Vodafone Group PLC and Microsoft have entered into a 10-year strategic partnership aimed at leveraging their strengths to provide digital platforms to over 300 million businesses, public sector organizations, and consumers across Europe and Africa. The collaboration will focus on transforming Vodafone's customer experience using Microsoft's generative AI, scaling Vodafone's IoT connectivity platform, expanding M-Pesa to improve financial inclusion in Africa, and growing enterprise business with new Microsoft services for SMEs.
As part of the partnership, Vodafone will invest $1.5 billion over the next decade in cloud and customer-focused AI services developed in conjunction with Microsoft. Microsoft will also utilize Vodafone's fixed and mobile connectivity services. Additionally, Microsoft plans to invest in Vodafone's managed IoT connectivity platform, which will become a separate, standalone business by April 2024.
The partnership will see the development of digital services using generative AI technology to provide a highly personalized and differentiated customer experience across multiple channels. These services will be built on unbiased and ethical privacy and security policies under Vodafone's established framework for responsible AI.
The companies have identified five key areas of collaboration, including the use of generative AI to enhance customer satisfaction, scaling IoT, accelerating digital services in Africa, extending Microsoft services to SMEs, and accelerating Vodafone's cloud transformation by modernizing its data centers on Microsoft Azure.
Margherita Della Valle, Vodafone Group chief executive, expressed that the partnership will accelerate the digital transformation of their business customers, particularly SMEs, and enhance the quality of customer experience for consumers. Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, highlighted the potential of the partnership to unlock new opportunities for organizations and industries worldwide.
The partnership aims to bring significant advancements in customer experience, IoT connectivity, financial inclusion, and enterprise growth, while also driving Vodafone's cloud transformation through the utilization of Microsoft Azure.