Microsoft has positioned itself at the center of what it calls the 'open agentic web' at its annual Build 2025 conference, introducing dozens of AI tools designed to create autonomous systems that can make decisions with minimal human intervention.
CEO Satya Nadella declared that 'we've entered the era of AI agents' thanks to groundbreaking advancements in reasoning and memory. The company unveiled more than 50 announcements spanning its entire product portfolio, from GitHub and Azure to Windows and Microsoft 365.
In a significant strategic move, Microsoft announced it would host AI models from Elon Musk's xAI (including Grok 3), Meta Platforms' Llama models, and offerings from European startups Mistral and Black Forest Labs in its own data centers. This brings the total AI models available to Azure customers to over 1,900 and marks a shift in Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, as the company diversifies its AI partnerships.
A centerpiece of Microsoft's agentic vision is GitHub Copilot's evolution from an in-editor assistant to an autonomous AI partner. The new GitHub Copilot coding agent can independently fix bugs, write features, and maintain codebases. Already, 15 million developers use GitHub Copilot, with features like agent mode and code review streamlining development workflows.
Microsoft also introduced NLWeb, an open project that aims to play 'a similar role to HTML for the agentic web.' NLWeb allows websites to provide conversational interfaces for users with the model of their choice and makes content discoverable and accessible to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Microsoft has joined the MCP Steering Committee to help advance secure, at-scale adoption of this open protocol.
The company's vision extends to Windows, which is being transformed into an agentic AI platform. Windows AI Foundry provides a unified platform for local AI development with capabilities like Windows ML and ready-to-use AI APIs powered by built-in Windows models available on Copilot Plus PCs.
With more than 230,000 organizations—including 90% of the Fortune 500—already using Copilot Studio to build AI agents and automations, Microsoft is betting that AI agents will soon become a regular part of how people work, build software, and manage tasks across individual, organizational, and business contexts.