Mott MacDonald strengthens frontier position on AI enablement with Microsoft 365 E7

Empowering our people to scale AI safely and responsibly

Mott MacDonald has invested in Microsoft 365 E7, strengthening its frontier position on AI enablement. The new licensing agreement, which is available to the business’ 20,000 people, combines Microsoft's productivity, security and AI capabilities into a single platform for the development and application of frontier technology.

This strategic move supports Mott MacDonald’s vision to enable its people to shape the future of engineering through transitioning towards AI-enabled operating models and agent-based workflows. Through Microsoft 365 E7 the business will further enhance project delivery, strengthen decision making and create innovative ways to realise value for its clients.

David Johnson, executive board director responsible for technology at Mott MacDonald, said: “We believe the future of our industry is people led and agent enabled. By adopting Microsoft 365 E7, we are empowering our people to scale AI safely and responsibly across our global business. It supports our ambition and commitment to being at the frontier of technology, with AI augmenting the expertise, judgement and creativity of our people.”

Accelerating the shift to an agentic enterprise

Microsoft 365 E7 brings together advanced productivity, security and AI capabilities including Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365, the enterprise control hub for managing AI agents. This provides the foundation to scale AI agents safely and responsibly across the organisation, embedding AI into everyday workflows whilst maintaining enterprise-grade governance, security and transparency as adoption accelerates.

“Scaling AI is about governance and technology in equal parts. Agent 365 gives us the ability to operate AI agents with the same rigour we apply to our projects, establishing trust, accountability and control as we expand its use,” said David Johnson.

The move aims to make AI accessible across the organisation accelerating adoption beyond personal productivity improvements and into broader business transformation. It builds on Mott MacDonald’s investment in Microsoft Azure Foundry which empowered employees to facilitate the rapid creation and innovation of AI enabled digital solutions to directly address the needs of clients while meeting governance and security requirements.

Mott MacDonald employees have pioneered a range of advanced solutions that include adding AI functionality to stakeholder engagement in Mott MacDonald's Consents Management platform; improving project assurance with the Requirements Evaluation Assurance and Lifecycle Management tool (REALM); accelerating structural design through invention of an agent that can turn natural language into parametric modelling scripts; and unlocking data driven insight.

From AI assistant to agent ecosystem

Mott MacDonald has already demonstrated strong momentum in applied AI through the development of EMMA, its internal enterprise AI assistant, which has been rolled out within the business to support knowledge access, collaboration and productivity. This includes optimising monthly project reviews with an AI enabled guided digital workflow.

Deploying Microsoft E7 enables Mott MacDonald to extend EMMA’s functionality into a window for coordinating multi-agent systems, supporting engineers, project teams and disciplines with domain-specific AI capabilities.

Nasrine Tomasi, global head of AI and data, said: “EMMA showed us the potential of AI to unlock knowledge and support our people. With E7, we are moving beyond individual assistants to a managed ecosystem of AI agents enabling us to automate complex workflows, augment decision-making and operate at scale with the right controls in place.”