Microsoft has launched a sweeping AI strategy at its annual Build developer conference, positioning itself as a central force in the emerging era of autonomous AI agents.

The tech giant unveiled over 50 announcements across its product ecosystem — including GitHub, Azure, Windows, and Microsoft 365 — centered on enabling developers to build task-oriented AI systems capable of reasoning, decision-making, and collaboration with minimal human input.

“We’ve entered the era of AI agents,” says Microsoft Chief Communications Officer Frank Shaw, highlighting advancements in AI reasoning and memory that now make autonomous task execution viable across enterprise environments.

At the core of this shift is GitHub Copilot’s transformation from code-suggestion assistant to autonomous coding agent. The upgraded Copilot can now refactor code, fix bugs, and develop features independently or in coordination with other agents. Microsoft is also open-sourcing Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code to foster community innovation.

To support enterprise adoption, Azure AI Foundry now offers a production-grade Agent Service with support for multi-agent workflows and open protocols such as Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). “It’s very hard to squeeze an entire process into one agent,” says Microsoft’s Ray Smith. “Breaking it into multiple agents improves both reliability and maintainability.”

On the client side, Microsoft debuted Windows AI Foundry to streamline on-device AI deployment, allowing developers to run models locally using ONNX Runtime. This shift supports privacy-focused applications and offline use cases.

To prevent what it calls “agent sprawl,” Microsoft introduced Entra Agent ID, a security feature that assigns unique identities to AI agents, ensuring governance from day one. Integration with Microsoft Purview provides compliance tools and data loss prevention for agent-led interactions.

One standout showcase was Microsoft Discovery, a scientific R&D platform that used AI agents to identify a PFAS-free coolant for data centers—reducing a process that traditionally takes years to just 200 hours.

The company also announced NLWeb, an open-source project to enable websites to support agent interactions natively, signaling Microsoft’s intent to lay the technical foundation for what it calls the “agentic web.”