Katharine Shaw-Paffett

Katharine Shaw-Paffett leads the partner strategy for Data & AI in Germany at Microsoft.
She has two goals in her job: to empower Microsoft partners to be in the best possible to go into the market through the optimization of their sales value-chain end to end and to empower Microsoft sellers with the best possible partner ecosystem to go to market with. For Katharine, it is clear that we can only be successful and scale in a market that is growing at an unprecedented scale if we partner together. The future will rely on ecosystems and partnerships for growth and synergies or ecosystem economies. Along the Data & AI value chain, Katharine works with partners every day on use cases to enable their clients’ business with the cloud by modernizing their data estate, to empower their clients to make data-driven decisions and to allow their clients to differentiate in a highly competitive market by embracing AI and even IoT. Business transformation and Data & AI have always been pivotal topics throughout Katharine’s career. Before starting at Microsoft, she spent five years in management consulting in financial services working on topics like Post Merger Integrations and other company transactions predominantly on the IT side, intelligent wealth management apps and most memorably rolling out GDPR / DSGVO the year it came into power (2018) which opened her eyes and lit her fire for data and all topics around data quality and governance.