The Team Behind PIE
AI Cloud Partners didn't start with a business plan — it started with two brothers who'd spent decades solving the hardest problems in enterprise technology. Mike spent years migrating legacy infrastructure to Azure for federal, banking, and healthcare clients — high-stakes environments where precision was everything. His brother Mark spent those same years inside Microsoft, shaping the partner program frameworks the entire ecosystem runs on today. The mandate was simple: make partners successful, and build them the best platform possible. The team around that mandate has grown — a partner success lead who talks to more Microsoft partners in a week than most people in this ecosystem talk to in a quarter. Together they build the trusted-authority intelligence engine most of Microsoft's 400,000+ partners never had access to. And it gets better every week — new capability ships with every release.
Mike built his career on the hardest problems in enterprise technology — delivering solutions for some of the largest automotive, banking, and healthcare organizations in the country. He spent years leading complex migrations from legacy on-premises infrastructure to Azure for government agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare systems operating under the strictest regulatory requirements — high-pressure environments where getting it wrong meant regulatory exposure or business disruption. Mike became a go-to consultant for Azure infrastructure, messaging, and collaboration. He brought together his own field expertise and his brother Mark's deep knowledge of Microsoft's partner programs to build something neither of them could have built alone. Mike built the entire PIE platform from the ground up on Microsoft Azure — the same platform he'd spent years architecting enterprise solutions on for clients — proving many times over that what they deliver to partners, they built for themselves first. Married with four kids and based in Phoenix, Mike is a Spartan Race competitor who brings the same grit to obstacle course racing that he brings to building products — push through walls, adapt on the fly, and never quit the course.
Growing up, the Grossman brothers competed at everything — sports, academics, business. That same relentless drive is what makes AI Cloud Partners work. While Mike was migrating enterprise clients to Azure in the field, Mark was on the inside at Microsoft — a Stanford scholar, executive, and data scientist who helped design the partner program architecture that the entire ecosystem operates on today. He didn't just understand Microsoft's programs — he helped build them. When Mike showed him what PIE could become, Mark saw the opportunity immediately: take everything he'd architected at Microsoft and automate it at scale. As President of AI Cloud Partners, Mark translates Microsoft's complex program logic into the intelligence that powers PIE. He sees patterns where others see spreadsheets. Married with three kids and based in Phoenix, Mark brings the same intensity to building AI Cloud Partners that he brings to everything — the Grossman standard is outwork everyone, everywhere.
Cole runs sales and marketing for PIE-Partner Intelligence Engine & CERTIFY-Pro, the certification accelerator that gets partner teams exam-ready in 10 days instead of 10 weeks, and owns partner onboarding and account management across the platform. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Communication from the University of Montana, focused on persuasive messaging, public relations, and media literacy — the academic version of the job he does now. The platform surfaces a partner's first insight in minutes. Cole's job starts there — making sure that insight becomes a claim actually filed, a designation actually pursued, a team actually certified. He talks to more Microsoft partners in a week than most people in this ecosystem talk to in a quarter, and every one of those conversations feeds back into what PIE builds next. He earned that degree while starting at tight end for the Montana Grizzlies — a two-time All-American and a 2024 Reese’s Senior Bowl watch-list selection, one of thirteen Big Sky players named — and a working education in preparation, adaptability, and performing under pressure. Based in Phoenix.