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In an industry obsessed with the next big thing, Microsoft Advertising is playing the long game - one that is deeply rooted in a 50-year legacy of making transformative technology accessible to all.
It all started with a simple but powerful idea - to put a PC on every desk. That ambition didn’t just launch the company; it set in motion a half-century of innovation focused on empowering people through technology.
1975: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Today, Microsoft’s legacy of empowerment continues with Copilot, its generative-AI powered assistant designed to help people work, search, create and connect more intuitively. Launched in 2023, Copilot is redefining how people interact with search, ushering in a new era of conversational discovery.
For advertisers, this signals a paradigm shift in how audiences engage - with deeper intent, richer context and more meaningful moments of connection. Traditional keyword-based strategies are giving way to richer, more nuanced interactions, where understanding user intent in real time is key.
With its move into Microsoft’s global AI organisation, Microsoft Advertising now sits closer to the engine room of innovation; giving advertisers a front-row seat to the breakthroughs shaping how people work, create, and connect in an AI-first world. For marketers, that means faster access to cutting-edge capabilities, and the ability to translate emerging consumer behaviors into smarter, more responsive campaigns.
How advertisers are adopting AI innovations
For Nick Seckold, regional vice president of Microsoft Advertising in APAC, the convergence of AI and marketing brims with opportunity.
As he notes, while AI has gone through many iterations, the real momentum is now being driven by consumers themselves, who are always ahead of the curve when it comes to tech adoption. Since its launch, Copilot has been used to create more than 12 billion images and conduct over 13 billion chats. In 2024 alone, Copilot usage grew by 150%.
"Copilot is not just a consumer app you can use and have conversations with to help you navigate your life and act as your as your agent. It's also a tool that you can use for everyday work, to improve productivity, to help you write emails, to summarise, to create, and so much more,” says Seckold.
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Nick Seckold’s daily Copilot prompts
To stay sharp and efficient, Seckold uses these two Copilot prompts to kickstart his workday.
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While much of the industry buzz focuses on the capabilities of the technology itself, Seckold points out that the real disruption is happening at the behavioral level. “Consumers are already there,” he says. “They’re adopting AI-powered experiences faster than many organizations are prepared for.”
This creates both a challenge and an opportunity. For marketers, it’s not about jumping on every new trend; it’s about identifying where AI can meaningfully improve traditional marketing workflows and enhance the customer journey. That’s where Microsoft Advertising is stepping in.
With Copilot integrated into the Microsoft Advertising Platform and AI-powered tools like Ads Studio, advertisers can respond to these evolving behaviors with greater agility - surfacing insights, optimising campaigns, and delivering more relevant, conversational experiences that align with how people search and engage today. Whether it is generating performance recommendations to campaign insights, or answering frequently asked questions, Copilot streamlines the entire workflow; helping marketers set up, manage, and optimise campaigns with speed, confidence, and more time for human-led creative thinking.
Designed to create better-performing ads with ease, Ads Studio in Microsoft Advertising Platform is an AI-powered creative tool built for performance marketers to easily find, create, manage and optimise creative assets with insights to boost advertising results.
A fast-moving frontier in APAC
In Asia-Pacific (APAC), the adoption of AI has been rapid, to say the least. According to Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index, APAC is emerging as a global frontrunner in AI with 53% of APAC leaders already using AI agents to automate processes, outpacing any other region. Plus, 84% of APAC leaders are confident in expanding AI to boost capacity within a year.
This enthusiasm, according to Seckold, is partly due to many markets in this region not having to deal with legacy business models, because not everything that's been available in the developed Western markets, like the US or UK has been readily available in places like Vietnam or Malaysia. This leads to the region’s ability to leapfrog several tech phases that often go through rigorous testing in Western markets.
“Take Indonesia, for instance. With a population of 250 million, most of them likely skipped the PC generation and went straight to mobile. This organically lends to general appetite for learning and consumption when it comes to new tech.
“If you're an ecommerce brand like Tokopedia, for example, you’re likely to have a culture of innovation,” explains Seckold. “They're investing in global audiences and really trying to grow their business beyond their domestic borders. You find those types of businesses are much more nimble and agile and will be more willing to take calculated risks and try new tech. Whereas, more traditional businesses might be more reluctant to jump straight in.”
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Nick Seckold’s pro tips for marketers embracing AI:
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What’s next for AI in advertising?
At Microsoft Advertising’s recent flagship event in the Dominican Republic, Seckold observed that the conversation around AI took a noticeable turn—shifting from potential to proof. Across industries - from advertising to PR - real-world productivity gains powered by Copilot took center stage, showcasing how gen AI is already transforming the way brands engage, create and operate.
One area drawing increasing attention is agentic AI - intelligent systems capable of acting autonomously on behalf of users or brands. For Seckold, this isn’t a distant vision, but an imminent shift in how brands will engage with customers.
“If you set up your own brand agent or personal agent and you train it in the way you want it to act, it’s able to make complex and autonomous decisions on your behalf. We’ve just got to figure out what role it plays in advertising and customer service,” Seckold clarifies.
“Some people think these are the same as chatbots. But they’re not. Chatbots are already templated, and they can be pretty clunky at times. They don’t talk to you, and they certainly don’t remember who you are. We’re talking about advanced AI solutions.”
Brand agents are AI experts in your brand and services. In this example, Copilot can interact with an agent to help a user plan a custom trip to Japan with tailored, flexible itineraries
For Microsoft, this is more than a technical breakthrough - it’s a natural extension of its mission. From the era of putting a PC on every desk to now creating a Copilot for everyone, Microsoft has always been about more than building technology. It’s about empowering others to build what’s next. That same ethos is now shaping the future of advertising - one that is conversational, agentic and deeply personalised.
As generative AI continues to evolve, one thing remains clear: the rules are being rewritten. Success won’t hinge on who shouts loudest, but on who listens best, and who can meet customers in the moment, with relevance, context and trust. As AI reshapes how people search, discover, and decide, content must do more than show up - it must solve. And as the lines between content, commerce, and conversation continue to blur, the question isn’t whether AI will change advertising - it’s who will be ready when it does.
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