Druid earns the 2026 Microsoft Agents Partner of the Year Award and the 2026 Microsoft Romania Partner of the Year Award, both for agents running in production at REGINA MARIA - The Healthcare Network since 2018.
Most enterprises are still stalled between pilot and production with AI agents. The demo works, the business case looks great, and then the rollout never happens.
REGINA MARIA moved past that stage years ago. Since 2018, Druid AI agents have been doing real work across one of Central and Eastern Europe’s largest private healthcare networks. This week, Microsoft recognized Druid twice for that work.
The awards
Microsoft has named Druid AI its 2026 Agents Partner of the Year, a global award, and its 2026 Romania Partner of the Year. Both honor the same customer story.
Agents Partner of the Year
In Microsoft’s words, this global category recognizes partners who “move beyond prompt-based copilots to production-grade, autonomous agents that reason, plan, and take action across enterprise systems to execute business processes end to end.” Agents that run the workflow, not just answer questions about it.
Romania Partner of the Year
Country awards recognize at most one partner per country. Software companies must hold Microsoft’s Certified Software Designation for at least one solution, and judges assess seven areas: customer adoption and impact, innovation in AI and agents, security and responsible design, team skilling, go-to-market execution with Microsoft, competitive relevance in the local market, and growth potential.
Why this recognition matters
Microsoft’s Partner of the Year Awards are among the most competitive recognitions in enterprise technology. Each year, thousands of partners from around the world submit their best customer work, and only a small number win. Last year, Microsoft received more than 4,600 nominations from 100 countries and regions.
Druid’s nomination laid out eight years of production data: six agents, a million conversations a month, and results drawn directly from REGINA MARIA’s own operational dashboards.
Microsoft judges on evidence, not ambition. That means live deployments, measurable outcomes, and a customer willing to put its name to the results. Winning both for the same customer story means the work stood out on the world stage and at home at the same time. Winners are celebrated at Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco and highlighted across Microsoft’s partner channels and field teams.
Certified by Microsoft for healthcare AI
The awards also build on an earlier milestone. In 2025, Microsoft has recognized Druid as the Certified Software Provider for Healthcare AI in Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. For healthcare organizations, that means agents validated by Microsoft, running inside their own governed Azure environment, available through Azure Marketplace, and backed by SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance.
For anyone deciding where to place their bet on agentic AI, that matters:
- For buyers: agentic AI is no longer a bet on the future. It has a track record, with measured results, in a regulated industry.
- For healthcare leaders: patient-facing agents can work at scale while keeping data protection, consent and human oversight built in, not bolted on.
- For the Microsoft ecosystem: agents built natively on Azure and Dynamics 365 extend the investments customers already have. That lowers procurement risk, speeds up approval, and makes every expansion easier to buy.
Inside the REGINA MARIA story
Behind the awards are six agents handling a million conversations a month, with every result tracked in REGINA MARIA's own operational dashboards.
REGINA MARIA runs over 60 clinics, 5 hospitals, and dozens of labs and imaging centers, serving more than 6 million patients. At that scale, the patient phone line is where the pressure shows first.
In 2018, every patient call started the same way. An advisor answered, worked out who the caller was, read out the GDPR consent and call recording notice, and then got to the actual question. Multiply that by thousands of calls a day, and highly trained people spent much of their time on admin.
Today, Maria, the network’s patient-facing agent, picks up first. It recognizes 95% of returning patients across more than 5 million medical records, handles consent automatically, and books or changes appointments on its own, by chat or by voice. When a patient needs a person, the advisor gets the intent, the full conversation history, and the patient’s identity before they say a word.
Consent alone saves three minutes on every interaction. The result is a call center that serves more patients with the same team, with advisors spending their time where human judgment actually matters.
In our customers' words
“In healthcare, AI can only deliver real value when it operates reliably, at scale, and in full compliance with the standards and regulations that govern our industry. Since 2018, Druid has been a trusted partner in our digital transformation journey, with a consistent focus on delivering tangible business outcomes rather than just promising potential. Together, we have evolved from a single AI assistant to a network of six AI agents, helping our teams save valuable time, streamline workflows, and focus more on what matters most: our patients. This is what a successful technology partnership looks like: turning innovation into measurable impact."
— Cosmin Panaete, Business Process Director at REGINA MARIA
Maria is just one of six. Five more agents run behind the scenes on Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365, handling manager approvals in Teams, IT and HR support, internal knowledge, hospital operations, and contract flows. Together, they freed the equivalent of about 158 full-time roles last year.
Five insights from eight years in production
Building one agent is the start. Running six at scale, in a regulated industry, is where you learn what actually works.
1. Start with one high-volume workflow, then expand
REGINA MARIA didn’t launch six agents on day one. It started with one virtual assistant, proved the value, and grew from there. Each new agent got approved faster because the last one had already delivered. Maria itself started in 2018 as a scripted assistant built on decision trees. It’s now migrating to a fully agentic architecture, where the agent plans its own steps and calls the right systems, without a rebuild.
2. Build on what the customer already owns
Every agent runs natively on Azure and connects to Dynamics 365. That meant no parallel stack to justify, lower procurement risk, and faster internal sign-off. The best AI investment extends the systems you’ve already paid for.
3. Design the handoff, not just the agent
The hardest moment in any automated experience is the handover to a human. Maria passes the advisor a structured package: the detected intent, the full transcript, and a verified patient ID pulled from the medical record system. The advisor’s screen is ready before they pick up. We treat the handoff as a core feature, not an afterthought.
4. Govern model choice channel by channel
Not every channel should run the same model. REGINA MARIA chose not to expose LLM-based agents on Meta channels for data protection reasons, so a deterministic, non-generative version of Maria still serves Facebook and WhatsApp, while the agentic version runs on web, app, and voice. Under the hood, every interaction runs inside REGINA MARIA’s governed Azure environment, with sensitive data automatically anonymized, full audit logging, and explicit decision paths that show why an agent did what it did. Responsible AI isn’t one big switch. It’s a series of deliberate choices the customer controls.
5. Measure from day one
Define what success looks like before launch, and track it where the customer can see it. At REGINA MARIA, call center supervisors monitor response quality, accuracy, and escalations in real time, without needing an engineer. When the numbers are visible, renewals, and expansions take care of themselves.
Meet us at Microsoft Ignite
That’s the conversation we’re taking to San Francisco next week.
Joe Kim, President and CEO of Druid AI, and Irina Dochitu, Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances, will be at Microsoft Ignite, November 16 to 20, celebrating with this year’s Partner of the Year winners.
Ignite is where the industry figures out what comes after the pilot. We’re coming with real answers from REGINA MARIA: how to put agents to work in a regulated industry, how to keep humans in control, and how to prove the return. The same blueprint now powers our work across higher education, insurance, and more. Let’s talk about what it could do for your teams.
