AI And Cloud Computing For Governments & Businesses: Dinis Guarda Interviews Alex Grimshaw, Chief Technology Officer At Microsoft Azure

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Alex Grimshaw, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Microsoft Azure, discusses how Microsoft Azure supports UK organisations with AI, cloud, and infrastructure solutions, co-creation strategies, and government transformation projects. The conversation also covers the role of data, people, and quantum computing in shaping future-ready digital ecosystems. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Alex Grimshaw is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Microsoft Azure in the United Kingdom, where he supports customers and partners across sectors to drive digital transformation using Microsoft Azure Cloud., Alex also worked with the UK’s largest Public Administration organisations, HM Revenue & Customs, and the Department for Work & Pensions. During this time, he focused on tech intensity, human excellence, and industrial empathy as core pillars of cultural change to impact customers, partners, and colleagues.

During the interview, Alex discusses how Microsoft Azure plays a critical role in helping businesses: 

"The onus is on every organisation to embrace the digital age or they’re going to be left behind, or crucially, they’ve got to insert the benefits of AI transformation.

The Microsoft Azure platform, of course, provides the most secure, compliant globally dispersed platform that allows organisations to benefit from know revolution with best-in-class AI and data services.

We are continuously striving forward, investing in new infrastructure and innovation to ensure that we remain a cornerstone for businesses looking to thrive in the digital age. We provide things like workflow automation, enhanced decision making and improved customer experiences for all organisations."

Microsoft Azure: Solutions for business and digital transformation

"Azure platform is circa 600 different services, so a huge, huge footprint of different services covering infra, data and AI, and application development.

We have three distinct solution areas that cover all of those capabilities. Where other providers might be quite niche, we cover the entire gambit of what a customer will require to digitally transform their organisation."
 

We continue to deploy vast amounts of regions and data centre regions in parts of the globe where our customers need to consume those services. At the moment, we have more regions than the other hyperscalers combined.

When you think about open source, and whether it’s open source OSS or databases or even LLMS and AI models, we completely whatever a customer wants to utilise in terms of their technology stack choices, our platforms will enable those technology choices

You may have assumed that Azure was a Windows-only platform. Of course it's not. We have equally as many Linux distributions on there as we do Windows. We mainly focus on the where and the what: where do customers want to consume services, and what choices do they want to use?"

Alex highlights how Microsoft Azure supports digital transformation in the UK through co-creation and co-innovation strategies:

“We currently have an initiative where a customer or partner can bring their engineering teams and directly work with Microsoft AI experts to achieve the goal.

We do work quite closely with a number of customers and partners where we have direct engineering engagements, and we invest in those engagements.

We try to instil creativity, reduce cost and improve efficiencies, and think about competitive advantage.

Co-creation fosters more openness, higher morale across all the teams, and ultimately higher productivity.”

Transforming HMRC's tax system with Microsoft Azure

Alex explains the rationale behind migrating a mission-critical government system to Azure:

“I think when any organisation takes its first kind of baby steps into public cloud and in this case Azure you've got two choices one is you can either pick a very discreet, isolated, non-interdependent workload or like in HMRC’s case, you can pick the most gnarly, horrifically interdependent, huge, massively complicated workload.

If we can migrate that thing into Azure, then of course, anything after that will be relatively easy. So, in this case, of course, they went for what was called the enterprise tax management platform to migrate.

This platform collects hundreds and hundreds of billions—billions of pounds worth of tax revenue every year. When I think about the definition of mission-critical workloads, this is one of those workloads.

This particular platform fuels the coffers of the UK government, it funds the distribution, and the funding for welfare services. 

This has created a much more stable, scalable, certainly more secure, and far more resilient platform than the original hosting environment provided. It also benefits from cloud economics and an always-current underlying infrastructure.

The great thing about the Azure platform you’re getting the financial benefits of only paying for what you utilise.

Each time that Intel, Nvidia, or AMD produce their next set of silicon we adopt that newest technology, implement it onto our platform.

That means customers have got the very latest tech all the time, which in most cases means they can scale down their VM sizes because the silicon is much more powerful.”

AI and quantum computing in business

“For some, AI simply means co-pilot or some other human interface to an AI backend, where others are appreciating the impact that AI brings, like enhancing productivity, streamlining operations, and driving business model innovation.

Over time, we’ll see the interaction speed, consistency, and quality improve through automation between businesses and consumers, businesses and businesses, and between consumers themselves.

The adoption speed of many AI-based services is still based upon regulations that still need to be created, consumer trust, and, more importantly, the normalisation of societal expectations of what AI is and what it isn’t.

Microsoft Research published a paper saying Co-Pilot is brilliant, but it’s actually making humans dumber—what it’s talking about is critical thinking.

AI-based models are there to augment our own critical thinking to speed up less human tasks, so we can focus on critical decisions.

Quantum has been around now for over 40 years, it’s got clear advantages in specific use cases, but many organisations aren’t yet planning for its impact outside of specialised industries."

Concluding the interview, Alex shares key advice for UK business leaders on how to approach digital transformation in the age of AI:

"I would say rather than a single action, I'd almost like to give two focus areas. For me, the most crucial areas are people and data.

I'd encourage all UK business leaders to prioritise digital transformation, of course, but to embrace a culture of continuous innovation.

This involves, you know, continuing to invest in new technologies to release the power of people and data, fostering a mindset of continuous improvement and building strong partnerships with technology partners like ourselves. 

Every organisation needs to ensure it focuses on people, so skilling, investment, and empowerment, in tandem with data.

It's so crucial that every organisation starts to become more intentionally data-driven in terms of how they think about their, certainly their business model innovation and how they compete in the future. 

On that way, they'll be able to embrace the real power of AI, as I mentioned before."