Microsoft Unveils AI Agent Customization and Oversight Features at Build 2025

Microsoft unveils new AI agent customization and oversight features at Build 2025

On Monday, during Build, its annual developers conference, Microsoft made some announcements that helped bring into focus the company's strategic vision for the future of its tailor-made AI systems. Also: How Microsoft Outlook's new AI-powered features reduce tedium, increase security Microsoft introduced Copilot Tuning, a new feature that enables enterprise customers to train custom models and agents using internal company data and processes to perform specific tasks, no coding required. "For example," explained Jared Spataro, chief marketer of Microsoft's AI at Work division, in a company blog post, "a legal firm can create an agent to reflect its unique voice and expertise -- automating document creation and even drafting arguments that blend institutional knowledge with client-specific context to help build the strongest case possible." According to Spataro, Microsoft will not use proprietary customer data to train its foundation models. The feature will be available starting in June as part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning Early Adopter Program. The company also debuted Multi-Agent Orchestration, which is available in public preview. This technology synchronizes individual agents into a single network, allowing them to share information and work with one another to complete tasks. Such inter-agent collaboration is designed to make it even easier for employees to offload tasks to AI. Finally, there is a suite of new tools that give developers more control over the fine-tuning of agents built in Copilot Studio: Also: I retested Microsoft Copilot's AI coding skills in 2025 and now it's got serious game Not so long ago, tech developers only built models that worked exactly the same for everybody everywhere. Now, there's a growing focus on customization, specialization, and personalization. Every individual and organization now has access to their own custom-trained AI tools tailored to their particular data and needs. Microsoft has been especially keen on this approach. The company has, for example, been a major proponent of so-called small language models -- miniature systems that, unlike their larger counterparts, are relatively cheap to train and designed to operate within the closed data ecosystems of specific businesses. Also: The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT, Copilot, and notable alternatives The company has also been pouring R&D money into AI agents, systems designed to communicate in natural language and autonomously perform tasks on behalf of human users. In late 2023, the company introduced Copilot Studio, a platform on which customers can build their own custom agents (or "Copilots," as Microsoft calls them). In small ways, then, each of these new features points to what's become a core part of Microsoft's strategy for commercializing AI: building and deploying tools designed not for everyone but for specific individuals and organizations. The company is banking on this tailored approach to set it apart in the ongoing AI arms race. "Today's announcements further our ambition to give developers the tools they need to empower every employee with a Copilot," Spataro wrote.

Microsoft makes building trustworthy AI agents easier and more secure

Trusting AI agents to deal with your data is hard, and these features seek to make it easier. AI agents are the hottest topic at the moment -- with good reason. Agents take the assistance offered by traditional AI chatbots a step further by performing tasks for you. From something simple like sending or responding to an email to a complex task, such as approving procurement orders, agents will access user data, meaning safety is especially important. At Microsoft's annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, the tech company unveiled platform updates during the keynote, and AI agents were a big topic. Beyond releasing powerful agents that can optimize people's workflows in Microsoft 365 applications, GitHub, and more, Microsoft also released new features that make building a trustworthy agent easier. Also: 60% of AI agents work in IT departments - here's what they do every day "The amazing thing about agents is that they are actually able to do so much more -- they use tools, they take actions on your behalf -- and so the space of what can go wrong is much more significant," said Sarah Bird, CPO of Responsible AI at Microsoft to ZDNET. Your AI agents will have access to your organization's sensitive data, and as a result, you'll want to put these tools to the test to ensure they are as accurate and attack-protected as possible. Microsoft has introduced new tools to make this task easier. Also: The best VPN services (and how to choose the right one for you) Agent Evaluators help users measure how agents understand and carry out user goals, stay aligned to requests, and select tools, according to Microsoft. A new AI Red Teaming Agent automates the red teaming of generative AI systems by recreating realistic attack scenarios, helping identify vulnerabilities to mitigate risks. "By using new agentic technology and turning our safety evaluation system into an agent, that will just adversarially red team your system; it is way, way easier to use, and it also results in better testing, because the agent is able to iteratively adversarially attack your system and try to get through," said Bird. Similarly, the Agent Observability features in Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft's platform for building, deploying, and managing AI apps and agents, allow developers to view built-in metrics such as performance, quality, cost, and safety via a single dashboard. Also: Tech leaders are seemingly rushing to deploy agentic AI - here's why These metrics are available throughout the AI development cycle, from early ideation in the Agents Playground to production deployment using GitHub and Azure DevOps. Evaluations run automatically on every code update, making monitoring and iterating AI systems easier. Defender alerts in Foundry provide real-time visibility into security threats in model deployments, enabling developers to assess and respond to suspicious activity. These alerts include contextual recommendations and direct links to resolution actions in the Azure Portal. With new integration with Microsoft Purview, users can apply enterprise-grade security governance and compliance controls to AI systems built using Azure AI Foundry models. Microsoft Entra ID allows organizations to safely manage their workforce's access to applications, information, and company data across clouds and on-premises environments. Now, Microsoft is introducing the preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID, which expands access management to AI agents built with Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Once an agent is created in either platform, it will automatically be assigned an identity in Microsoft Entra, so admins can immediately control access permissions, the same way they can control access for human identities. "An agent is this new thing that you're deploying in your system that isn't quite like an application, isn't quite like a user, but it might behave like an application, or it might sometimes behave like a user," said Bird. "We need to extend all of our existing management and governance, and security tooling, to handle this new category of things." Also: 100 leading AI scientists map route to more 'trustworthy, reliable, secure' AI Microsoft also introduced Spotlighting capability in preview, built in Content Safety to strengthen the Prompt Shields guardrail, making it better at detecting and stopping indirect prompt injections that manipulate the AI for malicious outcomes, according to the release. "Prompt shields look for attacks that are coming through the user interface, but also look for attacks that are coming hidden in the data," said Bird. "One of the things we've done for Build is extend it to work for attacks that are hidden in tool calls or other things that our agents are doing." Other new guardrails include a PII detection guardrail in Foundry, which redacts sensitive information with added support for user-defined content filtering, and a task adherence guardrail in Content Safety, which ensures that your AI agents stay on track with the task assigned to them.

At Build, Microsoft Makes It Clear That Autonomous AI Is Here to Stay. Should You Be Worried?

Truly independent (and potentially sinister) AI agents have long been a societal fear, dating back to sci-fi radio shows in the 1950s. And, now more than ever, it's scary to think about what autonomous AI can do with a seemingly limitless supply of data. Thankfully, the AI agents Microsoft introduced at its 2025 Build developer conference seem to have an amicable goal: To help you streamline your business and developer processes. The press materials for Build include 296 mentions of the word agent, beating Copilot's 154 mentions, so you know it's the main theme this year. What's Being Announced at Microsoft Build? Below are some of the key new agent technologies Microsoft is unveiling: The Entra identity for agents is key to Microsoft's strategy. "Agentic AI is gaining momentum for its ability to combine large language models with reasoning to deliver real outcomes," said IDC's group vice president of security and trust, Frank Dickson. "As we scale autonomous capabilities, identity becomes critical -- robust authentication, access provisioning, fine-grained authorization, and governance are essential." Microsoft is also announcing tools to help with creating agents. Copilot Tuning, for example, lets you train AI models on your business's internal data and impose restrictions on its use and permissions. Support for a couple of existing public protocols will help the widespread adoption of agents, too. The first is Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows agents access to data and services and supports public or private repositories of the agents. The second is NLWeb, which Microsoft bills as the HTML of the agentic web. According to Microsoft's press materials, "NLWeb makes it easy for websites to provide a conversational interface for their users with only a few lines of code, the model of their choice and their own data, allowing users to interact directly with web content in a rich, semantic manner." Is Microsoft Taking Steps to Protect Against Agentic Threats? Microsoft is leaning hard into AI agents, and these technologies indeed seem capable of making the web and Windows more powerful. But what about the nightmare scenario of uncontrolled and malicious AI? After all, rogue AI agents can do a lot of damage with access to all the sensitive data associated with the above products and services. In a related blog post, Microsoft CVP David Weston acknowledges risks of attacks from a confused deputy exposing sensitive functionality, prompt injection, tool poisoning, unwanted remote access, and others. Weston says, "The goal for Windows 11 as an agentic OS is to provide the strongest fundamental security capabilities while also evolving and adapting to emerging threats." Microsoft has itemized security principles for AI on Windows, too. It requires developers to employ the principle of least privilege and code isolation, meet a baseline set of security requirements, and put the user in control for sensitive operations. Windows 11 will include technology controls to enforce those principles, including routing agentic interactions through a secure proxy for mediation, a requirement for top-level user authorization to access tools, a central server registry of trustworthy AI agent sources, and runtime isolation to limit the "blast radius" should an attack occur. Will it be enough? Probably, in most cases. But I expect to see some security bumps in the road to agentic AI in Windows and elsewhere. It's reassuring that Microsoft seems to be taking the issue seriously, at least. Weston states, "Security is not a one-time feature -- it's a continuous commitment." Let's hope the commitment is strong enough to avoid major catastrophes for your computer and beyond.

Microsoft Build 2025: From chatbots to digital coworkers, and the "agentic" web

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Something to look forward to: As exciting as the world of large language models may be, it's clear that the tech industry is moving fast and beyond the capabilities current GenAI tools to enter a new phase focused on AI-powered agents. At the developer-focused Microsoft Build event, the company made this next stage in AI evolution evident through a wide range of announcements that point to how software agents can extend LLM capabilities into more sophisticated and far-reaching applications. The buzzword Microsoft used at Build was the "agentic web." However, the agent-based opportunities the company described aren't limited to the web or cloud-based applications - they also extend to Windows and other client-based environments. In building out its vision for agents, Microsoft introduced a variety of developer tools to easily create agents and unveiled several new prebuilt ones. The company also discussed capabilities for organizing and orchestrating the actions of multiple agents. Most notably, Microsoft introduced mechanisms for treating agents as "digital employees" - complete with identities and access rights managed through the company's Entra digital identity and authentication framework. On the development front, Microsoft debuted the GitHub Copilot coding agent, designed to streamline the creation of AI applications and agents. Described as "an agentic partner," the Copilot coding agent was likened to a coworker who can assist with parts of a development project, such as refactoring old code or fixing bugs. For non-programmers, Microsoft also showcased a set of low-code/no-code tools for agent creation, including Copilot Studio. Additionally, the company introduced the concept of Computer Use Agents (CUAs), which can perform actions across a computer screen as a human would. CUAs are capable of interacting with websites and applications in ways not possible through traditional APIs alone. With the launch of Copilot Tuning, Microsoft is making it easier for users to fine-tune existing LLMs using their own content, enabling the creation of personalized agents tailored to specific tasks. For example, an agent could learn to write in an individual's style or incorporate an organization's specialized knowledge into content generation. This capability opens up new possibilities for a broader range of users. Conceptually, this is similar to the idea of a personal RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) tool, a concept that garnered attention over the past year but never quite went mainstream. Microsoft's agent-based approach through Copilot Tuning simplifies the process by allowing users to select documents to augment the model's training set - potentially making a bigger impact. One of the key themes Microsoft emphasized at Build was how coordinating multiple agents can unlock even more powerful capabilities. The company showcased orchestration mechanisms for linking and synchronizing different agents' actions. In Copilot Studio, for instance, developers can connect several agents to handle more complex tasks collaboratively. Perhaps the most striking announcement was the ability to register agents within Entra. This seemingly minor detail carries significant implications - it effectively elevates autonomous software into the role of a digital employee. While the real-world deployment and limitations of these "digital employees" remain to be seen, the fact that this concept is under serious consideration underscores just how groundbreaking - and potentially disruptive - agent-based AI could become. Notably, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also spoke about digital agents as employees in his keynote at Computex, highlighting the broader industry momentum behind the idea. Microsoft also made several announcements around developing standards. The company strongly endorsed both the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) standards. MCP provides a unified method for interacting with LLMs across different models and environments, while A2A defines a common protocol for agent communication and collaboration. In keeping with this open approach, Microsoft announced broader model support across most of its development tools. While the company hasn't formally released its own LLMs yet - aside from the Phi family of Small Language Models (SLMs) - the inclusion of hundreds of models in Azure AI Foundry suggests Microsoft is moving away from its initial reliance on OpenAI and embracing greater model diversity. It wouldn't be surprising if Microsoft introduces its own family of LLMs in the near future. For Windows developers, Microsoft introduced several new features to simplify building and running AI agents and applications on PCs. These tools are designed to leverage the diverse silicon now available in Copilot+ PCs. Windows Foundry - the successor to Windows ML Runtime - addresses a key challenge: supporting the varied NPU and GPU architectures from Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. By providing a translation layer that optimizes app code for the available hardware, Windows Foundry should encourage more development of AI-accelerated Windows apps. Microsoft also introduced Local Foundry, which expands the range of models developers can use and supports integration with external platforms such as Nvidia NIMs. Thanks to Nvidia's newly announced TensorRT for RTX PCs, developers can now run CUDA applications on PCs with Nvidia RTX GPUs, opening up yet another mechanism for bringing AI-accelerated applications to PCs. Finally, with MCP support in Windows 11, AI agents can now serve as intermediaries across different applications registered as MCP servers. This opens the door to automating complex, multi-step workflows across multiple applications. While this will likely start on a single PC, MCP also enables distributing tasks across various environments - paving the way for advanced, hybrid AI applications. As with most Microsoft Build events, the sheer volume of announcements can be overwhelming. What's becoming increasingly clear is that agents - and the tools and protocols enabling them - are ushering in a new era of AI development. These next-gen agents move beyond chatbots and toward more powerful, structured AI applications. They're even laying the groundwork for digital "coworkers" who could dramatically reshape how organizations operate and how work gets done. Bob O'Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on X @bobodtech

What's next for Microsoft's Copilot? AI agents that do tasks for you

You've probably barely become used to interacting with ChatGPT, Copilot, and other AIs. Whether you like it or not, Microsoft will soon start guiding you towards the next generation of AI: ordering agents to autonomously pursue tasks for you, particularly in the business space. Today, at Microsoft Build, the company begins rolling out tools to consumers and business users that show off its vision. Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2, for example, is Microsoft's name for an improved Microsoft 365 application, a hub where your chats, notebooks, and agents all intersect. It will include Copilot Search, too. Microsoft wants those business users to also begin training their agents and models on company data so that a legal agent, for example, can quickly come up with a merger proposal or disclaimer form. Other work that Microsoft is doing is laying the groundwork for a future that isn't here yet, but you'll probably want to know about: what Microsoft calls a Model Context Protocol will be a framework for AI agents to work with and control native Windows apps -- part of what Microsoft originally promised with Copilot but never really delivered. And while Microsoft is pushing what it calls Windows AI Foundry and Windows AI Foundry Local toward developers, you might benefit, too -- they're designed to allow LLMs to run locally, with Microsoft handling all the deep thinking about bits of code you'll need and how they'll be optimized for the hardware that's already on your PC. Microsoft seems to believe that any ground it lost to OpenAI, Meta, or Anthropic can be quickly made up by pushing AI across its workplace and yours. If it's scary, just think: Microsoft just went through a round of layoffs that apparently were used to replace some of programmers with AI. So what's an agent? If you've interacted with Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or others, you might have delved into what some call "Deep Research": you ask a question, the AI formulates a plan, and then it goes off and figures out what you'll need. Agents are designed even more autonomous so that you'll be able to assign them a task, and then they'll keep at it until it's done -- potentially even repeating the task. That's the hypothetical approach, anyway. Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 will probably have the most immediate impact on your workday, provided that you work for a company that subscribes to Microsoft 365. The app itself is designed for human-agent interaction, and Microsoft showed off a menu with an "agent" category. Two of those, Researcher and Analyst, will be included. They're rolling out to customers by what Microsoft calls the "Frontier Program," which is basically a Windows Insider program for AI. Microsoft has two demonstration videos that explain Researcher and Analyst. Researcher is like a supercharged version of Deep Research, but instead of making a plan and checking it with you, it might bounce questions or ideas off you to get things going. Analyst feels like something that normal people could use -- or at least those who haven't learned good data practices. In the Analyst video below, you're essentially able to ask Copilot to format your data in a way that makes sense, like to whip it up for a meeting. Another, separate feature that Microsoft is working on is in PowerBI, where you'll have an opportunity to "query" or ask questions of your data. At this point, Microsoft is excellent at taking related functions and sprinkling them across their various apps where they make sense. Microsoft already offers what it calls Copilot Notebooks, where you can query Copilot and then turn the output into an interactive document. Microsoft says you can do this on your phone, and when you're done, you can save the notebook as a "legacy" file format like Word for sharing. Microsoft also said that Microsoft plans to roll out Copilot Search and Copilot Memory in June. We've already seen Copilot Search, which is live now; the AI-powered search slurps up the recommendations from your favorite content creators and journalists and then presents them in Microsoft's voice, with small links. Copilot Memory is more than just a history of your search. It's a reminder of how you solved your problem. Currently, engaging with AI is a one-time, transactional process. Microsoft wants more of a history where it remembers what Copilot did and how it got there. "So you interact with an agent, maybe it recalls past interactions," Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technical officer, said Sunday night. "It almost certainly doesn't remember its scratch work over time, like the way that we would, like we solve a problem once, and then we sort of write it down somewhere on a piece of paper, store it on disk, or remember it. So memory is one of these problems that is really going to be important for us to solve, and it needs to be a form of agentic memory that probably more mirrors what happens with biological memory." Microsoft is also going to beef up Copilot's Create function with OpenAI GPT-4o image generation, which OpenAI believes excels at generating text. So if you want a raccoon writing lines on a blackboard, the words will (hopefully) make sense. Another feature, Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning, might not be totally aligned with Microsoft's Wave 2 efforts. But Microsoft is trying to allow Copilot to train itself on as much corporate data as you (or your company) will allow it to take over menial tasks. "Users will be able to automate repetitive tasks using Computer Using Agent (CUA) technology for tasks such as data transfer, document processing, market research, and compliance monitoring," Microsoft says. Finally, Microsoft is taking its business browser, Edge, and improving it at understanding files shared over the Web, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft is also setting the stage for future improvements, which aren't here yet. Remember how Microsoft promised that Copilot would allow you to control your PC? That really never happened, although Microsoft's promised controls of the Settings menu are an intermediary step. According to Microsoft, the company is "evolving Windows for the agentic future" with a technology called Model Context Protocol, or MCP. (It's possible Microsoft will rename this when they realize the similarities with Tron's Master Control Program.) Microsoft is also working to implement "app actions" within Windows, too. "MCP integration with Windows will offer a standardized framework for AI agents to connect with native Windows apps, enabling apps to participate seamlessly in agentic interactions," Microsoft said in a blog post authored by Pavan Davuluri, the corporate vice president in charge of Windows and devices at Microsoft. "Windows apps can expose specific functionality to augment the skills and capabilities of agents installed locally on a Windows PC." For developers, Microsoft is building Windows AI Foundry. It's not obvious what AI Foundry does, but it appears to take AI models and model catalogs like Ollama and bring them within Windows so that developers can quickly try out new models. A complementary AI Foundry Local service will allow those models to run locally on a PC rather than in the cloud. "In preview, Foundry Local will make it easy to run AI models, tools, and agents directly on devices, whether Windows 11 or MacOS," Microsoft said. "Foundry Local will be included in Windows AI Foundry and will deliver best-in-class AI capabilities on Windows with excellent cross-silicon performance and availability on millions of Windows devices." "During preview, developers can access Foundry Local by installing from WinGet (winget install Microsoft.FoundryLocal) and the Foundry Local CLI to browse, download, and test models," Microsoft added. "Foundry Local will automatically detect device hardware (CPU, GPU, and NPU) and list compatible models for developers to try." If you've ever tried playing around with AI yourself, you probably know that trying to figure out what model your PC can run, then downloading it and whatever dependencies it needs, and then trying to update it -- it's all a real pain. Foundry AI and Foundry Local may be aimed at developers, but this might be a tool for enthusiasts to keep an eye on as Microsoft moves ahead into its agentic future.

Microsoft just taught its AI agents to talk to each other -- and it could transform how we work

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Microsoft announced a significant expansion of its Copilot Studio platform at Build 2025 today, introducing multi-agent systems that allow different AI agents to collaborate on complex business tasks, along with new developer tools, security enhancements, and integration with WhatsApp. The suite of announcements represents Microsoft's most ambitious attempt yet to make AI agents more practical for enterprise use, addressing key limitations that have hindered broader adoption of agent technology in business settings. "We're seeing from customers doing large-scale production rollouts that governance and observability become even more critical," said Ray Smith, VP of AI Agents at Microsoft, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The beauty of Copilot Studio is that we provide a managed infrastructure framework with built-in lifecycle management and comprehensive governance capabilities." How Microsoft's new multi-agent system is transforming enterprise workflows At the heart of the announcements is Microsoft's new multi-agent system, which enables agents built with Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365, Azure AI Agents Service, and Azure Fabric to work together, delegating tasks to one another to complete complex business processes. This capability addresses a fundamental challenge organizations have faced when implementing agent technology. "Creating a reliable process within a single agent is extremely challenging," Smith explained. "Breaking it down into multiple agents not only improves maintainability and simplifies solution building, but it also significantly enhances overall reliability." The system enables scenarios such as a Copilot Studio agent pulling sales data from a CRM, handing it to a Microsoft 365 agent to draft a proposal in Word, and then triggering another agent to schedule follow-ups in Outlook. Microsoft is also emphasizing interoperability through support for the agent-to-agent protocol recently announced by Google, potentially enabling cross-platform agent communication. 'Computer use' feature brings human-like UI interaction to AI agents without API dependencies Another key announcement is "computer use" for Copilot Studio agents, which allows agents to interact with desktop applications and websites by controlling interfaces directly -- clicking buttons, navigating menus, and typing in fields -- even when APIs aren't available. "When APIs aren't available, this feature can interact directly with user interfaces -- whether desktop applications, browsers, or other platforms," Smith said. "It provides what we call 'no-cliffs extensibility' and operates based on intent rather than pixel coordinates, unlike traditional desktop automation. This goal-oriented approach makes it significantly more robust." This capability is currently available through Microsoft's Frontier program for eligible customers with 500,000+ Copilot Studio messages and a U.S.-based environment. Customizable model selection and Python-powered analytics supercharge enterprise AI solutions Microsoft is giving organizations more flexibility with their AI models by enabling them to bring custom models from Azure AI Foundry into Copilot Studio. This includes access to over 1,900 models, including the latest from OpenAI GPT-4.1, Llama, and DeepSeek. "Start with off-the-shelf models because they're already fantastic and continuously improving," Smith said. "Companies typically choose to fine-tune these models when they need to incorporate specific domain language, unique use cases, historical data, or customer requirements. This customization ultimately drives either greater efficiency or improved accuracy." The company is also adding a code interpreter feature that brings Python capabilities to Copilot Studio agents, enabling data analysis, visualization, and complex calculations without leaving the Copilot Studio environment. Smith highlighted financial applications as a particular strength: "In financial analysis and services, we've seen a remarkable breakthrough over the past six months," Smith said. "Deep reasoning models, powered by reinforcement learning, can effectively self-verify any process that produces quantifiable outputs." He added that these capabilities excel at "complex financial analysis where users need to generate code for creating graphs, producing specific outputs, or conducting detailed financial assessments." WhatsApp integration extends AI agent reach to billions of global users Starting in early July, organizations will be able to publish Copilot Studio agents to WhatsApp, enabling them to reach customers through one of the world's most popular messaging platforms. "WhatsApp is obviously a key channel. Globally, it's pretty huge," Smith explained. "So that became a high priority for us through the various channels and integrations, to unlock that as a way for end users to interact at a time that suits them." This addition, along with a new SharePoint channel (now generally available), significantly expands the reach of custom agents beyond Microsoft's own ecosystem. Microsoft bridges the developer experience gap with VS Code extension and enhanced admin controls For professional developers, Microsoft is launching a Visual Studio Code extension for Copilot Studio, bringing familiar tooling and workflows to agent development. The extension provides features like IntelliSense, color formatting, and "find all references" functionality, enabling developers to edit agents directly from within Visual Studio Code. IT administrators gain new tools as well, including a centralized "Agents & connectors" page in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for managing the full lifecycle of Copilot agents. This interface allows admins to view all agents, filter by metadata, assign sensitivity labels, manage connector behavior, and block or delete agents that violate security policies. AI-powered agent discovery solves the 'which agent do I need?' problem for end users As organizations develop more specialized agents, Microsoft is addressing the challenge of agent discovery with new in-conversation agent recommendations. This feature suggests the most relevant agent based on a user's needs, dynamically recommending handoffs when appropriate. "It's fundamentally like an agentic RAG pattern," Smith explained, referring to retrieval-augmented generation. "It uses vector databases and indexing based on the description of the agent. When you describe the task, it's looking up and going, 'Hey, I think you should look at this agent.'" The system only recommends agents the user has access to, respecting existing permissions structures. Overcoming enterprise AI implementation hurdles: Microsoft's roadmap for success Despite the new capabilities, organizations still face significant challenges when implementing multi-agent systems. Smith recommends focusing on specific use cases rather than attempting comprehensive transformations from the outset. "Best practices have been customers who've focused on a use case or problem to start with, broken that down into parts, and looked at embedding an agent at various parts of that process," he said. "They go from one agent to two agents, and then effectively they're stitching it together in a multi-agent solution." He emphasized the importance of hands-on experience with the tools: "You need to know good at what it's not... it's a mix of tooling that you will use to transform your business process." Microsoft's enterprise AI strategy positions it to lead the next wave of workplace transformation These announcements collectively strengthen Microsoft's position in the enterprise AI market, where competition with Google, Amazon, and specialized AI startups continues to intensify. By addressing key enterprise requirements like security, governance, and interoperability, while simultaneously expanding the platform's capabilities through features like computer use and code interpretation, Microsoft is creating a more complete offering for organizations looking to deploy AI agents at scale. "Microsoft is very much in a leading position in building and managing and scaling these agentic solutions or agentic workflows," Smith noted. "I think we've hit an important inflection point of some of the key feature asks from customers." The company's dual approach -- supporting both no-code tools for business users and professional development environments for engineers -- also sets it apart from competitors that focus primarily on either developers or business users. "Our platform serves experienced developers who prefer to use Visual Studio for direct access to APIs and frameworks," Smith said. "It also accommodates business users with limited coding experience who want to start with a specific business problem and rapidly prototype solutions using natural language." The future of Microsoft's AI agent ecosystem: from tools to marketplace While Microsoft has addressed many of the key challenges for enterprise AI adoption with these announcements, Smith hints at future developments focusing on agent discovery and accessibility. "I think the next piece will be all of these agents surfacing within a marketplace or catalog and then accessible from AI assistants like Copilot or Microsoft 365 Copilot and beyond," he said. The Build 2025 announcements represent a significant step forward for Microsoft's AI strategy, but the company continues to face the challenge of driving widespread adoption of these technologies across industries and helping organizations realize tangible business value from their AI investments. As Smith concluded, "At the core of all transformation isn't really technology itself. It's about delivering solutions that are more cost-effective, faster, higher quality, and that ultimately create a superior customer experience."

Microsoft announces over 50 AI tools to build the 'agentic web' at Build 2025

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Microsoft launched a comprehensive strategy to position itself at the center of what it calls the "open agentic web" at its annual Build conference this morning, introducing dozens of AI tools and platforms designed to help developers create autonomous systems that can make decisions and complete tasks with limited human intervention. The Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant introduced more than 50 announcements spanning its entire product portfolio, from GitHub and Azure to Windows and Microsoft 365, all focused on advancing AI agent technologies that can work independently or collaboratively to solve complex business problems. "We've entered the era of AI agents," said Frank Shaw, Microsoft's Chief Communications Officer, in a blog post coinciding with the Build announcements. "Thanks to groundbreaking advancements in reasoning and memory, AI models are now more capable and efficient, and we're seeing how AI systems can help us all solve problems in new ways." How AI agents transform software development through autonomous capabilities The concept of the "agentic web" moves far beyond today's AI assistants. While current AI tools mainly respond to human questions and commands, agents actively initiate tasks, make decisions independently, coordinate with other AI systems, and complete complex workflows with minimal human supervision. This marks a fundamental shift in how AI systems operate and interact with both users and other technologies. Kevin Scott, Microsoft's CTO, described this shift during a press conference as fundamentally changing how humans interact with technology: "Reasoning will continue to improve. We're going to see great progress there. But there are a handful of new things that have to start happening pretty quickly in order for agents to be the recipients of more complicated work." One critical missing element, according to Scott, is memory: "One of the things that is quite conspicuously missing right now in agents is memory." To address this, Microsoft is introducing several memory-related technologies, including structured RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), which helps AI systems more precisely recall information from large volumes of data. "You will likely have a personal agent and a work agent, and the work agent is going to have a whole bunch of your employer's information that belongs to both you and your employer," explained Steven Bathiche, CVP and technical fellow at Microsoft, during a presentation about agents. Bathiche emphasized that this contextual awareness is crucial for creating agents that "understand you well, contextualize where you are and what you want to do, and ultimately understand you so that you can click fewer buttons at the end of the day." This shift from purely reactive AI to systems with persistent memory represents one of the most profound aspects of the agentic revolution. GitHub evolves from code completion to autonomous developer experience Microsoft is placing GitHub, its popular developer platform, at the forefront of its agentic strategy with the introduction of the GitHub Copilot coding agent, which goes beyond suggesting code snippets to autonomously solving programming tasks. The new GitHub Copilot coding agent can now operate as a member of software development teams, autonomously refactoring code, improving test coverage, fixing defects, and even implementing new features. For complex tasks, GitHub Copilot can collaborate with other agents across all stages of the software lifecycle. Microsoft is also open-sourcing GitHub Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code, allowing the developer community to contribute to its evolution. This reflects Microsoft's dual approach of both leading AI innovation while embracing open-source principles. "Over the next few months, the AI-powered capabilities from the GitHub Copilot extensions will be part of the VS Code open-source repository, the same open-source repository that drives the most popular software development tool," the company explained in its announcement, emphasizing its commitment to transparency and community-driven innovation. Multi-agent systems enable complex business workflows and process automation For businesses looking to deploy AI agents, Microsoft unveiled significant updates to its Azure AI Foundry, a platform for developing and managing AI applications and agents. Ray Smith, VP of AI Agents at Microsoft, highlighted the importance of multi-agent systems in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat: "Multi-agent invocation, debugging and drilling down into those multiple agents is key, and that extends beyond just Copilot Studio to what's coming with Azure AI Foundry agents. Our customers have consistently emphasized that this multi-agent capability is essential for their needs." Smith explained why splitting tasks across multiple agents is crucial: "It's very hard to create a reliable process that you squeeze into one agent. Breaking it up into parts improves maintainability and makes building solutions easier, but it also significantly enhances reliability as well." The Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, now generally available, allows developers to build enterprise-grade AI agents with support for multi-agent workflows and open protocols like Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). This enables organizations to orchestrate multiple specialized agents to handle complex tasks. Local AI capabilities expand as processing power shifts to client devices While cloud-based AI has dominated headlines, Microsoft is making a significant push toward local, on-device AI with several announcements targeting developers who want to deploy AI directly on user devices. Windows AI Foundry, an evolution of Windows Copilot Runtime, provides a unified platform for local AI development on Windows. It includes Windows ML, a built-in AI inferencing runtime, and tools for preparing and optimizing models for on-device deployment. "Foundry Local will make it easy to run AI models, tools and agents directly on-device, whether Windows 11 or MacOS," the company announced. "Leveraging ONNX Runtime, Foundry Local is designed for situations where users can save on internet data usage, prioritize privacy and reduce costs." Steven Bathiche explained during a presentation how client-side AI has advanced remarkably fast: "We're super busy trying to essentially predict and stay ahead. Most of our predictions come true within three or four months, which is kind of crazy, because I'm used to predicting a year or two years out, and then feeling good about that timeline. Now it's like we're stressed all the time, but it's all fun." Security and identity management address enterprise AI governance challenges As agent usage proliferates across organizations, Microsoft is addressing the critical need for security, governance, and compliance with several new capabilities designed to prevent what it calls "agent sprawl." "Microsoft Entra Agent ID, now in preview, agents that developers create in Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry are automatically assigned unique identities in an Entra directory, helping enterprises securely manage agents right from the start and avoid 'agent sprawl' that could lead to blind spots," according to the announcement. Microsoft is also integrating its Purview data security and compliance controls with its AI platforms, allowing developers to build AI solutions with enterprise-grade security and compliance features. This includes Data Loss Prevention controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot agents and new capabilities for detecting sensitive data in AI interactions. Ray Smith advised IT teams managing security: "Building solutions from the ground up gives you total flexibility, but then you have to add in a lot of the controls around these frameworks yourself. The beauty of Copilot Studio is we're giving you a managed infrastructure framework with lifecycle management and many governance and observability capabilities built in." Scientific discovery platform demonstrates how AI agents transform R&D timelines Perhaps one of the most ambitious applications of AI agents announced at Build is Microsoft Discovery, a platform designed to accelerate scientific research and development across industries from pharmaceuticals to materials science. Jason Zander, the CVP of Advanced Communications & Technologies at Microsoft, described in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat how this platform was used to discover a non-PFAS immersion coolant for data centers in just 200 hours -- a process that traditionally takes years. "In our area, our data centers are huge for us because we're a hyperscaler," Zander said. "Using this framework, we were able to screen 367,000 potential candidates in just 200 hours. We then took this to a partner who helped synthesize the results." Zander elaborated on how this represents a dramatic acceleration of traditional R&D timelines: "The meta point is, all those things took, in some cases, years or even a decade to create. Now they've been banned due to regulatory constraints. And the real business question companies need to answer is: you need to replace these products because you have offerings that are now banned...and it took you years to create your existing products. How do you compress that development timeline going forward?" Industry standards create ecosystem for interoperable agents across platforms Central to Microsoft's vision is the advancement of open standards that enable agent interoperability across different platforms and services, with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) playing a particularly important role. The company announced its joining of the MCP Steering Committee and introduced two new contributions to the MCP ecosystem: an updated authorization specification and a design for an MCP server registry service. Jay Parikh, who leads Microsoft's Core AI team, emphasized the importance of openness and interoperability: "Inside Microsoft, this is all about learning faster. Speed is essential because the world is changing so rapidly with new technologies, applications, and competitors emerging constantly." Microsoft also introduced NLWeb, a new open project that "can play a similar role to HTML for the agentic web," allowing websites to provide conversational interfaces for users with the model of their choice and their own data. Microsoft's agent strategy positions it at center of next computing paradigm The breadth and depth of Microsoft's announcements at Build 2025 underscore the company's all-in approach to AI agents as the next major computing paradigm. "The last time that I was as excited about being a software developer or a technologist as I am now was in the 90s," Kevin Scott said during the press conference. "One of the reasons why is I had this kid-in-a-candy-store feeling with building blocks that even someone like me could fully understand. I could grasp how each of these individual pieces worked and how they composed together, and I could just go play." Industry analysts note that Microsoft's approach -- combining cloud and edge AI, open standards with proprietary technologies, and developer tools with business applications -- positions the company as a central player in the emerging agentic ecosystem. For enterprise customers, the immediate impact may be most visible in increased automation of complex workflows, more intelligent responses to business events, and the ability to build custom agents that incorporate domain-specific knowledge and processes. As we transition from a web of information to a web of agents, Microsoft's strategy mirrors its earlier approach to cloud computing -- providing comprehensive tools, platforms, and infrastructure while simultaneously advancing open standards. The question now isn't whether AI agents will transform business operations, but how quickly organizations can adapt to a world where machines don't just respond to commands, but anticipate needs, make decisions, and fundamentally reshape how work gets done.

Microsoft secures the modern workforce against AI agents

Microsoft just introduced Entra Agent ID, a new identity management tool for AI agents. With this capability, users can assign unique, secure digital identities to AI agents, similar to vehicle registration, or having a digital passport for the AI agent. A blog post published earlier this week by Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Security, said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to profoundly reshape organizations within the next two to five years. In this new paradigm, which Microsoft dubbed "Frontier Firm", humans will collaborate with AI agents, which is why the transformation "must be grounded in security," Jakkal explained. Purview and Defender This starts by adopting the Zero Trust security model and prioritizing identity protection and risk mitigation. Enter Entra Agent ID. It will secure the digital identities for AI agents created in Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, ensuring centralized identity management for both humans and AIs. For starters, Microsoft partnered with ServiceNow and Workday, to integrate Entra Agent ID into their platforms. Redmond also announced extending Microsoft Purview's data security and compliance control to any custom-built AI app with the new Purview SDK, enabled natively for AI agents built within Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. "This means that AI agents can now inherently benefit from Microsoft Purview's robust data security and compliance capabilities," Jakkal explained. "Developers can leverage these controls to help reduce the risk of their AI applications oversharing or leaking data, and to support compliance efforts, while security teams gain visibility into AI risks and mitigations. This integration improves AI data security and streamlines compliance management for development and security teams." Finally, Microsoft Defender - the company's native antivirus for Windows, now integrates directly with Azure AI Foundry, offering security posture recommendations, runtime threat alerts, and a bridge between development and security teams. With these changes, Microsoft wants to help organizations "innovate more securely with AI," Jakkal concluded.

Microsoft launches tools to streamline AI agent development - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft launches tools to streamline AI agent development Microsoft Corp. is rolling out a suite of new tools and services at its Build conference this week that are designed to accelerate the development and deployment of the autonomous assistants called artificial intelligence agents across its platforms. The updates aim to simplify enterprise adoption of agent-based systems, strengthen agent capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Teams, and enable developers to build more personalized, scalable and secure AI-powered workflows. The centerpiece of Microsoft's announcements is the general availability of the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service announced last fall. The platform allows developers to build, manage and scale up AI agents that automate business processes. It supports multi-agent workflows, enabling specialized agents to coordinate on high-level tasks. The service integrates with a wide range of Microsoft services such as Bing, SharePoint, Databricks and Fabric with support for open protocols like Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocol. These standards help ensure interoperability across agent frameworks, allowing developers to orchestrate and control agents across diverse environments. To aid deployment and testing, the Foundry Agent Service supports a unified runtime that merges the Semantic Kernel software development kit and AutoGen framework for creating multi-agent AI applications. Developers can simulate agent behavior locally and deploy agents unchanged to the cloud, maintaining consistency across development and production environments, Microsoft said. The service also includes advanced monitoring and optimization tools, known as AgentOps, and allows developers to bring their own thread storage via Azure Cosmos DB. Prebuilt agent templates and deployment tools are available through an Agent Catalog, including examples tailored to specialized use cases such as healthcare coordination. Microsoft is also introducing Copilot Tuning, a new capability that allows businesses to fine-tune Microsoft 365 Copilot using their organization's data. For example, law firms can build agents that generate legal documents in their house style, and consultancies can create Q&A agents based on their regulatory knowledge. This feature will be available starting in June through the Copilot Tuning Program to organizations with at least 5,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. Access to tuned models is restricted to users with permission to view the underlying training data, which Microsoft said ensures secure deployment within enterprise boundaries. Microsoft is also previewing several new developer tools for building agentic applications in Microsoft Teams. They support secure, peer-to-peer communication via the A2A protocol, agent memory for contextual user experiences and improved development environments for JavaScript and C#. Developers will also gain access to automated agent validation, a service that ensures compliance with Microsoft Store policies, and new analytics for tracking adoption and engagement. Additionally, Teams agents can now operate within meetings, access AI-generated meeting notes via a new application program interfaee and be used in both groups and privately from the meeting interface.

Microsoft boosts AI platform security with new identity protection threat alerts and data governance - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft boosts AI platform security with new identity protection threat alerts and data governance Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a major expansion of its artificial intelligence security and governance offerings with the introduction of new capabilities designed to secure the emerging "agentic workforce," a world where AI agents and humans collaborate and work together. Announced at the company's annual Build developer conference, Microsoft is expanding Entra, Defender and Purview, embedding them directly into Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio to help organizations secure AI apps and agents across the entire development lifecycle. The expanded capabilities collectively seek to address a growing issue in AI development -- securing systems from prompt injection, data leakage and identity sprawl, all while also ensuring compliance with various regulations. Leading the list of announcements is the launch of Entra Agent ID, a new centralized solution designed to manage the identities of AI agents built in Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry. Each agent is automatically assigned a secure, trackable identity in Microsoft Entra, giving security teams visibility and governance over nonhuman actors in the enterprise. The integration includes support for third-party platforms, with Microsoft announcing new partnerships with ServiceNow Inc. and Workday Inc. to support identity provisioning across human resource and workforce systems. With Entra Agent ID, security teams can now unify oversight of AI agents and human users within a single administrative interface, laying the groundwork for broader nonhuman identity governance across the enterprise. Also announced today is a feature that sees security insights from Microsoft Defender for Cloud are now integrated directly into Azure AI Foundry to give developers AI-specific threat alerts and posture recommendations without leaving their environment. The alerts cover more than 15 detection types, such as jailbreaks, misconfigurations and sensitive data leakage. The idea here is that by removing friction between development and security teams, the integration enables faster response to evolving threats without slowing down deployment. Purview, Microsoft's integrated data security, compliance and governance platform, is getting a new software development kit that allows developers to embed policy enforcement, auditing and data loss prevention into AI systems. The SDK allows organizations to identify sensitive data risks in real time, apply auto-labeling to Dataverse tables and inherit sensitivity classifications across AI agent outputs to ensure consistent protection from development through production. Given that the security announcements today focus on AI security, not surprisingly, Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry is gaining updates, including one called "Spotlighting" that can detect prompt injection attacks embedded in external content, real-time task adherence evaluation and continuous monitoring dashboards. The feature allows developers to confirm agent behavior remains within scope and aligned with enterprise policy. Azure AI Foundry now also supports compliance workflows through integration with Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager and third-party governance solutions Credo.AI Inc. and Saidot Ltd. With the update, developers can now run algorithmic impact assessments, generate reports and surface risk evidence for security and compliance teams, all from within the Azure AI environment.

"Wish I Were 25 Again," Microsoft CTO on the Golden Age of Building | AIM

Microsoft announced an early preview of Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration in Windows 11, positioning it as a foundational layer for secure and interoperable agentic computing. Microsoft is setting the stage to change the way the web functions, with a focus on AI agents to drive digital engagement. At the heart of this is what CTO Kevin Scott calls the 'agentic web', a connected layer where AI agents can interact, reason, and evolve. At Microsoft Build 2025, the tech giant made it clear that AI agents are not just features, they're the future. With updates across Azure AI Foundry, new protocols like MCP, and tools like NLWeb, Microsoft is wielding it all together. The focus now is not just on building smarter agents, but on giving them memory, context, and the ability to operate securely at scale. To begin with, Microsoft announced the general availability of developer essentials in Azure AI Foundry, expanding its platform for building and deploying agents and applications. The update introduces new tools and services that streamline model selection, fine-tuning, deployment, and monitoring for AI workloads across cloud and edge. At a media briefing, Scott said agentic software use has grown quickly, with the Microsoft ecosystem's daily active users rising about 215% in the past year, but he believes the world is still not using these AI systems to their full potential. He expressed his desire to build a web for AI agents, similar to the way hypertext protocols helped spread the internet in the 1990s. Scott made it clear that for AI agents to be truly useful, they must connect broadly. He is excited about what's coming next. "I wish I was 25 years old again, because, like, all I had was Moore's law, and it's a piece of crap compared to what's happening right now." He shared an anecdote where his 16-year-old daughter built an app, along with her friends in school, using AI, without any prior coding experience. He said that one "quite conspicuously missing" piece from current agents is memory. Scott explained that agents often feel "very transactional" because they lack the ability to retain and build on their previous interactions. Drawing an analogy to biological memory, which is imprecise but refines recall using cognitive tools, Scott outlined the need for agentic memory that offers "precise and broad recollection." He added that challenges include limited context windows and information fragmentation. In Azure AI Foundry, developers can host a single agent or orchestrate a group of agents, expose them through the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, and connect them to other services using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or OpenAPI. The company said that quick-start templates, VS Code integration, and GitHub workflows reduce the time from idea to production from weeks to minutes. Moreover, agent development also integrates with Microsoft services like Bing, SharePoint, and Azure AI Search, and includes support for automation via Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and custom tools. Developers can now access over 1,900 models, including Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini from xAI. A new model leaderboard and smart router help select models based on quality, cost, and latency requirements. "We saw up to 60% cost savings with similar accuracy when using the router versus direct access to GPT-4.1," the company said. Besides, Microsoft has also announced an early preview of Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration in Windows 11, positioning it as a foundational layer for secure and interoperable agentic computing. "MCP is kind of like HTTP. It is a protocol where you can connect to a service or someone who's got a piece of content they want to make agent-accessible," said Scott, adding that it is easy to implement. He stressed the importance of open, ubiquitous protocols, saying, "It kind of doesn't matter, like, which approach you choose, just as long as you get to the thing that's really ubiquitous as quickly as humanly possible. "It means that your imagination gets to drive what the agentic web becomes, not just a handful of companies that happen to see some of these problems first," Scott said. Complementing this, Microsoft introduced NLWeb, an open-source project that turns any website into a natural language interface. NLWeb lets developers use models of their choice with their own data to make site content queryable via natural language, much like an AI assistant or Copilot. Crucially, every NLWeb instance doubles as an MCP server, enabling websites to expose their content directly to agents in the MCP ecosystem. Microsoft envisions NLWeb playing a role similar to HTML in the original web, becoming a key building block of the agentic web by making content widely discoverable and accessible to AI agents. On the larger picture, Azure AI Foundry is envisioned as a factory for AI applications and agents, providing a platform for building and deploying AI applications with security and trust built in. During the media briefing, Microsoft executive vice president Jay Parikh shared that Bill Gates was excited by the idea of an "agent factory," which resembles the "Software Factory" concept he envisioned back in 1975. He said CoreAI is really trying to reimagine the end-to-end developer experience using AI, and then building on a platform that becomes a factory for these AI applications and agents. "We're embedding and we're making sure that security and trust are baked in right from the start." As part of this broader vision, Microsoft announced the public preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID. This first release introduces a unified directory that brings together all AI agent identities created through tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and Microsoft Security Copilot. Whether an agent is built by a developer or a business user, identity admins can now view and manage them centrally in the Microsoft Entra admin center, with security and trust built in from the beginning.

Microsoft Build 2025: The Biggest News In AI, Agents, Windows

These are some of the biggest reveals to come out of Microsoft's annual Build conference, which runs through Thursday in Seattle. Support for Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to foster adoption of artificial intelligence agents. An open-source project for building the AI era's version of HTML. And a host of AI capabilities in preview across the Microsoft productivity portfolio. These are some of the biggest reveals to come out of Microsoft's annual Build conference, which runs through Thursday in Seattle. The innovations come as increased global uncertainty around tariffs appears to not be hampering enterprise investment in cutting-edge new AI technology. Microsoft reported in April during its latest quarterly earnings call growth across a variety of AI products, with GitHub Copilot now reaching more than 15 million users, up over fourfold year over year and Microsoft 365 Copilot serving hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide, with use up threefold year over year. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, which has a worldwide ecosystem of more than 500,000 partners, echoed what other technology vendors including Google and IBM have said in recent weeks about AI investments withstanding concerns around price increases as the U.S., China and other nations negotiate tariffs. Read on for the biggest news to come out of this year's Microsoft Build.

Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote Highlights

What does the future of technology look like? If Microsoft Build 2025 is any indication, it's a world where artificial intelligence, seamless collaboration, and dynamic digital ecosystems take center stage. This year's keynote didn't just unveil updates -- it painted a bold vision of how developers and organizations can thrive in an era defined by intelligence and connectivity. From autonomous coding assistants to new advancements in the agentic web, Microsoft is equipping the tech community with tools that promise to transform how we build, innovate, and interact. The event wasn't just about software; it was about reimagining the very fabric of digital experiences. In this overview, we'll explore the most exciting innovations that emerged from Build 2025, including AI-powered development tools, customizable enterprise solutions, and the rise of intelligent agents. You'll discover how Microsoft is addressing complex challenges like data integration, security, and scalability while fostering a more inclusive and collaborative ecosystem. Whether it's the open-sourcing of Copilot or the debut of Azure as the largest GB200-based supercomputer, these announcements signal a new chapter in technological progress. As we unpack these developments, consider how they might redefine not just the tools you use, but the possibilities you imagine. Microsoft introduced significant updates to its development tools, focusing on improving productivity and fostering seamless collaboration. These enhancements are designed to streamline workflows and reduce manual effort, allowing developers to focus on innovation and problem-solving. By integrating AI-powered features directly into development environments, these tools enable developers to work smarter and collaborate more effectively, ultimately driving innovation across industries. Artificial intelligence was a central theme at Build 2025, with Microsoft unveiling tools designed to enhance enterprise efficiency and customization. These advancements provide developers with the ability to create intelligent, adaptable solutions tailored to specific business needs. These tools empower businesses to deploy AI solutions that address evolving demands while maintaining flexibility and precision. Unlock more potential in AI-driven development tools by reading previous articles we have written. Microsoft highlighted innovations aimed at transforming digital ecosystems through the agentic web, a concept that emphasizes dynamic and interactive digital experiences. These advancements simplify the integration of intelligent agents into various platforms. These developments aim to transform how websites, APIs, and applications interact with users, fostering more engaging and responsive digital environments. Microsoft emphasized the importance of unified data integration and governance, unveiling tools designed to optimize data usage and enhance decision-making processes. These updates reflect the growing need for actionable insights in today's data-driven world. These tools empower organizations to extract meaningful insights from their data, driving informed decision-making and operational efficiency. Security and compliance were key focuses at Build 2025, with Microsoft introducing features to protect sensitive information and ensure regulatory adherence. These updates aim to build trust and safeguard systems in an increasingly complex digital landscape. These advancements help organizations maintain security and compliance while navigating the challenges of modern technology. Microsoft introduced tools to make local development and edge computing more accessible, allowing developers to create and deploy applications on their preferred platforms. These updates reflect the growing importance of flexibility in development environments. These tools simplify the development process, empowering developers to innovate without being constrained by platform limitations. Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Discovery, a platform designed to accelerate scientific research and R&D efforts. By using advanced agents and Foundry technologies, this platform enables researchers to tackle complex challenges and drive breakthroughs in various fields. These tools aim to enhance collaboration and innovation across scientific disciplines. Microsoft reinforced its commitment to open source with initiatives aimed at fostering collaboration and inclusivity within the developer community. These efforts highlight the importance of shared innovation in driving technological progress. These initiatives encourage a more dynamic and inclusive ecosystem, empowering developers to contribute and benefit from shared advancements. Microsoft announced Azure as the largest GB200-based supercomputer, offering unmatched scalability for AI applications. This milestone underscores Microsoft's dedication to providing the infrastructure needed to support large-scale AI solutions. By allowing developers to scale their applications effectively, Azure continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in supercomputing.

5 Things To Know On Microsoft Entra Agent ID

The tech giant is seeking to proactively eliminate major security issues related to the coming 'AI agent sprawl,' a Microsoft executive tells CRN. Microsoft is seeking to proactively eliminate major security issues related to the coming "AI agent sprawl" with its unveiling Monday of Entra Agent ID, a Microsoft executive told CRN. The tech giant's new Entra Agent ID offering enables organizations to gain improved visibility into agents while also allowing for application of identity and access policies through Microsoft's Conditional Access capabilities, according to Alex Simons, corporate vice president for product management and identity security at Microsoft. [Related: Microsoft Debuts Security Copilot Agents: Five Big Things To Know] The capabilities simplify management and security for AI agents and are crucial because when it comes to agents, "the scale of the sprawl is going to be so big [and happen] so fast" within many organizations, Simons said. The goal of Entra Agent ID, he said, is ultimately so that customers "can confidently start adopting agentic AI." Entra Agent ID was announced as a public preview Monday in connection with the start of Microsoft Build 2025. What follows are five things to know about Microsoft Entra Agent ID. While Microsoft is unsurprisingly an early adopter for AI agents, the company is already using 27,000 AI agents internally -- with 5,000 agents added in just the past few weeks, Simons said. "Agent sprawl is a real thing," he said. "It's hitting us first, but I think all of our customers will have that issue over the coming years." In many conversations with customers, it's clear that they are enthusiastic about the potential for AI agents but also deeply concerned about how to govern and secure agents on a large scale, according to Simons. Microsoft is aiming to make this far easier to accomplish first by embedding a unique Agent ID into every AI agent created with Microsoft tools such as Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio and Security Copilot. The idea is comparable to a car's VIN number, which automatically comes with every new car and allows the vehicle to be tracked over time, Simons noted. With every agent produced by Microsoft tools coming with an agent ID built in, "that gives our customers the ability to have visibility of all of those agents from the directory," he said. Once organizations have visibility into their agents, they can then manage what those agents can access, Simons said. For instance, "how do they authenticate? What's their lifecycle? When do they have to be re-approved? Should they still be around? Are they still being used?" he said. "All of that will now be manageable from Entra ID," Simons said. "So all of the power that we give them for managing how users can access things -- and governing those users and protecting them -- now, those [capabilities] will all be available for their agents as well." Specifically, Microsoft will make it possible for organizations using Entra Agent ID to implement Conditional Access for AI agents, allowing partners and customers to set security policies in real time for agents, according to Simons. Until now, organizations have used Conditional Access for managing how and when users can connect to services -- for instance, based on the user's location or time that they're trying to access a service, he said. "Now you'll be able to do the same thing for agents," Simons said. Beyond the initial sets of capabilities around visibility and Conditional Access with Entra Agent ID, Microsoft plans to roll out a broader set of capabilities over the next six months, according to Simons. For instance, in the future Microsoft plans to expand beyond securing agents made by its own platforms to also covering agents made by other tools, he said. Down the road, "we're going to make it so that anyone who is spinning up an agent in any toolset that you want to use, you'll be able to ground it in an Agent ID from Microsoft if you want to do that," Simons said. For partners -- who play a "critical role" in identity management in general -- "I think they will play a similarly huge role for agentic identities," he said. "Every agent in an enterprise is going to need to be able to work with lots of other things in the enterprise. And I think there's a there's a big role for our partners in helping customers do that."

Microsoft Brings AI Agents To Life

In addition to offering a range of new agent-related tools, Microsoft also made several significant announcements related to developing standards at Build. As exciting as the world of AI-powered large language models (LLMs) may be, it's clear that the tech industry is now moving beyond the core capabilities that these generative AI tools enable and moving into AI-powered agents. At the company's developer-focused Build Bob O'Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.

Microsoft Build 2025: The age of AI agents and building the open agentic web

Reimagining the software development lifecycle with AI GitHub Copilot coding agent GitHub Copilot is evolving from an in-editor assistant to an agentic AI partner with a first-of-its-kind asynchronous coding agent integrated into the GitHub platform. Learn more here. Windows AI Foundry & Foundry Local Windows AI Foundry offers a unified and reliable platform supporting the AI developer lifecycle across training and inference. With simple model APIs for vision and language tasks, developers can manage and run open source LLMs via Foundry Local or bring a proprietary model to convert, fine-tune and deploy across client and cloud. Read more here. Azure AI Foundry Models and new tools for model evaluation: Azure AI Foundry is a unified platform for developers to design, customize and manage AI applications and agents. We're bringing Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models from xAI to our ecosystem and also introducing new tools like the Model Leaderboard and Model Router to help with model selection. Learn more here. Making AI agents more capable and secure Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and Observability New features including multi-agent workflows, SharePoint tool integration, increased interoperability via support for open agent protocols (A2A and MCP), the ability for customers to bring their own LLM from any cloud provider, and built-in observability into metrics for performance, quality, cost and safety. Read more here. Microsoft Entra Agent ID With Microsoft Entra Agent ID, agents that developers create in Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry are automatically assigned unique identities in an Entra directory, helping enterprises securely manage agents right from the start and avoid "agent sprawl" that could lead to blind spots. Read more here. Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning  Copilot Tuning: With Copilot Tuning, customers can use their own company data, workflows and processes to train models and create agents in a simple, low-code way. These agents perform highly accurate, domain-specific tasks securely from within the Microsoft 365 service boundary. For example, a law firm can create an agent that generates documents aligned with its organization's expertise and style. Learn more here. Multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio New multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio connects multiple agents, allowing them to combine skills and tackle broader, more complex tasks. Learn more here. Supporting the open agentic web A new open protocol called NLWeb Microsoft is introducing NLWeb, which we believe can be the equivalent of HTML for the agentic web. NLWeb empowers websites to create a natural language interface using only a few lines of code and the model of their choice, allowing users to interact directly with web content in a rich, semantic manner. Learn more here. Supporting Model Context Protocol (MCP) Microsoft is delivering broad first-party support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) across products including GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel and Windows 11. Microsoft and GitHub  joined the MCP Steering Committee and announced two new contributions to the MCP ecosystem. Learn more here. Accelerating scientific discovery with AI Microsoft Discovery A platform built to empower researchers to transform the entire discovery process with agentic AI, helping research and development departments across various industries accelerate the time to market for new products and accelerate and expand the end-to-end discovery process for all scientists. Read more here.

Microsoft Build 2025: Grok on Azure, GitHub's AI agent, new consumer AI tools, and Palestine protest rock keynote

Microsoft's annual Build developer conference kicked off this week in Seattle with a flurry of announcements that promise to transform how everyday users interact with AI, from smarter Microsoft 365 tools to AI-powered browsers. But amid the applause for Copilot updates and AI integration, an employee protest during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote also shook the event. For consumers, the most exciting part of Build 2025 isn't the developer jargon, it's how AI is becoming more accessible, personal, and useful in your daily digital life. Microsoft unveiled Copilot updates across Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, powered by the latest GPT-4o and Microsoft's own MAI models. These AI agents can now read your OneDrive files, emails, and even web articles to assist you in drafting smarter replies, summarising lengthy documents, and suggesting meeting schedules. In Teams and Excel, they support real-time collaboration, allowing users to co-author Power Apps and streamline routine tasks with context-aware assistance. Essentially, think of Copilot now as a digital coworker who knows your habits and can handle repetitive work, sometimes even before you ask. Also read: Microsoft needs to listen to HP to improve handheld gaming Microsoft also announced that its lightweight on-device AI models, like Phi-4-mini, will soon be available for web developers to use in Microsoft Edge, including on macOS. This development means websites can offer real-time writing assistance, provide summarisation and translation tools, and deliver more interactive user experiences with fewer performance or privacy trade-offs. A particularly useful feature is the upcoming ability to translate entire PDFs into over 70 languages with a single click, directly within the browser. This eliminates the need for third-party services. So, farewell to any startups working on this. Regardless, it offers users a seamless experience without the hassle of copy-pasting content between platforms. And in a bold move to decentralise AI, Microsoft introduced NLWeb, a new open protocol that allows every website to run its own AI search system. This is a direct challenge to platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, and a win for consumers who want relevant, site-specific answers, not generic chatbot summaries. With the launch of Windows AI Foundry and native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Windows is now equipped to handle AI apps the way USB-C handles hardware: universally. Whether it's a health app, a finance tracker, or a browser plugin, AI agents can now interact with other apps and services effortlessly, even across devices. It also means those fancy new Copilot+ PCs might finally justify their NPU hype. With on-device processing, they can run AI features offline, giving you faster responses and tighter privacy. Tasks like article summarisation, photo enhancement, and smart suggestions now happen right on your machine, no cloud involved. Microsoft also announced that the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open-source. meaning developers can now tweak or extend the underlying codebase to better suit their specific workflows. This opens up real-world use cases like building more efficient Linux-based dev environments on Windows machines. It also means faster bug fixes, experimental features from the community, and deeper integration possibilities for teams working across both Linux and Windows stacks. Also read: Flipkart's AI Vision: Sandhya Kapoor on Building an Intelligent, Trustworthy, and Inclusive E- Even if you're not a developer, GitHub's new AI agent is a peek into the future of work. This agent can independently fix bugs, add features, boot virtual machines, analyse codebases, log its own actions and reasoning and a lot more. It works as part of GitHub Copilot and activates when a user assigns it a task. What makes this agent remarkable is its ability to handle tasks without direct supervision while still keeping developers in the loop. It saves its changes as it progresses, provides session logs to explain its decisions, and even tags developers for review. This kind of automation could transform coding into a more collaborative and efficient process where AI becomes a reliable programming partner. Perhaps one of the more controversial tech partnerships is Microsoft's announcement that Elon Musk's Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini models from xAI are now hosted on Azure. These models, known for their "edgy" and unfiltered nature, will be available to enterprise users under stricter Microsoft-style service-level agreements. According to Microsoft, Grok models will be tightly governed, with enhanced data controls, billing mechanisms, and direct availability via the Azure AI Foundry. The move also signals Microsoft's broader strategy of diversifying its AI partnerships, moving beyond OpenAI and integrating models from Meta, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and now xAI. Just as Satya Nadella began his keynote, a Microsoft employee -- Joe Lopez, a firmware engineer with Azure, interrupted the session, shouting "Free Palestine!" and calling attention to Microsoft's cloud contracts with the Israeli government. Lopez, part of the activist group No Azure for Apartheid, later sent an emotional email to thousands of Microsoft employees, criticising the company's internal review of its involvement in Gaza. He accused leadership of denying reality and described his internal struggle working for a company he believed was complicit in violence through its technology. "Every byte of data stored on the cloud... can and will be used as justification to level cities and exterminate Palestinians," Lopez wrote. Microsoft recently stated that it found no evidence its Azure or AI services have been used to harm civilians, following an external review. However, activists argue that Microsoft's inability to monitor how its tools are being used, especially by clients like Israel's Ministry of Defense, is not a valid excuse, but the core of the problem itself. This is not the first protest to hit Microsoft. Just weeks earlier, two former employees interrupted the company's 50th anniversary celebration, calling out AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman and co-founder Bill Gates over similar concerns. The Build 2025 event paints a tale of two Microsofts: A company pioneering the future of AI, empowering consumers with smarter tools, more privacy, and less cloud dependence. And another company under fire for its ethical choices, as employees and activists demand accountability for how those tools are used, especially in conflict zones. If you use Microsoft products, whether Word, Teams, Edge, or a Windows laptop, you're getting smarter and faster tools starting this year. Everything from writing emails to searching the web will be powered by AI that understands your context, runs locally, and, in theory, respects your privacy. The events at Build 2025 highlighted how rapid advancements in AI are accompanied by complex ethical discussions. Technologies designed for productivity and efficiency can have broader implications depending on how they're deployed. As demonstrated by the on-stage protest, conversations around AI are no longer limited to capability, they now increasingly involve questions of accountability and responsible use.