It’s all about AI agents at Microsoft Build

Microsoft announced a bevy of new AI tools at its Build 2025 developer conference in Seattle. The big theme: AI agents are here.

CEO Satya Nadella took the stage for a two-hour presentation outlining the company’s plans for developers. Nadella’s presentation included cameos from some key AI leaders: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Tesla/X/xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang.

Microsoft’s $14 billion partnership with OpenAI was recently reported to be fraying due to tension between Nadella and Altman, but the OpenAI CEO was the very first guest for a live interview, which was a completely cordial talk. Altman discussed OpenAI’s new Codex coding agent and how agents are the future of coding.

Nadella also highlighted updates to Copilot — but that requires some unpacking.

There’s Microsoft Copilot 365, which is an AI agent that lurks in your productivity suite of apps and can help generate PowerPoint slides, summarize Microsoft Teams meetings, or analyze your data.

There are also big updates to Github Copilot, an AI tool that helps software developers generate, test, and debug code, which has evolved from an in-editor AI tool to an “asynchronous coding agent.”

That’s not to be confused with plain old Microsoft Copilot, which is just a ChatGPT-style chatbot.

Also there’s Microsoft Copilot Studio, for building new AI agents, and Copilot Tuning, for fine-tuning your AI agents on your company’s proprietary data. (It seems Microsoft didn’t get our memo on the growing AI naming branding confusion.)

Microsoft’s Azure AI cloud computing platform is adding xAI’s Grok3 models. In a prerecorded interview, Musk waxed nostalgic about his early days working with Windows and how the goal with Grok is “to aspire to truth with minimal error.”

Nadella highlighted that Azure AI Foundry lets developers use models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Meta’s “full heard of llama” models.

Microsoft is now embracing Model Context Protocol into its tools, an open standard developed by Anthropic to standardize the way apps interact with different AI models.

Microsoft also announced a new tool to let companies quickly add conversational chatbots to their websites called NLWeb that can pull from a company’s own data.

For the scientific community, the company announced Microsoft Discovery, an AI-powered research platform that is built to help scientists research, develop hypotheses, and test new discoveries.

At one point during Nadella’s presentation, two protestors disrupted the keynote, challenging the company’s cloud computing contracts with the Israeli government. One protestor turned out to be a Microsoft employee who was able to email several thousand coworkers about the protest after being ejected from the theater.