a full coding agent, built right into GitHub, taking Copilot from being a pair programmer to a peer programmer," Nadella said. "You can assign issues to Copilot, bug fixes, new features, code maintenance, and it'll complete these tasks autonomously."

Microsoft also flexed its reach with virtual appearances from a who's who of AI CEOs, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Tesla and xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Altman made a live appearance virtually to talk about the evolution of agentic AI and the recent launch of Codex, the AI startup's new agent designed to assist programmers with writing code, fixing bugs, and running tests. Altman described Codex as "true software engineering task delegation."

"We've been talking about someday we'd get to a real agentic coding experience, and it's kind of wild to me that it's finally here," Altman said. "I think this is one of the biggest changes to programming that I've ever seen."

"This idea that you now have a real virtual teammate that you can assign work to, that you can say, 'Hey, go off and do some of the stuff you were just doing and increasingly more advanced things,' you know at some point saying, 'I've got a big idea, go off and work for a couple of days and do it,'" the OpenAI CEO added.

The productivity gains can also be significant, Altman said.

"It was amazing to watch over the last few months as we were working on Codex internally — you know there's always a few people who are the early adopters — and how quickly the people who were just using Codex all day changed their workflow and just the incredible amount they were able to do relative to someone else was quite interesting," he said.

Microsoft announced plans to expand the AI models available through Azure to integrate xAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini. In a pre-recorded clip, Musk, who once interned at Microsoft, talked with Nadella about his first experiences using Microsoft software as well as Grok's capabilities.

Microsoft also introduced "Copilot Tuning" to create agents using company data. The announcement confirmed Business Insider's reporting from last week that Microsoft was planning to debut a new Copilot designed to "rapidly channel an organization's knowledge into a Copilot that can 'talk,' 'think,' and 'work' like the tenant itself," according to an internal memo. That project was previously called Tenant Copilot internally, the company has since confirmed.

In Satya Nadella's closing comments, the Microsoft CEO said the company is trying to apply AI across the "full stack" of software development and agentic web products, including Microsoft 365 Teams, Copilot Studio, and more.

"Ultimately, though, all of this is about creating opportunity to fuel your ambition," the Microsoft CEO said, pointing to a father who used Foundry to speed the diagnosis of a rare disease affecting his son and a startup in South America that created an app to gamify wellness.

• Microsoft is working on a new "Tenant Copilot" offering, according to an internal memo.
• The company is also developing news ways for customers to manage AI agents alongside human staff.
• Microsoft at the time was planning to announce the developments at next week's Build.

Microsoft is working on a new Copilot and could unveil it at the company's Build conference next week, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.

The software giant also has grand "Agent Factory" ambitions, and is developing new ways for corporate customers to manage AI agents alongside human employees, the memo shows.

The Tenant Copilot project is run by the organization behind the Microsoft 365 business. This new Copilot is designed to "rapidly channel an organization's knowledge into a Copilot that can 'talk,' 'think,' and 'work' like the tenant itself," according to an April 14 email sent by Microsoft executive Jay Parikh.

A "tenant" is the term used to describe corporate users of the Microsoft 365 suite of business applications. A Copilot that has access to these tenants would essentially be able to access customer information stored within their Microsoft 365 accounts.

Parikh explained in the email that Microsoft is using different AI techniques to power the Tenant Copilot feature. Supervised fine-tuning helps "to capture a tenant's voice." The tool will also tap into OpenAI's o3 reasoning model "to shape its thought process." Lastly, "agentic" fine-tuning will "empower real-world tasks," he wrote.

Microsoft at the time planned to offer a public preview of Tenant Copilot at Build, according to the memo. The company sometimes changes what it plans to announce at the conference.

Meanwhile, the CoreAI Applied Engineering team is also "working to launch a collaborative go-to-market plan for top-tier customers to drive successful adoption of our Al cloud," Parikh added in the memo.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Parikh's 'Agent Factory' concept

Parikh is the former head of engineering at Facebook. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hired Parikh in October and tapped him in January to run a new group called CoreAI Platform and Tools focused on building AI tools. The group combined Microsoft's developer division and AI platform team and is responsible for GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered coding assistant.

This year's Build event will be Parikh's first at the helm of this new organization. In the email to the nearly 10,000 employees in the organization, Parikh discussed a new "Agent Factory" concept. That's likely a nod to cofounder Bill Gates, who talked about Microsoft being a "software factory."

"Building our vision demands this type of culture — one where Al is embedded in how we think, design, and deliver," Parikh wrote. "The Agent Factory reflects this shift — not just in what we build, but in how we build it together. If we want every developer (and everyone) to shape the future, we have to get there first."

Parikh has been trying to work across organizations to collaborate on AI agents, through a "new type of cross-product review" combining teams such as security services like Entra and Intune with "high-ambition agent efforts" within LinkedIn, Dynamics, and Microsoft 365.

Meet your new AI agent co-worker

Part of this effort focuses on how to manage AI agents alongside human employees.

Microsoft, for example, has been working on how to handle identity management for AI agents, according to the memo. This technology usually controls security access for human users. Now, the company is trying to spin up a similar system for AI agents.

"Our hypothesis is that all agent identities will reside in Entra," Parikh wrote, although "not every agent will require an identity (some simpler agents in M365 or Studio, for instance, don't need one)."

Microsoft is taking a similar approach to M365 Admin Center, which is used by IT administrators to manage employee access to applications, data, devices, and users. Future versions of this system will accommodate AI agents as "digital teammates" of human workers, according to Parikh's memo.

Microsoft's Copilot Analytics service is also expanding into broader workforce analytics to give corporate customers a view of how work gets done both by humans and AI agents.

And Parikh aims to make Azure AI Foundry, its generative AI development hub, "the single platform for the agentic applications that you build," he wrote. "At Build, we will have the early versions of this, and we'll iterate quickly to tackle a variety of customer use cases."

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