CEO Satya Nadella and team show tools for building and scaling agents and AI apps and a new version of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Very cool demos, though there’s still a lot of work to do.
SEATTLE—Microsoft is now focused on “building the open, agentic web at scale”, CEO Satya Nadella said in an opening keynote at the Build conference this week, an ambitious vision of giving users a stable of Copilot agents who do things for them, from handling customer service calls to checking company policies.
Developers will be tasked with creating individual agents and secure experiences that work together. It’s a new approach that means lots of new tools for developers, Build’s target market.
Nadella announced all sorts of software for developing AI applications, including enhancements to Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio developer tools, as well as Visual Studio and GitHub. I was particularly glad to see a focus on open-source and industry-standard protocols; the tech won’t reach its full potential without them.
According to Nadella, we’re in “the middle innings of another platform shift”, equivalent to 1991 when Win32 developer tools were rolling out, or 1996, when a variety of companies built new development tools designed for the internet.M365 Copilot Gains Researcher and Analyst Agents
As more of a corporate user and manager, I was very interested in the changes to Microsoft 365 Copilot—which Nadella described as the biggest update since Teams launched. Just how big? Nadella said that the overhaul turns Copilot into “the UI for AI.”
Copilot now provides five distinct capabilities. It starts with the Chat interface common to AI assistants. Then it adds Search, which can look through your personal documents and anything else you have access to, either in Microsoft applications or connected third-party apps. Notebook lets you gather results from Chat or Search and organize them, then allows you to share the results in the company’s Pages collaboration view. Create lets you generate images and now does things such as turn PowerPoint presentations into videos.
Now Copilot is adding Agents; the first two are Researcher, which uses deep reasoning to search your documents and the web to create a research report, and Analyst, which can look through lots of source information, including spreadsheets, to do things like find specific data or compare results. For now, these agents are only available to organizations in Microsoft’s Frontier program (typically larger enterprises), but the plan is to roll these out more broadly and eventually allow for other software companies and individual organizations to create their own agents.
To make all this work, Microsoft is setting up an Agent Store, where organizations will be able to publish and get new agents, and making big improvements to the Copilot Studio where individuals or organizations can build simple agents. There will be support for multi-agent orchestration, so agents can invoke other agents and they can work together. For example, you may have an agent for onboarding a new hire, which in turn would call on specific agents from HR, finance, or IT to ensure all the appropriate forms are filled out for each department.
Another new feature is Copilot Tuning, which lets organizations fine-tune models based on their own data.
Nadella said the agent concept is already gaining traction, with over 1 million agents created in the past year.
