Solution Area Specialists- Cloud & AI

Overview The Cloud & AI Platforms Specialist – Education leads Microsoft’s cloud and AI sales engagement with higher education institutions, ministries of education, and research organizations. The role owns the Cloud & AI Platform sales journey from qualified opportunity through commitment, consumption, and expansion, leading transformation conversations that modernize legacy estates, unify data, and deploy agentic AI at scale. The Specialist leads with AI as the front door to the platform, while shaping the commercial and technical foundation that sustains it: cloud migration and modernization, a governed data estate, secure-by-design architecture, and long-term consumption commitments such as MACC. They engage senior academic, research, and technology leaders to connect Microsoft’s platform to institutional priorities — student success, research acceleration, operational efficiency, workforce readiness, and national education transformation — and orchestrate Microsoft and partner resources to convert that vision into measurable consumption. Responsibilities Customer Engagement - Lead discussions with senior stakeholders and decision-makers across education institutions to identify, qualify, and accelerate opportunities, positioning Microsoft as the platform of choice for AI-powered transformation. - Engage account teams to align the customer’s AI transformation vision with institutional business priorities and success objectives, ensuring every opportunity has a clearly articulated AI intent. - Act as a trusted advisor and subject matter expert, leading insight-driven conversations tied to the customer’s most important priorities. - Embed security and responsible AI principles into customer interactions and opportunity pursuits to maintain trust, compliance, and sovereignty alignment. - Build enduring relationships with partners (SIs, ISVs) and activate co-sell strategies that drive partner attach across the opportunity lifecycle. Sales Strategy - Lead whitespace analysis and market assessment across the education segment, using AI-driven market intelligence to identify gaps, emerging opportunities, and expansion paths. - Synthesize market insight to align sales plays with complex customer priorities and outcomes, translating trends into team strategy and proactive account direction. - Position Infra, Data, AI, and Apps as one platform — spotting adjacent workloads early and expanding multi-workload adoption for sustained account growth. - Shape strategic cloud transformation opportunities spanning migration, application and database modernization, data estate unification, and AI platform build-out, securing executive buy-in for large-scale commitments such as MACC. - Craft differentiated compete strategies where Microsoft is contested in the education and sovereign-cloud landscape. - Drive cross-functional collaboration to prioritize solutions and strategies against customer business objectives, identifying gaps and setting direction for market engagement and sales execution. Sales Execution & Deal Making - Assess and qualify sales opportunities against Microsoft sales frameworks (MCEM) and guidelines, owning opportunities end-to-end from qualification to commit. - Lead strategy development for driving and closing complex, high-value opportunities, partnering with the Account Team Unit, Solution Engineering pod, CSU, ISD, and Global Partner Solutions to orchestrate deals and ensure seamless handoffs. - Maximize deal value through MACC, Unified, Frontier Accelerate for Azure, ECIF, and Value Acceleration Services, attaching the right delivery engines and partners. - Plan consumption before the deal closes — establish deployment readiness, capacity plans, and delivery alignment to protect time-to-value and post-close adoption. - Advance best practices that build customer trust, mitigate risk, and strengthen sales execution quality. Pipeline & Consumption Management - Lead sales pipeline reviews with senior stakeholders to drive forecasting accuracy and target attainment, applying AI-powered analytics and forecasting tools to improve precision. - Maintain disciplined pipeline hygiene, healthy coverage, and predictable unqualified-to-committed progression. - Use propensity, renewal, and consumption usage data to refine and execute sales strategy, monitor adoption trends, and identify intervention points that help customers realize value, drive expansion, and deliver healthier renewals. - Integrate AI sales agents, automation, and agentic tooling into daily execution to build customer context, personalize engagement, and accelerate execution from account plan to commit. Growth & Continuous Learning - Build deep technical and consultative expertise, achieving and maintaining the required Cloud & AI certifications to sustain technical credibility with customers. - Elevate the wider team through shared deal insight, competitive intelligence, and repeatable