Key highlights from Microsoft Build 2025

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (Agentic AI) was the focus on the opening day of Microsoft’s annual Build event on May 19. Indicative of the shifting technology landscape, the CEO of the Redmond-headquartered company, Satya Nadella, unveiled a suite of “agentic” innovations, including a vision for an open, agentic web where AI systems act as delegated teammates rather than mere assistants.

The keynote came just days after Microsoft made a 3% reduction (6,000 employees, including the AI Director) in its global workforce, as the company doubles down on long-term bets like AI.

“You know, it's always fun to be back at Build, especially in times like this. You know, we're just about getting into these middle innings of another platform shift. And these middle innings are where all things happen, all things scale,” Nadella said as he kicked off the keynote.

Microsoft has announced about 50 AI tools to build an Agentic Web. The following are the major announcements made:

AI-based enhancements to the software development cycle 

Microsoft said that it will integrate an asynchronous coding agent into GitHub Copilot to transform it from a simple in-editor assistant to a fully agentic AI partner. 

Microsoft also unveiled the Windows AI Foundry, a comprehensive platform supporting the full AI development lifecycle across both training and inference. With simple APIs for vision and language tasks, developers can run open-source large language models via Foundry Local or bring their proprietary models to fine-tune and deploy across client and cloud environments.

Azure AI Foundry

The new Azure AI Foundry serves as a unified environment for building, customising, and managing AI applications and agents. As part of this launch, Microsoft is integrating xAI’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini models into its ecosystem. Additionally, tools like the Model Leaderboard and Model Router were introduced to help developers evaluate, compare, and select the most effective models for their use cases.

With the announcement of the general availability of Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, Microsoft is enabling developers to build and manage complex, multi-agent systems. Foundry also includes new observability features for tracking performance, quality, cost, and safety through a built-in metrics dashboard.

Security and governance are also central to the update. With the preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID, every agent created in Copilot Studio or Foundry gets a unique identity in the Entra directory, helping prevent "agent sprawl."

Open project NLWeb

Microsoft is introducing NLWeb, a new protocol designed to serve the agentic web much like HTML did for the traditional web. NLWeb enables websites to offer conversational interfaces powered by the model of their choice and grounded in their own data, allowing users to engage with web content in a more natural, semantic way. Each NLWeb endpoint also functions as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, giving websites the option to make their content easily discoverable and accessible to AI agents.

To be sure, MCP is an open standard developed by Anthropic to facilitate communication between AI models and external tools, data sources, and services. Microsoft announced that it is delivering broad first-party support for MCP across its agent platform and frameworks, spanning GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, and Windows 11. 

Microsoft Discovery

Introduced at Build 2025, Microsoft Discovery is designed to help users and agents navigate a growing landscape of intelligent services. It is a protocol and platform that enables the seamless finding, indexing, and invocation of AI agents, APIs, and NLWeb endpoints.

Through Discovery, developers can register their agents or applications so they become easily searchable and interoperable within the broader ecosystem. For users, this means AI agents can autonomously find and collaborate with other agents or services to complete tasks, without manual input or integration.