Business Development Manager

The Business Development and Ventures organization at Microsoft is responsible for driving growth across all Microsoft products by setting corporate strategy and identifying and executing high impact strategic partnerships, corporate venture investments, and acquisitions.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot Ecosystem team leads strategic partnerships, identifies new opportunities, and drives growth across Microsoft’s AI Business Solutions, with a focus on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

We are seeking a Business Development Manager to join the team and drive major partnerships and initiatives focused on Microsoft 365 Copilot and data integration opportunities to transform the way organizations work and transform with AI.

In this role, you will: 

• Identify and develop strategic partnerships with data-rich platforms and providers to access to proprietary, high-signal data sets that enhance Copilot’s ability to reason over and transform commercial workflows  

• Drive interoperability initiatives that enable seamless integration and contextualization of external data sources into Microsoft 365 Copilot, ensuring relevance across diverse industries and customer environments. 

• Design and implement ecosystem strategies for partners holding domain-critical data, working cross-functionally to accelerate time-to-value and unlock differentiated AI capabilities. 

• Continuously monitor and assess emerging ecosystems, data trends, regulatory shifts, and platform innovations to inform partnership priorities and ensure Copilot remains at the forefront of enterprise knowledge enrichment; have a structured way to execute. 

• Have consistent high-level visibility and be expected to be a trusted strategic advisor to executives across product, engineering, legal, and marketing teams.  

• Demonstrate and live our values and principles of teamwork, curiosity, self-awareness, integrity, diversity and allyship.  

Microsoft Strategy Alignment (Product Insights and Innovative Projects/Pilots) 

• Collaborates with team to help create practices that enable partners to influence the product. Progresses product improvement with engineering by collecting customer and partner feedback that identifies potential gaps and areas of opportunity within products. Begins to improve operations of existing programs by applying industry methodology and innovation, defining program issues, assessing various scenarios, and selecting the optimal scenario to resolve issues. Identifies internal opportunities to develop new programs and improve current ones, with some oversight and guidance, learns about methods for identifying process improvement areas. Collaborates with others to identify root problems (e.g., root-cause analysis), define the program strategy, gather program requirements, identify resource needs, create the project plan and targets, and work across teams to align on the plan of record. 

Microsoft Strategy Alignment (Stakeholder Engagement and Deal Diligence) 

• Collaborates with internal teams and business units to build relationships and build knowledge of internal resources. Builds working relationships with Microsoft and business partners, and executive relationships (e.g., Sr. Directors). Identifies repeatable opportunities to share signal on Microsoft products and services to benefit internal stakeholders. Contributes new ideas as a member of the deal team and assesses opportunity to engage with Microsoft during investment diligence process and contributes to the creation and maintenance of existing thesis areas over time, learning to build relationships with stakeholders. 

Negotiation

• Identifies actions to lead deal opportunities across deal stages (e.g., Strategic Approval (SA), Approval to Negotiate (A2N), Final Go-no-go (FGNG)), to closure and close