Levi Strauss & Co. simplifies work and accelerates decision-making with Microsoft Foundry

For more than 170 years, Levi Strauss & Co. has stood at the intersection of culture, craftsmanship, and progress—reinventing how people experience denim and self-expression.

As a global direct-to-consumer retailer, delivering exceptional fan experiences is core to the brand. These experiences require continuous innovation and improvement to how employees can access information, make decisions, and take action.

As the retail industry accelerates, consumer expectations evolve, and technology rapidly advances, Levi Strauss & Co. faced a growing challenge: how do you increase speed and agility across the business without creating more complexity for employees?

Teams were working with data spread across multiple sources, making it difficult to find information and navigate complex workflows to complete tasks. Valuable insights were often difficult to access and act on in real time.

The opportunity wasn’t just to introduce AI but to fundamentally simplify how work happens across the company.

Jason Gowans, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Levi Strauss & Co., saw the need to address internal networks and keep pace with the scale and speed required, and what the transformation means. 

“As a best-in-class direct-to-consumer retailer, the biggest thing that’s changed for us is the speed at which we need to operate,” Gowans said. “This isn’t just about a tool—it’s a wholesale workplace transformation.”

AI automation and augmented workforce

Levi Strauss & Co. began its AI journey by deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot across the enterprise. This integration enabled employees to use AI as a productivity tool and thought partner. 

Copilot helped designers synthesize years of research, finance teams surface insights from complex data sets, and HR explore underlying employee experiences. 

Sheena Kunhiraman, Vice President of HR Technology and Analytics, shared how AI is about enhancing employee’s experience to work on the things that matter. 

“Human/agent collaboration at Levi I believe is going to be all about augmentation—giving time back,” Kunhiraman said. 

As adoption matured, the company expanded its approach to using Microsoft Foundry to build purpose-driven agents that automate workflows and connect systems across the business. 

Engineering teams paired GitHub Copilot with Foundry-built agents to modernize systems, accelerate development, and upskill talent. 

Jennifer Patchen, Senior Director of Shared Platforms and Services, shared why GitHub Copilot was chosen for that strategy and the impact on developers using these products. 

“We know it’s really going to augment our engineers in such a rich and powerful way and act as a force multiplier for them,” Patchen said. 

GitHub Copilot acts as a pair programmer, supporting junior developers and freeing up senior engineers to focus on higher-value work. 

Behind the scenes, Foundry is used as the orchestration layer, enabling teams to design, test, and evolve agents that understand intent, connect to enterprise systems, and work together as part of a larger ecosystem.

The platform is built on three foundational layers working together to power the Super Agent experience. Agents securely connect to enterprise systems such as SAP, HR platforms, and retail systems, accessing live, governed data based on user identity, without duplication or shadow data stores. Instead of a single generalized model, Levi Strauss & Co. uses specialized agents guided by structured prompts, intent detection, and reasoning workflows, prioritizing orchestration over fine-tuning to improve reliability and scale. Foundry coordinates agent workflows, with tools like Microsoft Agent Framework supporting planning and intent routing. The backend execution layer runs on Azure Functions, enabling scalable, event-driven processing to support agent workflows, integrations, and real-time task execution alongside Foundry and Agent Framework orchestration. Microsoft Teams serves as the user interface, and integrated services execute actions securely across systems.

As more agents were introduced, a new challenge emerged: too many entry points for employees. 

Introducing the Super Agent

To simplify the experience, Levi Strauss & Co. introduced its plan to create a Super Agent—a unified AI experience within Microsoft Teams. 

The Super Agent will provide a single-entry point where employees can ask questions in natural language and receive outcomes instantly. Behind the scenes, the Super Agent will connect and orchestrate an ESS agent, custom built SAP agent, and their Retail Agent that spans across areas such as inventory, HR, finance, and IT. They are all designed to handle specialized workflows and data sources across the business. 

The agent will act as an intelligent orchestrator by understanding employee intent, routing requests to the right underlying agent, connecting data workflows across systems, and delivering outcomes. Rather than relying on a single mode, the system will route requests across specialized agents that use intent detection, tool selection, and structured execution to deliver accurate, context-aware outcomes.

Whether it’s checking inventory availability or initiating HR and IT requests, the Super Agent will reduce complexity and embed AI directly into daily work. 

At the company, employees don’t interact with individual systems or agents. A finance leader can request a categorized view of last year’s budget spend through a single Teams prompt. The Super Agent will route each request to the appropriate domain agent and will pull live data from systems of record, returning one trusted answer.

This innovation is made possible by the company’s investment in Azure to modernize infrastructure, unify data, and enable global scale. A strong foundation ensures agents can operate consistently across regions and roles, ultimately to support performance, reliability, and trust.

Saravana Ramaratnam, VP of Global ERP and Enterprise Platforms, acknowledged the need for a foundation that standardizes processes to scale globally. This foundation is what allows agents to operate consistently across regions and roles—ensuring the Super Agent can scale globally while maintaining trust, performance, and reliability.

“Azure laid the foundation,” Saravana Ramaratnam, VP of Global ERP and Enterprise Platforms said. “Azure was the frontrunner in running SAP workloads, partner of choice five years ago and that’s why we made the bet with Azure to move our global ERP platform and workloads to Azure.”

Getting data into the right place allows Levi Strauss & Co. to deliver real-time insights and consistent value to the business. 

The value extends beyond productivity gains. By centralizing access to data, AI, and workflows, Levi Strauss & Co. reduces cognitive load for employees, eliminates the need to navigate multiple systems, and ensures consistent, governed access to information. As new agents are introduced, they build on the same foundation—scaling securely across the enterprise while continuously improving how work gets done.