Microsoft and MYOB, a business software provider, have signed a five-year strategic partnership to jointly fund, build and scale AI across MYOB’s business management software, with the first jointly developed customer features due later in 2026.
In the announcement, the companies said the work is aimed at the way Australia and New Zealand’s 3.28 million small and midsized businesses use next-generation AI in day-to-day operations.
Simon Noonan, MYOB’s chief technology officer, said “this partnership accelerates AI across our people, culture, and operations while co-investing in the engineering talent building the next generation of technology.”
Microsoft will be supplying engineering support to work alongside MYOB’s technology teams, a setup the companies said is meant to shorten feature delivery from months to weeks.
MYOB will use Microsoft Foundry for customer-facing agentic AI, Copilot Studio for internal agent creation and deployment, and Agent 365 for governance in an agentic environment.
Microsoft’s describes Foundry Agent Service as a fully managed platform for building, deploying and scaling AI agents, while Agent 365 is used for deploying, governing and managing agents at scale.
This is split between internal operations and customer products. MYOB said the first internal “AI teammate” will summarize cases and conversations, triage queues and incidents, and draft responses and updates across customer support, finance and engineering.
For SME customers, MYOB plans embedded agents that forecast cash flow, guide compliance readiness and surface proactive insights and next-best actions inside existing products.
For mid-market customers, MYOB Acumatica will add native AI features for contextual financial insights, natural-language queries and AI-assisted document processing. Acumatica’s March 26 release separately said its 2026 R1 update adds AI-driven monitoring of key report metrics and automatic document tagging.
Scaling existing innovation
The April deal also extends work MYOB had already started shipping on its own. On March 1, MYOB said it was rolling out AI BAS, AI Business Insights, Smart Reconciliation and Smart Invoice Reminders across parts of its portfolio.
In that release, MYOB said its AI BAS product was built to support about 2.61 million GST-registered small businesses in Australia, while Smart Invoice Reminders addressed a payment-pressure problem MYOB said showed up in its November 2025 Bi-Annual Business Monitor, where 18% of respondents identified late payments as a cause of extreme pressure.
The earlier rollout shows MYOB had already started shipping AI features before announcing the Microsoft partnership.
Skills, governance and regional context
MYOB said the partnership will also create an AI Academy, backed by Microsoft, to build skills across technology, engineering and customer-facing teams and to strengthen governance, security and responsible AI standards.
Microsoft says Agent 365 will reach general availability on May 1, 2026. MYOB also said the partnership will extend its AI Everyday program and give it access to multiple models through Microsoft’s platform, with flexibility to use future models as they emerge.
The MYOB agreement is also not the first regional AI partnership Microsoft has announced this year.
On Feb. 13, Microsoft said Wesfarmers had signed a multi-year partnership to expand Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio across businesses including Bunnings, Kmart Group, Blackwoods and Priceline in Australia and New Zealand.
Like Microsoft’s February partnership with Wesfarmers, the MYOB deal extends the company’s AI partnership activity in Australia and New Zealand, though this rollout is focused on accounting, compliance, ERP and finance workflows for smaller businesses and mid-market customers.